Final answer:
The question pertains to a statistical analysis of miles-per-gallon performance for Ford's hybrid car, the Fractal, and other cars, and whether an auto manufacturer can claim compliance with fuel economy standards, which aligns with a college-level mathematics topic.
Step-by-step explanation:
The student's question involves the comparison of miles-per-gallon (mpg) performance between Ford's new hybrid car, the Fractal, and competitors' cars. To determine if an auto manufacturer can claim their fleet meets a certain fuel economy standard, one has to perform a statistical test, specifically a hypothesis test to see if the sample mean of the fuel economy is significantly different from the required standard. Since the question also asks if the manufacturer's fleet can meet the 2016 policy standards, this requires knowledge of hypothesis testing and confidence intervals in statistics, which is generally a college-level topic.
From the data provided on the mpg of 30 cars, we can analyze the information to understand the performance spread. Moreover, a random sample analysis of 55 cars and light trucks with a sample mean of 34.6 mpg against a standard deviation of 10.3 mpg, compared to the policy standard of 35.5 mpg with a standard deviation of 7.6, also applies statistical methods to infer about the population mean.