NHTSA deputy administrator David Friedman (left) stands with transportation secretary Anthony Foxx after they announce a record $35 million fine against GM in May.
Congress is turning up the heat on the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration over car recalls. A new House bill would require automakers to make detailed assessments on all fatal crashes and archive defect-related documents for 20 years, or four times longer than mandated today.
The bill is the fifth such legislation written this year to bolster NHTSA after the General Motors ignition-switch recalls. Just two days after the House Committee on Energy and Commerce lambasted NHTSA in a separate report, seven Democrats on the committee, including sponsors Rep. Henry Waxman (California) and Rep. Jan Schakowsky (Illinois), signed off on the Vehicle Safety Improvement Act. It was also two days after a Senate subcommittee—this time, without any GM executives in the room—scolded NHTSA deputy administrator David Friedman for the agency's aloofness.
I'm Just a Bill
The new bill attempts to standardize NHTSA's admittedly haphazard data collection and make much of this information public for the first time. Friedman said automakers previously didn't have to disclose any reason for fatal crashes involving their vehicles. While automakers, in quarterly reports known as Early Warning Reporting, have to disclose information on deaths, injuries, warranty claims, and other statistics to NHTSA, these don't rely on the same criteria. This can result in exaggerated data, making it even tougher for the agency's small investigative staff to verify potential defects. Any police reports and other documentation in an automaker's possession would have to be sent to NHTSA by default, according to the bill. The bill also forces the Transportation Secretary to disclose the agency's "death inquiries" sent to automakers for the past 10 years, an investigative process that is now confidential. Regional recalls, in which automakers allege a weather-related problem by limiting their liability to specific states, would also be banned.
The bill draws upon three earlier bills introduced in April, May, and June, all of which would either increase or remove the $35 million maximum fine for automakers that purposely delay a recall, allowing NHTSA to impose whatever amount it sees fit. In two of those bills sponsored by Waxman and Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-West Virginia), NHTSA would impose fees on every new car to help fund the agency, the perplexing NHTSA website would be revamped, the Transportation Secretary would have greater authority to force immediate repairs, and used-car dealers would be required to inform buyers of unrepaired defects. Last month, Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Missouri) went off the deep end with a bill that would jail automaker employees for up to life in prison for unreported defects.
Lost in the Database
None of these bills have made it to a vote, as well they shouldn't. NHTSA's own defective organization will require a careful set of laws to force the agency into full accountability. According to the House report, NHTSA had the information to uncover GM's ignition-switch problem since 2007, when a Wisconsin state trooper investigating a fatal accident with a Chevy Cobalt correctly hypothesized that the airbags were linked to engine power and that improper ignition-switch torque had caused the car to stall before the crash. NHTSA staff never tested the trooper's theory, nor did they claim to remember reading it—or the critical GM technical service bulletin referenced in the police report—until this year.
Indeed, from the roughly 2000 stalling complaints from owners of the 2.2 million cars GM recalled for ignition-switch failures, NHTSA investigated the problem three separate times. But engineers didn't know how the new smart airbags functioned (NHTSA mandated them starting in September 2006) and assumed they could still deploy after the car's ignition switch was shut off. Analytics software that's supposed to connect the agency's scrupulous resources remains disjointed and tough to use, much as GM's own warranty database was during internal Cobalt and Ion investigations. And NHTSA employees, many who went years without training and were pulled from normal duties to full combat mode during the Toyota unintended-acceleration recalls in 2009 and 2010, didn't reference previous investigations or make attempts to spot trends. Friedman has claimed that NHTSA didn't have everything it needed to pass proper judgment on GM's ignition-switch defect. While that's true, we now know the agency had plenty under its own nose.
2009 Chevrolet Cobalt LS coupe
NHTSA Plays Ball, Doesn't Know How to Score
Friedman, whose title recently switched from acting to deputy administrator, came to the agency in May 2013 as a placeholder until the White House named a new NHTSA head (it still hasn't). His testimony last week, at times bewildering and wildly inaccurate, showed just how ambivalent the agency is toward its own regulations. When asked by Sen. McCaskill if NHTSA had ever issued subpoenas, Friedman—who in April admitted he didn't know his agency had that power—said he thought every document passing from NHTSA had subpoena power, which of course isn't true. All this time, automakers claiming "attorney-client privilege" had been blocking NHTSA crash investigations when a subpoena could have compelled additional information.
"I want to see NHTSA not accept that answer ever from a company. A company in that setting could raise attorney-client privilege anytime that's asked," said Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-New Hampshire). Friedman's response was that "NHTSA was actively trying to find the ball. GM was actively trying to hide the ball. It wasn't simply incompetence on their part. GM had policies in place to not mention the word 'defect' in order to shield information from NHTSA."
But Friedman later said, in so many words, that he didn't think stalling should always be considered a defect—the same flawed logic he has accused GM executives of using to delay their recalls. "If a consumer can safely pull their vehicle over to the side of the road and restart that vehicle, then that's a situation where the consumer can be safe," he said, "but obviously the car company does need to address any stalling that's a safety risk."
Despite extending regulatory arms over nearly every car technology—including published plans by NHTSA to regulate mobile safety apps, which Friedman denied was happening—Friedman said he wants automakers to "come into a room" and explain how their systems work. "They have more information, more people, more resources than us. They need to be finding these problems before we even have to start searching for them," he said. Yet when he was asked later if a higher budget would solve more problems, Friedman said that "throwing additional dollars at it is not the key to the solution" and admitted his agency hadn't finished a workforce assessment it was required to start in 2011 (Friedman said it would be done in November). Essentially, despite a request to add $32 million to its current $819 million budget, NHTSA doesn't know what it needs.
McCaskill was blunter. "When you had a lonely highway patrolman in Wisconsin figuring it out, when you had a study that your agency was part of in Indiana that figured it out—and you didn't figure it out. And why you cannot take a measure of responsibility for that at this hearing has frankly got us all scratching our heads."
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Certainly, it's easier to analyze NHTSA's failures in a retrospective light without showing its respective good work over the years. But if there's a culture within NHTSA that doesn't follow through or doesn't look hard enough, we're not being served.
from Car and Driver Blog http://ift.tt/nSHy27
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