March 27, 2014
Leiana Marie Ramirez was three days shy of her second birthday, when she was burned alive, strapped in a Graco Nautilus child safety seat.
On August 26, 2011, her mother, Samika Ramirez had been out running errands related to Leiana’ party – delivering cupcakes to her pre-school, shopping for Lieana’s birthday present. The pair was on the way home, southbound on Arroyo Seco Parkway in South Pasadena, when Samika felt her Nissan Altima swerve, and thinking she had a flat, regained control of her vehicle, stopped in the left-most lane and put on her flashers. The divided highway had no breakdown lane, just a narrow shoulder.
Ramirez was about to call AAA, when another driver, who hadn’t noticed the stopped Altima, plowed into its rear end. The vehicle almost immediately caught fire. According to the police reports, Samika tried frantically to unbuckle her daughter, but could not release the harness. The flames engulfing her car were too intense, and onlookers pulled Samika Ramirez out of the car, while Leianna stayed behind. She witnessed her daughter’s death.
More than a year later, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration would open an investigation – still pending – that would eventually result in a recall of the Graco Nautilus and 17 other models for buckles that were so difficult to unlatch that some consumers complained to NHTSA that they had to cut the belt webbing to get their children out of the seat. And, from the beginning, Graco would concede that it was “keenly aware of the issue.” Indeed, it had collected more than 6,100 complaints about it.
But Graco insisted that the inability to extract a child from the car seat was merely “a consumer frustration and a consumer experience that Graco has been working to improve.” To this date, Graco has not acknowledged that this defect led to a horrific death – not in its responses to the agency’s investigative information requests; not in its Part 573 Defect and Noncompliance Report and not in its Early Warning Reports. The company paid a big fine to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission in 2005 for a long history of failing to report injuries and deaths. Even now, with the initial recall expanded and under a Special Order to answer all questions truthfully, Graco comforts its customers on its website:
Graco can assure you there have been no reported injuries as a result of the harness buckles used on Graco car seats. We want to stress that our car seats are safe and effective in restraining children. And, the safest way to transport a child is always in a car seat.
NHTSA declined to comment on Graco’s stance, via a statement to The Safety Record:
“Although Graco has submitted a defect notice in response to NHTSA’s recall request, our investigation remains open. As such, the agency cannot discuss or comment at this time.”
Attorney Christine Spagnoli, who represents the Ramirez family, says that Graco’s failure to acknowledge Leiana’s death will negatively affect the efficacy of the recall”
“To me the issue is this: by putting on their website that there are no reported claims and by telling that to NHTSA, They are trying to dissuade people from getting new buckles,” says Spagnoli of Greene, Broillet & Wheeler, LLP. “This is a safety issue, and by saying something false to the public, they’re trying to save money, at the expense of kids getting hurt.”
The Investigation
The Preliminary Evaluation into Graco buckles opened in October 2012 with 25 complaints reported to NHTSA via their Vehicle Owners Questionnaire database, containing hypotheticals that echoed the Ramirez incident, like this one, filed with the agency in September 2012:
March 19, 2014
Back in 2010, after Toyota announced that a federal grand jury in New York had subpoenaed the company on June 29 for documents regarding relay rod failures in Toyota truck models, we asked if the automaker would be the first to be prosecuted under the Transportation Recall Enhanced Accountability and Documentation Act (TREAD).
Well, right question, wrong defect.
Under the settlement with the Department of Justice announced today, Toyota is banged for $1.2 billion, and prosecution for committing one count of wire fraud is deferred for three years, for the lies it told about the floor mat entrapment and sticky pedal recalls. According to Toyota’s Statement of Facts, the automaker sought to limit its floor mat recalls, even though the entrapment hazard affected other models, and resisted the sticky pedal recall, even though Toyota had addressed the problem in Europe.
“This sends a mixed message,” says Sean Kane, president of Safety Research & Strategies. “On the one hand, a $1.2 billion fine is a very significant hit. But the government’s focus is only on the narrow areas of the floor mats and sticky pedals. The bulk of Toyota vehicles experiencing Unintended Acceleration problems were never recalled. That billion dollars doesn’t do a thing for Toyota owners stuck with defective vehicles.”
The skeleton of this particular set of lies have been in the public domain for several years. In April 2010, when former Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood announced that the agency had imposed a $16.4 million fine on Toyota for failing to recall 2.3 million vehicles with defective accelerator pedals – then the largest civil penalty NHTSA had levied against an automaker – the Secretary failed to make public the documents laying out his rationale. In May 2011, NHTSA quietly posted the sternly worded demand letter that explained why Toyota got slapped.
