White House Ends California Talks on Vehicle Mileage Standards

As part of the proposed mileage freeze, the administration threatened to revoke California's legal authority to set its own, tougher mileage standards, a waiver granted the state decades ago to help it deal with its punishing smog. About a dozen states follow California's mileage standards.

Lawmakers and automakers have urged the two sides to settle, warning that a split could divide the auto market, bring years of court battles and raise costs for automakers.

"This administration's negotiations with the State of California over fuel economy and greenhouse gas emissions standards have been superficial and not robust at best, or duplicitous and designed to fail at worst," Sen. Tom Carper of Delaware, the top Democrat in the Senate's Environment and Public Works Committee, said in a statement late Wednesday, as the formal negotiations breakdown loomed.

"Litigation is not the best option here. It wastes time, money, creates uncertainty for American automakers, and harms the environment," Carper said.

California officials say the administration never offered any compromise and that it broke off any contacts around December.

"We concluded at that point that they were never serious about negotiating, and their public comments about California since then seem to underscore that point," said Stanley Young, spokesman for the California Air Resources Board.

It's the latest shot by the White House in its escalating feud with California. The Trump administration earlier in the week said it planned to cancel nearly $1 billion for California's high-speed rail project and would seek the return of $2.5 billion more. Gov. Gavin Newsom said it was political retribution for the state's role in leading a 16-state lawsuit against Trump's declaration of a national emergency to get funds for his proposed wall at the southern border.

Since it takes several years to design vehicles, automakers have been planning to meet higher mileage requirements under Obama-era standards, as well as those in other countries.

For now, "essentially the industry is ignoring what Trump wants to do," auto-industry analyst Sam Abuelsamid of Navigant Research said. "We know at least until this thing gets settled in the courts, we have to deal with California and the other states and have product that can sell there as well as products that can sell overseas."

The Associated Press' Kathleen Ronayne in Sacramento contributed to this report.