How President Trump Can Help Bring Back the Hemi

Over the past few years, many members of the community suggested that a second term by President Donald Trump would lead to the demise of electric vehicles and a quick rebirth of the modern Hemi era. As you likely know, President Trump won the election earlier this week, sparking many conversations about what he will do to bring back the Hemi. In seeing all of those discussions, I wanted to put together a piece that looks at what President Trump can do to help bring back the Hemi.

Now, before I get into this, I want to point out a few things. First and foremost, this is not a post promoting President Trump, so we are not interested in any debates about the election, his past or his upcoming term outside of the automotive industry. If you hate him, feel free to go on and on about that on your own Facebook wall. Second, I am not saying that he will do what I am about to suggest – I am simply pointing out one path that he could take which would allow Ma Mopar to reintroduce the Hemi engine architecture to the Dodge and Ram lineup. This is really a rundown of any President would need to do to help make powerful V8 engines financially viable in the near future for the American automakers – without requiring them to sell scores of EVs to offset the fleet fuel economy figures.

Many people who believe that President Trump can and will make the moves needed for the Hemi to return seem to think that it hinges on an EV mandate. That isn’t the case, as right now, there is not any sort of federal mandate that requires a certain level of EV production. The Biden administration’s program that was announcer earlier this year does require that 13% of a company’s new vehicle sales is made up of electrified vehicles by 2032 (that would be roughly double what the average of EV-to-gas sales in the US today), but the bigger issue is tailpipe emission levels. To achieve the required levels of tailpipe emissions, automakers would have to sell a mix of about 56% electric vehicles, so while President Biden isn’t literally requiring a company to sell more EVs than gas-powered vehicles, that is what companies would have to do in order to meet his overly ambitious emission requirements. President Trump could certain step into office and scrap that plan, but Biden’s plan for the years leading up to 2032 are not what killed the Hemi.

Plain and simple, the Hemi was killed by CAFE regulations, which require an automaker to reach a certain average fleet fuel economy number over all of the cars and trucks sold over the course of the year. Cars and trucks (both categories include some SUVs, depending on their size) each have their own required fuel economy numbers, but for FCA/STLA, the issue has been the required car fuel economy figures. Just for the 2016-2020 model years, FCA/STLA has been fined $582,600,000 for missing the minimum required fleet fuel economy figure – an annual average of $116,520,000 per year. The company still faces fines for the 2021, 2022 and 2023 model years, and since the car lineups were pretty much the same and for those years, the required fuel economy level stayed at 43.7mpg, the company stands to be fined over $300,000,000 more for the final three years of “the Hellcat era” (2015-2023).

To make matters worse, while the federally required fleet fuel economy number for cars held steady at 43.7 from 2020 through 2023, it goes up sharply in the coming years. For 2024, companies are required to have their cars average 49.2 miles per gallon, rising to 53.4 in 2025, 59.4 in 2026, 60 in 2027 and 61.2 in 2028. You read that right – in 2028, all cars (and small SUVs that are included in the EPA car class) are required to average 61.2 miles per gallon. Think about how many gas-powered vehicles you can name that get 61 miles per gallon. The Toyota Prius is currently the 2024 model year car with the best MPG rating in the United States at 57 miles per gallon. If the standard Prius was the most efficient vehicle that Toyota offers in 2026 – just 14 months away – Toyota would not have a vehicle that can reach the CAFE minimum required fuel economy number. To put it another way, the global industry leader in hybrid technology won’t be able to meet CAFE requirements in two calendar years without vehicles that offer significant all-electric driving range. Fortunately for Toyota, they have the Prius Prime, which offers all-electric range and an MPGe figure of 114, which allows the company to comfortably fit within the CAFE requirements in the next four years. Those incredibly high MPGe numbers drive a company’s average fleet fuel economy number way up, allowing them to build other, less efficient vehicles without being in danger of the big fines. Click here for a breakdown of how CAFE fines work.

Now, if Toyota can’t get the standard Prius hybrid to meet government MPG regulations without selling more heavily electrified versions of the same model, it is common sense that a car like the Dodge Charger SRT Hellcat (rated by the feds at 15 MPG combined) doesn’t fit under the impending requirements without the company selling tons of highly efficient EVs. Since Dodge has no small, efficient vehicles, the company has been pounded with nearly $600 million in CAFE fines with more to come. The government’s solution to these fines is to simply sell lots more EVs to counter the low MPG numbers, but that isn’t a viable solution when people aren’t buying enough EVs and that is how we came to the demise of the Hemi cars. To stop getting hundreds of millions in fines, Dodge went away from the Hemi in favor of the upcoming electrified Charger Daytona.

So how can President Trump fix this solution without requiring STLA to sell a huge ratio of EVs to gas powered vehicles? He needs to do something to stop those gigantic fines. Ideally, Trump needs to roll those required fleet fuel economy numbers for cars (53.4 to 61 during his coming term) back to far more manageable numbers, and many other people in the government and the auto industry agree. Trump doesn’t need to abolish CAFE, and that isn’t likely to happen anyway, but he just needs to dial them back.

How far back? Well, FCA had never been fined under CAFE regulations until the 2016 model year, and prior to that year, the MPG standard was in the mid-30 range. If Trump push the CAFE requirements for cars back into the mid-30s, the company could get back to offering vehicles powered by the high performance Hemi engines – most notably the supercharged Hellcat Hemi. Really, thanks to the introduction of newer, more efficient vehicles like the Hornet hybrid and the upcoming electric Dodge Charger Daytona, both of which help to lift the fleet average, STLA could very likely meet CAFE requirements in the 40mpg range even with Hemi V8 models in the lineup. However, there is no way for STLA to get into the 50s and 60s while still offering a supercharged Hemi car that gets less than 20 MPG without selling tens of thousands of EVs. With that in mind, it will not be enough for President Trump to simply end the Biden plans announced earlier this year – he absolutely needs to roll back CAFE requirements to where they were about 10 years ago and he needs to set laws in place to protect those numbers from quickly climbing back up once he is out of office.

Can he do that? I sure as hell hope so.