Residents drop off their filled-out ballots in an official ballot box outside of San Francisco City Hall during Election Day in San Francisco on March 5, 2024.

In August of 2012, President Barack Obama stepped to the lectern, gleam in his eye, to deliver what was widely billed as an historic announcement.

In front of a raucous crowd of autoworkers, he declared that America’s carbon-spewing vehicle fleet would face a new fuel efficiency mandate. Cars and light trucks would have to average 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025, an unprecedented upgrade over the existing standard.

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The plan, years in the making, fulfilled a 2008 campaign promise to combat both climate change and an overreliance on foreign oil. It was widely praised as both a significant boon for the climate and a massive political win for the president in the tensest days of his reelection race against Republican Mitt Romney.

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Lost in the ensuing wave of optimism and political intrigue, however, were the voices of experts who checked under the hood of Obama’s plan — and screamed that something was wrong.

The larger the vehicle, the more lenient the fuel efficiency requirement under the plan. By 2020, for instance, small passenger cars had to get an impressive 48 miles per gallon. But large pickup trucks only needed to achieve 25.

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These carveouts for large vehicles were intended to give a competitive advantage to American automakers — whose bulky vehicles couldn’t match smaller, efficient foreign models.

But this hometown deal, experts warned, provided an invitation for automakers to game the new regulations by making their cars even bigger and heavier. This size bloat would not only wipe out much of the purported climate benefits of the plan, it would also make roads significantly more dangerous; SUVs and pickups are 45% deadlier in crashes with pedestrians than regular passenger cars.

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The experts were ignored. They were also right.

Within a few years, light trucks became the overwhelming majority of new vehicles sold not just in America, but around the world as automakers catered to the American market. Smaller, more efficient passenger cars started disappearing entirely.

As for fuel efficiency, it barely budged since Obama’s announcement. Vehicles averaged 23.6 miles per gallon in real world driving conditions in 2012 and 25.6 for non-electric vehicles in 2025 according to Environmental Protection Agency estimates.

Meanwhile, America’s hulked-up vehicle fleet grew more deadly. Pedestrian deaths reached a 40-year high in 2022. One study found the U.S. could reduce its child mortality by 27% by replacing SUVs with passenger cars.

So, why revisit this little-known policy failure?

Because just like 2012, we’re in an election season. Which means politicians — even those many of us admire, like Obama — are shoveling all kinds of policy ideas into our troughs.

A few of these ideas will be great. Some will be palatable. Most will be slop.

Figuring out which is which is which and voting accordingly is a key civic responsibility.

But it isn’t easy; it takes real work to get to the truth.

That’s especially the case in California, where voters not only have to deal with the usual glut of campaign promises from candidates, we also have to navigate ballot measures written by special interests and confusing judicial elections that take place in an informational vacuum. Here in the progressive Bay Area, many voters will manage all this with their desire to fight back against the lawlessness of the Trump administration weighing on their decision-making.

In this kind of environment, details matter. Nuance matters. And, yes, your vote matters — more than ever.

That’s why the Chronicle’s editorial board is here to help.

Each election year, our board makes endorsements in key races across the Bay Area and around California. That process is currently underway for 2026.

We’re interviewing candidates, speaking to experts, fact checking campaign promises and vetting ideas for coherence and impact. At the end of this process, we’ll make recommendations based on what we find.

Sure, we’d love it if you agree with our final takeaways. But that’s not our most important objective. We want to ensure you step into the ballot box fully armed with enough information to make your own informed decisions. If a popular plan has a poison pill, our editorial board will tell you about it.

Different voters have different priorities, of course. Despite the deep flaws in his fuel efficiency plans, Obama was still the superior candidate to Mitt Romney in 2012.

But it’s our job to ensure you understand the tradeoffs of the decisions before you.

The editorial board is on the opinion side of the Chronicle, completely distinct from the newsroom. This gives us the license we need to make value judgments. But we are still journalists. It’s our task to cut through the BS and lay out the facts like any other reporter does.

Members of the editorial board — myself, publisher Bill Nagel, editorial writers Emily Hoeven and Allison Arieff and editors David Knowles, Harry Mok and Pete Wevurski — spend hours researching each race. This cycle, Hoeven is focusing on statewide offices and ballot measures, while Arieff is concentrating on local contests.

Guest opinions in Open Forum and Insight are produced by writers with expertise, personal experience or original insights on a subject of interest to our readers. Their views do not necessarily reflect the opinion of The Chronicle editorial board, which is committed to providing a diversity of ideas to our readership.

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We don’t cover every election in California; we prioritize competitive races where the stakes are high and reliable information is scarce.

Unlike many other newspaper editorial boards, we don’t guarantee that a candidate will secure our endorsement in each race. If we go through the endorsement process and decide voters have a no-win choice before them, we’ll say so.

Reach the Chronicle editorial board with a letter to the editor: www.sfchronicle.com/submit-your-opinion.

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