[tanklizard]

I looked a little further than the article and I didn't like what I saw. This list is produced by the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy and this page describes how they calculate their ratings:
The ACEEE's Green Book® Methodology

My biggest problem right of the bat is they don't test anything! They take information from the EPA and auto makers and apply their mathematical formulas to them. They don't actually test anything.

At first glance their rating methods seems reasonable, the form a rating based on tailpipe emission, fuel economy, and vehicle mass. But when you read into each category you find they've tacked little extras on.

Any reasonable person would assume they use EPA certified standards for the vehicles they rate but they don't.

In real-world driving, tailpipe pollution (CO, HC, NOx, and PM) can be as much as 3 times higher than the nominal grams-per-mile (g/mi) emission standard to which a vehicle is certified. These excess emissions occur for a variety of reasons: inaccuracy of the tests; malfunctioning emission control systems; and deterioration of the catalytic converter and other components. Therefore, we apply adjustment factors, similar to those used in EPA's vehicle emissions calculation models, to determine the expected lifetime average emissions for vehicles meeting a given standard.

Okay, I'm a little confused. It looks like the EPA standards aren't good enough for them, so they apply adjustment factors and come up with a new higher emissions rating (without physically running any tests.)

Rating vehicles on fuel economy seems very reasonable at first, the more fuel the vehicle uses the more emissions it produces. Then they say they're measuring:

fuel-cycle criteria emissions (air pollution due to producing and distributing the fuel)

They do something similar when it comes to vehicle weight:

Vehicle weight is used as the basis for estimating manufacturing impacts.

So now they're not only measuring pollutants a vehicle produces, their also trying to measure the pollutants produced creating and transporting fuel for the vehicle as well as pollutants produced when making the vehicle. The key word here is trying, where are they getting the information on how much pollutants are produced creating and transporting fuel? I hope that information is more accurate then what they use to determine pollutants produce making the vehicle. They make this disclaimer:

Standardized, model-specific data on the environmental damage of vehicle manufacturing are not available.

Then they come up with a formula based on averages and try to measure it anyway.

To sum it all up, the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy didn't do any tests at all for this list. They took information from other sources (primarily the EPA), applied their questionable formulas to it, and produced these "results." This is nothing but junk science and the worst part is our tax dollars paid for it.

We all know the vehicles on this list aren't "green" friendly and I'm not trying to prove their not. My problem is, why is the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy producing this list (based on the EPA's work)when there is already superior information available for the EPA. Sounds like another government agency trying to justify its existence.