February 4, 2015
Toyota’s runaway success in blaming drivers for its defective vehicles, hit an $11 million pothole yesterday, after a Minnesota federal jury found that the automaker was 60 percent responsible for an Unintended Acceleration (UA) crash that killed three and severely injured two. Attorney Robert C. Hilliard, who represented plaintiffs Koua Fong Lee, the driver, and […]
January 30, 2015
Look at the pictures of this week’s s field test of the controversial ET-Plus energy absorbing end terminal below: Do you see what we see? The curled steel ribbon shows that guardrail began to extrude through the feeder end, as designed, but apparently got jammed up in the chute. The rail folded back into a […]
January 22, 2015
After two decades of fruitless interaction between the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission and the window covering industry, the commission voted last Friday afternoon to officially put one step forward toward a mandatory standard. The vote was unanimous to publish an Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking. “It speaks to the new tenure of Chairman [Elliot] […]
January 9, 2015
Honda had its turn on the ducking stool yesterday. The Japanese automaker, which had previously disclosed that a data entry glitch led to a failure to report some 1,729 death and injury claims to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s Early Warning Reporting system, got held underwater until it agreed to pay $70 million in […]
December 31, 2014
1. GM Ignition Switches, the Big Opener for 2014 Who knew on Jan. 1 that just a few weeks later, we’d be watching one of the biggest safety defect scandals unfold when the world learned that GM had been sitting hiding an ignition-switch defect it had known about since before the vehicles went on the […]
December 18, 2014
Last week, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) brought together tire industry players, federal regulators, and consumer advocates for a tire safety symposium to evaluate the tire recall system, new technologies, tire age and service life, and consumer awareness in preparation for a tire safety report and recommendations scheduled for release next year. The intervention […]
December 17, 2014
National Highway Traffic Safety Administration Chief Counsel O. Kevin Vincent’s message to the defense bar a few months ago at a legal conference was pretty clear – keep us in the loop, or risk the consequences. NHTSA’s message to the plaintiffs’ bar has been more like radio silence, so it will be interesting to see […]
December 3, 2014
For a report that’s a quarter of a century-old, testing old technology and resting on questionable assumptions, An Examination of Sudden Acceleration (also known as the Silver Book) has exerted an out-sized influence over the search for root causes in unintended acceleration events. Manufacturers have loved the document, for its emphasis on driver error as […]
November 20, 2014
Well, here we are again. Another vehicle defect crisis, another round of Congressional hearings, this time only months after the GM and NHTSA were taken to task for allowing the ignition switch defect to spiral out of control. This time the Senate delves into the Takata airbag inflator defect, another agency-assisted hazard that has been […]
November 14, 2014
Wednesday, the Federal Highway Administration announced some big, big news: Trinity Industries will test its ET-Plus guardrails in a way that virtually guarantees a passing grade, thereby ensuring that the agency’s past decisions are validated. The Safety Record confesses those were not the agency’s exact words. The FHWA said: Trinity would not be required […]