General Motors and Sterantis have collectively paid $363.8 million for failing to meet federal fuel efficiency standards for cars and trucks they produced over the past few years, according to federal documents posted Friday. paid the fine.
GM paid $128.2 million for failing to meet targets for light-duty trucks sold in 2018 and 2019, according to documents published on the U.S. Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s website. Sterantis, the company formed by Fiat Chrysler’s merger with French automaker Peugeot, paid $235.6 million for cars it sold in 2016 and 2017.
GM paid the fine in December and Stellantis paid in December and May, according to the documents. The payment was first reported by Reuters.
The fines were imposed several years before the companies began mass-producing electric and hybrid vehicles. The fines were based on average corporate fuel economy standards overseen by the Safety Agency.
Fuel efficiency standards date back to before the spread of electric and hybrid vehicles. For many years, automakers routinely paid fines for failing to meet regulatory targets. But those penalties were typically far less than what GM and Stelantis recently paid.
In recent years, automakers such as GM and Stellatis have avoided paying fines by purchasing fuel economy credits from manufacturers that produce electric and other zero-emission vehicles. GM covered the 2016 and 2017 fines with credits, but chose to pay the fines in 2022, according to federal documents.
GM and Stellantis, like most other automakers, are rushing to introduce new electric models and expect the majority of the vehicles they sell to be electric within a decade.
Stellantis announced that it will invest $35 billion in the development of battery-powered vehicles and related software and will offer 25 electric models in the United States by 2030. The penalty paid by the company “reflects historical performance recorded prior to the formation of Sterantis and does not represent the formation of Sterantis,” the company said in a statement.
GM says it wants to produce 1 million electric vehicles a year by 2025 and end production of internal combustion engine vehicles by 2035.
