The US Department of Energy (DOE) has this week pledged $8.4 million to help vehicle manufacturers improve the energy efficiency of engines and powertrains and promised to make vehicle efficiency one of its priorities going forward.

The $8.4 million award will be shared between four projects led by General Motors, Filter Sensing Technologies, Eaton Corporation and MAHLE Powertrain, which will focus on improving thermal efficiencies while meeting federal emission standards for cars, light trucks and commercial vehicles.

Meanwhile, the Department’s Quadrennial Technology Reviewreport (DOE-QTR) identifies vehicle efficiency, the electrification of light-duty fleet vehicles and alternative fuels as three of its six key future strategies, which also include building and industrial efficiency, the modernisation of the electricity grid and clean power.

The Review concludes that the DOE should give greater emphasis to the transport sector and devote its greatest effort to the electrification of vehicles.

But the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has had to delay the announcement of new fuel economy standards from this month to mid-November because of ongoing work to harmonise its rules with those of California, which had been given the authority to set its own standards while the rest of the US caught up.

The new standards will require manufacturers to achieve an average fleet fuel efficiency of 54.5 mpg by 2025, a 5% year on year improvement between 2017 and 2025.

The EPA had planned to release details on how the standards would be calculated and enforced this month, but the Alliance to Save Energy (ASE) says that it is “not concerned” by the delay, given the complexity of the process that involves several federal agencies and California.

“Reliance on oil is the greatest immediate threat to US economic and national security… [and this] announcement in no way diminishes the Obama Administration’s commitment to decreasing US oil dependence and reducing fuel costs,” says the ASE’s Floyd DesChamps.