To remind our readers, Toyota recalled the CTS supplied pedal in Europe in September 2009, but waited until January 2010 to recall the pedals in the U.S. However, on October 7, 2009, “a staff member of the Toyota Motor Corporation Product Planning and Management Division sent a copy of an Engineering Design Instruction describing the pedal remedy that was already implemented in Europe to someone at Toyota Motor Engineering and Manufacturing North America, Inc. for the accelerator pedal of a RAV 4 manufactured in Canada. Two weeks later “a member of the TMC PPM inexplicably instructed a member of the TEMA PPM not to implement this Engineering Change Instruction. Furthermore, in November 2009, Toyota provided NHTSA with FTRs regarding sticking accelerator pedals on vehicles in the United States but not with information regarding Toyota’s extensive testing and determinations regarding the cause of the sticking accelerator pedals or an explanation of the significance of the FTRs,” the demand letter said.
March 18, 2014
Last week, General Motors attempted to pour oil on its troubled waters with an offer of free loaner cars for consumers awaiting a fix for the wandering ignition defect that is linked to at least 13 deaths. But, Consumers for Auto Reliability and Safety (CARS) says that a loaner may be no safer – as long as automobile dealers are permitted to put customers in vehicles that may be under recall, but unremedied.
“We are very concerned for customers who go to GM dealers expecting a safer loaner car and that might not be what they get,” says Rosemary Shahan, CARS president.
This issue has been simmering on the Congressional back-burner since last May, after a California jury awarded $15 million to the parents of two sisters who died in an Enterprise Rent-A-Car 2004 PT Cruiser on October 7, 2004. The driver of the truck they hit testified that he could see smoke pouring from the PT Cruiser’s engine compartment just before it veered into the southbound lanes of Highway 101 in Monterey County, crashing into his 18-wheeled Freightliner tractor trailer. A month earlier, Chrysler had recalled 439,000 2001-2004 PT Cruiser and the 2005 PT Cruiser Convertible for a power steering hose that could rub against the transaxle differential cover, eventually resulting in a steering fluid leak and an underhood fire. Despite the recall notice, Enterprise had rented the PT Cruiser that crashed to three other customers before the Houcks. On the day of the crash, the PT Cruiser was the only vehicle available and Enterprise employees offered it to Raechel and Jacqueline Houck as a free upgrade.
Automobile dealers are prohibited from selling a new recalled vehicle that has not yet had the remedy implemented, but there is no such prohibition against renting or loaning out a recalled vehicle that has not had the fix, or selling a used unremedied vehicle.
The Raechel and Jacqueline Houck Safe Rental Car Act of 2013 was sponsored by Democratic Sens. Charles E. Schumer (D-NY), Barbara Boxer (D-CA), and Claire McCaskill (D-MO) and Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), and supported by the car rental companies. The bill, S921, was filed in May and was unanimously passed by the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, but it has advanced no further. CARS is lobbying for the bill and a similar one in the California legislature. SB 686 prohibits dealers from loaning, renting, leasing or otherwise transferring ownership of recalled used vehicles to consumers. But in both cases, the auto dealers have demanded a carve-out for loaners, because, as lobbyists testified they “have no way to know” if a vehicle has been recalled.
“The dealers and the manufacturers are blocking it and can’t even get out of the Senate,” Shahan said. “They’ve testified that they don’t want to pay for the down time, because a recalled vehicle could be out for weeks. They don’t want to lose the revenue, they’d rather put their customers at risk.”
March 10, 2014
With a 2011 rulemaking on standards governing electronic key systems still pending, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has opened a compliance investigation into 34 recent model-year vehicles that allow the vehicle to be turned off in a gear other than park, allow the key fob to be removed from a running vehicle with no warning to the driver, and allow vehicles to be restarted without the key fob present – all conditions that defy the letter and intent of Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard 114. And, incidentally, all conditions that Safety Research & Strategies informed the agency about in a 2010 meeting.
SRS obtained these documents after submitting a Freedom of Information Request for agency documents related to keyless ignition investigations.
On January 28, the agency’s Office of Vehicle Safety Compliance sent information requests to Toyota, Ford, General Motors, Nissan, Mazda, Hyundai and Kia regarding 2012 and 2013 model-year vehicles, based on tests of how their keyless ignition systems operate under different scenarios in which to determine if the Theft Protection and Rollaway Prevention Standard had been violated.
