January 2, 2008
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Five years after it issued a comprehensive report on its school bus safety research, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration declined to propose a requirement that three-point seatbelts be installed in full-size school buses – which agency research has shown to provide better occupant protection than lap belts or compartmentalization alone – because its is too expensive to implement, it said.
Instead, the agency is proposing to require shoulder/lap belts on small buses, to improve compartmentalization on large school buses and to establish lap/shoulder belt requirements for districts that wish to install them voluntarily.
WASHINGTON, D.C. – The National Sleep Foundation has released a report showing that states have made some progress during the last decade in identifying drowsy driving as a hazard to the motoring public, through police training, driving education and legislation. But states still have a long way to go in developing a coherent strategy to reduce drowsy driving and the resulting deaths and injuries.
According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, drowsy driving results in 100,000 police-reported crashes, 71,000 injuries, and 1,550 deaths each year. But these estimates are thought to be conservative for a variety of reasons: there is no test for drowsy driving, states have inconsistent reporting practices, few police departments are trained to identify drowsy drivers, and self-reporting is unreliable. Data from other nations, such as Australia and England, show that drowsy driving is a factor in 10 to 30 percent of all crashes. According to the NSF, 60 percent of drivers have driven while drowsy in the past year, and 20 percent, or about 32 million people, admit to having actually fallen asleep behind the wheel.
Drowsy driving is often compared to drunk driving because drivers operating while fatigued have slower reaction times, reduced vigilance and deficits in information processing, similar to alcohol impairment.
November 2, 2007
The current tire recall system designed to alert and capture defective models is ineffective and outmoded. Despite many technological advances, consumers trying to identify a defective tire still rely on a 38-year-old recall system that rarely averages more than a 20 percent return rate, leaving millions of potentially deadly tires on consumers’ vehicles. Other important […]
MOBILE, ALABAMA – After settling a seat-track and airbag defects case against DaimlerChrysler and Mitsubishi, attorney Patrick M. Ardis says he will pursue a fraud investigation against the Japanese automaker.
Ardis, of Wolff Ardis, P.C. of Memphis, Tennessee, alleges that Mitsubishi deliberately concealed that it had changed the design of the seat tracks in 1995-2000 Chrysler Sebring and Dodge Avenger coupes, the 1995-1999 Mitsubishi Eclipse, and the 1995-1998 Eagle Talon vehicles to fix a flaw that prevented the front passenger seat from locking into place. Ardis and his co-counsel Richard Taylor discovered the alleged fraud on the eve of trial, when one of their expert witnesses, Don Phillips, stumbled onto evidence that the seat tracks in the 1998 and 1999 model years lacked the seat adjuster part, known as the trigger, that was part of the 1996 track assembly.
August 2, 2007
NOTE: The following article was published in Auto Monitor, August 16-31, 2007. Auto Monitor is India’s largest auto industry trade news publication
It’s difficult to find an advertisement for a vehicle in the U.S. that doesn’t include safety claims. Multiple airbags, Electronic Stability Control, an alphabet soup of indecipherable acronyms, along with the prerequisite government five-star ratings – all seemingly indicate we are at the pinnacle of safety in America. Despite all of this hype, U.S. views on auto safety are schizophrenic: We allow our crash safety regulations, many of which were written decades ago, to significantly lag behind state-of-the-art and meanwhile more than 42,000 deaths that occurred on America’s roads last year are given scant notice.
April 2, 2007
PHILADEPHIA, PA. – A recall of 450,000 tires imported from China has exposed a loophole in the regulations that do not provide consumers with a remedy if an importer cannot afford to conduct a recall. The importer’s discovery of the defect – through a spike in warranty claims – also demonstrates the importance of the public accessibility to Early Warning Reporting data.
In June, Foreign Tire Sales, of Union, N.J., appealed to NHTSA for aid in recalling an estimated 450,000 light truck tires sold under the names Westlake, Telluride, Compass and YKS, asserting that the manufacturer, the Hangzhou Zhongce Rubber Company, had left a critical component out of the tire. Hangzhou officials have denied that the tires are defective. Initially, FTS said that it would go bankrupt if it were required to recall, replace and dispose of the defective tires. But NHTSA was unmoved by FTS’s hardship claims and ordered it to file a remedy plan.
April 1, 2007
Withholding critical data, the erosion of public accessibility to public information, the neglect of government documents-these have been the hallmarks of the Bush administration. Secrecy-in all of its forms-has been a prominent feature of the continuing stream of scandals out of Washington, D.C. Most have centered on national security, but lately, administration appointees have thrown a cloak of secrecy over motor vehicle safety information. The effect will likely be felt for many years to come.
In the following three stories, which were published in SRS’ The Safety Record (V2, Issue 4 March / April 2007), Safety Research & Strategies examines data secrecy, the new limits on public accessibility to important NHTSA documents, and the neglect of historical data sources. Alone, these issues are significant. Combined, they have potentially devastating effect on the future of safety regulation and defect trend detection and remediation.
December 2, 2006
Reprinted from The Safety Record, V3, Issue 3, Nov. / Dec. 2006
CROWNSVILLE, MD – Despite the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s assertions to the contrary, their warnings about the rollover propensities of 15-passenger vans have not stemmed the death toll, according to a new analysis of government data.
Statistician Randy Whitfield of Quality Control Systems Corporation says that the cumulative rate of deaths in 15-passenger van rollovers has actually risen since NHTSA started issuing the first of four consumer advisories from 2001 to 2005. One third of all the 15-passenger van rollover deaths since 1982 occurred after April 9, 2001, when the federal government first started warning the public about the vehicle’s hazards, once loaded to capacity with occupants and cargo.
Reprinted from The Safety Record, V3, Issue 3, Nov. / Dec. 2006
REHOBOTH, MA – Safety Research & Strategies has renewed its call for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to require tire makers to mold an easy-to-read date of manufacture on a tire’s sidewall.
SRS submitted comments on December 20 urging the agency to separate this proposal from the more complicated tire performance rulemaking. SRS President Sean Kane argued that now is the perfect time for NHTSA to consider implementing a new date of manufacture labeling regulation, while tire manufacturers gear up to meet their obligations in 2009 to mold the entire Tire Identification Number (TIN) on the intended outward sidewall of each tire. In November 2004, SRS petitioned the agency for a rulemaking to require that tire makers mold a non-coded date of manufacture on their products as a step toward reducing the number of aged tire failures. SRS argued that since the agency and the tire and vehicle manufacturers agree that tire age matters, consumers need an easy-to-read the date of manufacturer on the side of their tires. The agency denied the petition and instead chose to address the issue in its tire performance standards.
October 2, 2006
Presentations on tire aging at recent industry conferences indicate that the industry is beginning to accept what only several years ago it claimed was not possible-a scientific basis for tire expiration dates. Foundational to this acceptance is agreement from the tire makers, NHTSA, and Ford Motor Company that static oven aging in a lab can mimic thermo-oxidative aging found in tires removed from the field-an important step toward a regulatory performance standard. Other presentations have addressed specific tire components and properties that affect tire aging degradation. The unspoken message has been loud and clear: tire age matters and regulation appears inevitable.