January 12, 2018
Six years after Goodyear’s efforts to conceal the defects of its G159 truck tire enraged a U.S. District Court judge, NHTSA appears ready to take its own bite out of the tiremaker’s hide. To close out 2017, the agency opened a Preliminary Evaluation into the field performance of the tire, based on claim and complaint […]
December 18, 2017
On July 10, 2017, Takata recalled PSDI-5 driver air bag inflators containing phase-stabilized ammonium nitrate (PSAN) as a generant and calcium sulfate as a desiccant, which were used in vehicles sold in the United States as original equipment in frontal driver airbag modules. Recall 17E034 affected 2.7 million Ford, Mazda and Nissan vehicles produced between […]
September 14, 2017
In 1975, the auto industry began to equip vehicles with catalytic converters to meet the emission limits of the Clean Air Act of 1970. Sitting unobtrusively between the engine and the muffler, the “cat” changes the noxious gases in automobile exhaust into harmless nitrogen, oxygen, carbon dioxide, and water. The result, according to the National […]
August 16, 2017
On July 17, 2014, seven-year-old Ryan Paul Batchelder lost his life in a boating mishap that his family alleges, was completely preventable. The occasion was a Batchelder family reunion on Lake Burton, a 2,775 acre-reservoir in Georgia’s Northeast corner. Ryan was one of a party of six that included his uncle, Darin Batchelder, his brother […]
August 14, 2017
If your local police department has a fleet of Ford Explorer Interceptors, it’s probably trying to determine if the vehicle – an Explorer modified for law enforcement use – is sickening its officers during long periods of idling or hard acceleration. But if you are the civilian owner of one of these vehicles, keep a […]
June 28, 2017
Quality Control Systems (QCS) Corp. has filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia in pursuit of Tesla airbag deployments data that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has withheld from public view. R. A. Whitfield, the company’s director, said that the company wanted […]
March 9, 2017
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s Automated Vehicles web page breathlessly forecasts: “Vehicle safety technologies signal the next revolution in roadway safety. We see great potential in these technologies to save lives—more than 30,000 people die on our roads every year and we can tie 94 percent of crashes to human choice—transform personal mobility and open […]
January 18, 2017
For more than a decade, airbag supplier Takata manufactured what turned out to be ticking time bombs – airbag inflators with a volatile propellant called Phased-Stabilized Ammonium Nitrate (PSAN) – that were placed in vehicles worldwide by the hundreds of millions. Takata was churning them out at several dollars a bag less than airbags manufactured […]
January 6, 2017
For more than two years, The Safety Record had sought to report the results of a 2014 National Highway Traffic Safety Administration keyless ignition compliance investigation that involved seven major automakers, and to have our Freedom of Information Act request to the agency be awarded media status. It has taken dogged persistence – and a […]
December 21, 2016
Last Friday, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration opened a new probe into rollaway complaints from drivers of late-model Dodge Durango SUVs and Ram 1500 trucks equipped with Fiat Chrysler’s new rotary dial shifter. It follows on the heels on a rollaway investigation into FCA vehicles with a Monostable shifter, which concluded in June with […]