The agency said that the probe was initiated by a Ford recall (13V-475), for 23,000 Ford Focus vehicles, equipped with keyless starting systems that did not have an audible warning when the driver exited the vehicle. But actually, the compliance investigation had its origins in a routine FMVSS 114 compliance test of a 2013 Ford Focus. After discovering that the vehicle did not meet the warning aspect of the regulation, NHTSA’s Office of Vehicle Safety Compliance (OVSC) contacted Ford in March 2013. The two met to discuss how its Intelligent Access key system worked. And OVSC asked Ford if it could use its MyCANIC tool. Used with Ford software, the MyCANIC is plugged into the OBD-II diagnostics port to read specific data channels from the vehicle’s computer, namely to access how the “Power Mode” communicated either a “Key Out” or “Key In” reading.
Over the spring, and stretching into the fall the OVSC and Ford jointly reviewed the vehicle. NHTSA asked for more information; Ford provided it. In September, Ford made the decision to recall, even though, “it was not determined that a non-compliance to FMVSS 114 Section 5.1.3 existed in these vehicles,” Ford noted in its Part 573 Notice of Defect and Noncompliance. And just in case the agency was wondering what Ford really thought of FMVSS 114, it added:
“While the applicability of this section of FMVSS 114 to keyless ignition systems is ambiguous, in the interest of Ford’s consistent cooperation with the agency, Ford will conduct a notification and remedy campaign to add a ‘key in ignition’ door chime to address the agency’s question with respect to the requirements of FMVSS 114 Section 5.1.3 (Theft Prevention).”
March 6, 2014
Yesterday, the agency sent General Motors an extraordinary 27-page Special Order compelling the automaker to answer 107 questions about an ignition defect in the 2005-2007 Chevy Cobalt and six other models that claimed at least 13 lives and injured at least 31.
Retired NHTSA senior enforcement lawyer Alan Kam said that he’d never seen anything like it.
We are encouraged by NHTSA’s aggressive and swift action, and we are hoping and wishing and praying for actual enforcement follow-through that benefits and protects consumers, rather than merely burnishes the agency’s image.
We all know – including GM – that a big, fat fine is in their future for failing to launch a recall within five days of discovering a defect, as Marietta, Ga. attorney Lance Cooper found out. Cooper obtained internal documents during the discovery phase of a lawsuit on behalf of the family of the late Brooke Melton, showing that GM engineers discovered in 2004 that the ignition of the 2005 Cobalt could wander from the run to off or accessory position while the vehicle is underway.
February 26, 2014
On the First Day, attorney Lance Cooper called GM out on its recall of the 2005-2007 Chevy Cobalt and Pontiac G5 for an ignition switch problem that, the automaker announced, was linked to six deaths. Cooper had represented the family of 29-year-old Brooke Melton, who died in 2010 when the ignition module of her 2005 […]
February 20, 2014
If you want to know why civil litigation matters to safety, take these links over to USA Today and read James Healey’s fine coverage of General Motor’s crappy, nine-years-too late 2005 Cobalt and Pontiac G5 recall, and attorney Lance Cooper’s request to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration for a Timeliness Query investigation. (6 Killed in GM Cars with Faulty Ignition Switch; Lawsuit: GM Knew of Cobalt Ignition Problem; and Lawyer Asks Feds to Explain Recall Timing)
After settling a lawsuit in which a 29-year-old woman died in crash caused by a defect known within GM since 2004, the automaker announced that it would recall a subset of vehicles plagued by ignition switches that wander from the run to the accessory or off position. These shifts create an emergency situation while the vehicle is underway, disabling the airbags while cutting off the engine power, power brakes and power steering. The defect, which GM engineers discovered in 2004, before they began selling the 2005 Cobalt, was the central issue in Melton v General Motors.
Brooke Melton, 29, died in 2010 when the ignition switch in her 2005 Cobalt slipped into the accessory position as she drove along Highway 92 in Paulding County, Ga. Melton’s Cobalt skidded into another vehicle; she died of her injuries in the crash.
The incident was initially attributed to Melton simply losing control of her car on a rainy night. But the Melton family sought the counsel of attorney Lance Cooper, after facing a legal claim from the driver in the other vehicle. Cooper, a veteran of motor vehicle defect litigation, saw something that many lawyers would have overlooked and filed suit against GM. The records he pried out of GM’s hands after 18 months of requests for production and a court order compelling the automaker to produce what it knew about the defect, revealed a long, sorry history. GM engineers had discovered the ignition switch problem during the Cobalt’s production stage, but the company sold them anyway. GM began to receive complaints about the problem almost immediately, and tried to make them go away with an October 2005 TSB covering the 2005 Cobalt and with a later TSB involving later model years of the Cobalt, the Pontiac G5, along with 2006-2007 Chevrolet HHR, the 2005-2006 Pontiac Pursuit in Canada; the 2006-2007 Pontiac Solstice; 2003-2007 Saturn Ion; and 2007 Saturn Sky. This “fix” – an ignition key cover that changed the design from a slot to a key hole – did not solve the problem.
