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The car industry is required to raise the average fuel efficiency of its vehicles to 54.5 miles a gallon by 2025. But consumers have been reluctant to adopt hybrid technology that'll get the industry there quicker.

That means the car companies have to find other ways to get fuel savings.

If you were to guess, how important would you say fuel economy is to the car business? How much of the research and development is going into making cars more efficient?

Margaret Wooldridge a mechanical engineering professor at the University of Michigan has a pretty good educated guess: "I think all the churn is on fuel economy and the rest is window dressing to make sure [automakers] maintain or expand market share."

That's what car manufactures say: Fuel economy is right up there with safety.

So, how hard is it to make cars more fuel efficient? A Honda Civic from 1984 got 47 miles a gallon. Achieving a few more miles per gallon can't be that hard, right?

"If your only condition was build me a vehicle for 55 miles a gallon ... two snaps we could have it done," Wooldridge says.

"But, now design me that vehicle that's attractive, that has all the safety features, that [has] all the creature comforts that we've come to love and expect — my navigation systems, plug in my phone, power heating ... of my steering wheel," Wooldridge says. "So all of those comforts add more and more constraints and more and more burdens that make this harder and harder."

Business

Ford's New F-150 May Pave The Way For More Aluminum Cars

Skip Stiles stands on the edge of a small inlet known as the Hague, near downtown Norfolk, Virginia. The Chrysler Museum of Art is nearby, as are dozens of stately homes, all threatened by the water.

"We've got...[a] lot of old buildings around here: this apartment building, that church over there, been around since the turn of the last century," says Stiles, the executive director of Wetlands Watch, a Virginia-based environmental group. "You can sort of mark where the storms have come over the years and you can see the progress of these storms as they come farther and farther up onto these buildings."

Climate change may be an abstract concept to many people but in the Hampton Roads area of Virginia, it's very real: Sea levels are rising, and the area is increasingly subject to flooding. At the same time, Virginia is a coal-producing state, and the nation's largest coal shipping port is in the region.

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It's been a little more than a year since San Jose, Calif., increased the city's minimum wage by $2 per hour, with adjustments for inflation. Now at $10.15 an hour, it's one of the state's highest.

Back in 2012, as voters were debating the wage hike, some in the restaurant and hospitality industry warned that an increase would be bad for the sector. It would deter new businesses from opening, they said, and would cause existing businesses to slash hours for employees.

So how are San Jose's businesses faring today? The answer is, it depends.

The vast majority of the 17,000 minimum wage jobs in the city are in the food service and hospitality sectors. After the wage increase, the Pizza My Heart restaurant raised its prices by about 5 percent.

Just a block from San Jose State University, Pizza My Heart gets heavy foot traffic that adds to a line out the door on most days. The restaurant does a brisk business; about 50 pizzas come out of its brick oven every hour.

Like many business owners in downtown, Chuck Hammers fought the ballot initiative and braced for the worst when the law took effect last March.

"There's that little bit of a panic from a business owner, you know, 'Is the sky going to fall?' " Hammers says. "And you're nervous. It's a 20 percent increase in what's really one of your biggest costs" — labor.

"After looking at it, I kind of stepped back and realized, well, it's gonna happen to everyone," Hammers says. "It's going to be a fair playing field. We just need to increase prices a little bit."

So he did. Slices went up by 25 cents, pies by $1. Sales held steady and Hammers says customers didn't seem to notice.

Hammers owns 24 Pizza My Heart shops, a franchise. Only four shops are in San Jose, but he decided to raise everyone's wages at all his stores. Otherwise, he says, he was worried he'd lose workers at his franchises outside the city, where the minimum wage is lower.

"The employees like it, they're sticking around longer," Hammers says. "We're getting very little turnover now in employees, which is really good."

In fact, Hammers is opening more Pizza My Hearts. He still bristles at the suggestion that he's a booster of raising the minimum wage. But at the same time, Hammers says he understands that it's almost impossible to live on $8 an hour in a city where the average two-bedroom apartment goes for more than $2,000 a month.

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Shep Gordon's job is managing musicians and chefs and turning them into stars. Gordon created celebrities out of the likes of Alice Cooper and Anne Murray, but he says fame isn't necessarily a good thing.

"I made excuses to myself for how I made a living and tried to do it as honorably as I could, but I can't say that I'm proud," he tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. " ... If you make someone famous, they have to pay a price."

After intentionally staying out of the spotlight throughout his career, Gordon is featured in a new documentary by Mike Myers called Supermensch: The Legend of Shep Gordon.

Gordon managed Blondie, Teddy Pendergrass, Luther Vandross and he briefly managed George Clinton. He's often credited with the recent "celebrity chef" phenomenon, with such clients as Roger Verg, Alice Waters, Wolfgang Puck, Emeril Lagasse and Paul Prudhomme.

Gordon says he's been successful in his role behind the scenes.

“ I think my job is accomplished much better if I'm invisible.