February 19, 2014
The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission has voted to publish a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking removing the “unnecessary and unjustifiable,” in the words of Acting Commission Chairman Robert Adler, re-notification procedure which forces the commission to seek the manufacturer’s blessing every time it releases the same information about a product to a different source.
The rule is designed to rid the commission of situations in which, for example, two reporters working on the same story query the commission about a product a week apart. The commission staff dutifully sets off on the ten-day path, through the manufacturer, before it can deliver an answer to the first reporter. A week later, the commission is required to take all of the same steps – even though the manufacturer has already vetted it for inaccuracies – to give the second reporter the same information.
“This is not in keeping with the acting chairman’s aim for the CPSC to be more transparent while following the law,” says commission spokesman Scott Wolfson. “The onus is still on the agency to ensure fairness and accuracy, that principle does not go away. But this rule change would ensure more efficiency and we’ll be able to serve the public faster.”
In the Information Age, consumer product manufacturers have been unusually successful at keeping the public information regulations surrounding product defect positively medieval. While consumers have myriad Internet resources to find out if a particular product is any good, when it comes to finding out if it is safe, consumers are still at a disadvantage. Section 6(b) of the Consumer Product Safety Act – beloved by industry, reviled by consumer advocates — gives manufacturers a lot of control over what negative information the CPSC can disclose about them. The CPSC cannot release information that might be considered trade secrets or “misleading” and “inaccurate” information. The CPSC can disclose the existence of an investigation, under procedures designed to ensure the accuracy of whatever information is made public. The CPSC gives manufacturers 10 days to review any statements about their products and typically the two entities release agreed-upon language.
February 13, 2014
John Biello was not ready for the cruise control malfunction that sent his 2009 Tacoma careening down an exit ramp, then skidding into a rollover last June. But Tuesday, when he and his wife Diane appeared before the Commonwealth of Massachusetts Division of Insurance Board of Appeals to fight an automatic rate increase mandated by state law, Biello was fully prepared to educate the hearing officer about Unintended Acceleration problems in Toyotas.
As the great tide of cash washes from Toyota into the pockets of the U.S. government, attorneys, research institutions and some death and injury victims to settle fines and claims without an admission that the automaker’s electronic throttle control system is defective, owners like John and Diane Biello represent those left to deal with Toyota’s mistakes on their own. The Rehoboth, Massachusetts couple had no counsel, just a compelling account and a binder of public documents showing that Toyota Unintended Acceleration problems continue today and that juries and technical experts recognize what the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has not: Toyota’s badly designed electronic architecture can cause UA.
“I knew that there had been this unintended acceleration problem. I had read about it a couple of years ago,” John Biello says. “But I thought it pretty much done. I thought the problem was fixed and I didn’t really think my vehicle was involved because I got no Unintended Acceleration recall notices.”
January 28, 2014
With just six months to go before a Final Rule is due to be published, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has released its proposal to add side impact testing to the child seat safety standard for children up to 40 pounds.
To the uninformed, the NPRM reads like the history of an agency moving forward expeditiously toward a test that will lead the way for global child safety standards. And it is true that the proposed sled test adds a new deformable door component. But a more complete dive into the history of side-impact crashes and protection for child shows that this innovation should have been an amendment to an existing side impact test for child safety seats. This proposal is waaaaay late, and the result of not one—but two—Congressional mandates, about a dozen years apart.
Here’s the truth: (And you can measure it by policy, by regulation, by research, by public engagement – it all comes out the same.) Protecting children in crashes has never been a priority for the agency, nor for the automakers. That’s how you get the first side-impact compliance test for child safety seats in 2014.
Nonetheless, some child seat safety experts are applauding the effort.
“I’m very excited that this is finally being implemented,” said Gary Whitman, Vice President, Research and Development at ARCCA Inc, and an expert in occupant crash safety systems who has tested hundreds of child seats and collaborated with NHTSA, the Pennsylvania chapter of the American Academy of Pediatric Child Injury Prevention, National SAFE KIDS Campaign, and the Children’s Hospital of Pennsylvania in child restraint research. “It’s long overdue and it’s a shame that it required an act of Congress.”
At the same time, Whitman and biomechanical expert Salena Zellers Schmidtke agree that the proposal has some serious deficits – it only protects children up to 40 pounds, and makes questionable assumptions about the efficacy of side air curtains for children in booster seats in a side impact crash.