Category: Regulation

Toyota: A Series of Unfortunate Chapters

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On a sunny June day, Kathy Ruginis, of Bristol, RI, had a low-speed Unintended Acceleration event in a 2010 Corolla, as she attempted to park. The car had already been remedied under the floor mat entrapment and sticky accelerator recalls, and presumably was as safe as a babe in its mother’s arms. Ruginis was making a slow, right hand turn to ease into the parking space; her foot was on the brake, when the vehicle surged forward and crashed into an unoccupied parked Jeep in front of it. Fortunately, only the Toyota and the Jeep were injured.

Kathy’s husband Bob, an electrical engineer with 35 years’ experience in embedded software and hardware design, wanted an explanation. And Toyota had one. After a June 24 physical inspection, a test drive and a download of the Corolla’s Event Data Recorder (which Toyota requested be performed), Toyota sent Bob and Kathy a letter, which basically said: we jiggled your pedal, we wiggled your floor mat, and we drove your vehicle for an exhaustive 16 miles. There’s nothing wrong with your car. So sorry. Goodbye.

Missing from that July 9 ding letter? Any mention of the EDR download, which showed pretty clearly that something was definitely wrong. According to the five-second pre-crash snapshot, just before the Corolla struck the Jeep, the brake was on, the accelerator pedal was untouched, but the speed and the engine RPMs doubled just before the crash. Get that? Brake on. Accelerator pedal off. Speed doubles.

Today, the Bristol Rhode Island couple filed a defect petition to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration asking it to investigate low-speed surges in Toyota Corollas from the 2006-2011 platform. They also sent a follow-up a letter to the Independent Monitor, a position created by the March Deferred Prosecution Agreement that closed the criminal investigation into Toyota’s lies about its Unintended Acceleration problems. The Ruginises have requested that attorney David Kelley investigate whether Toyota has already begun to violate the terms of the agreement, which deferred prosecution for three years, in exchange for Toyota pleading guilty to one criminal count of wire fraud. The settlement, struck after a four-year probe, allows Toyota to merely pay its way out of the mess, as long as it stops lying to everyone about the safety of their vehicles.

Apparently, some habits are hard to quit.

In his letter to the Special Monitor, Ruginis pointed out that Toyota could not have concluded that nothing was wrong with the Corolla and that there were glaring discrepancies in what the company was saying privately to him, but publicly elsewhere. Here’s the wind-up:

  • "Toyota’s physical inspection showed that our unintended acceleration crash was not caused by floor mat entrapment or a sticking accelerator pedal; therefore Toyota’s solutions to the unintended acceleration problem by launching the sticky pedal and floor mat entrapment recalls have not been “effective and durable.”
  • Toyota has not identified the root cause of our crash; therefore the company cannot conclude that “the incident was not the result of any type of manufacturing or design defect.”
  • A vehicle that accelerates suddenly, without the driver’s input is an unsafe vehicle; therefore, in our case, Toyota did not stand behind “the safety and quality” of this vehicle.
  • In denying our claim, Toyota misled us by specifically excluding the one important piece of evidence that was unfavorable to the company’s position, but one the company has publicly proclaimed its great faith in. Toyota cherry-picked the data to claim to conclude there was no problem.”

And here’s the pitch:

“Concealing a safety issue and making misleading statements to an individual customer may not rise to the same level of chicanery as lying to a Congressional inquiry, or NHTSA investigators, or the Department of Justice. But, I have done a great deal of reading about the history of this issue, and, at its essence, what Toyota did to me is no different than what it did to thousands of other customers, and to those governmental entities over a span of over a decade – ignoring problematic data to make it look as though there is no unintended acceleration issue, making definitive statements about root causes without adequate investigation; making public promises of integrity while privately practicing deceit; and employing every means at its disposal to limit its liability of what appears to be a difficult-to-resolve technical issue, at the expense of the customer’s safety. In other words, I see that nothing has changed.”

Toyota Misery Has Plenty of Company

On June 24, as a Toyota engineer was combing the Ruginis Corolla allegedly looking for the root cause of the crash, The Safety Institute, a non-profit research and advocacy organization, released its first quarterly Vehicle Watch List on emerging – or in some cases, continuing — safety defect trends by vehicle make, model year, and alleged defect. Of the 15 vehicles on the list, Toyota Camry vehicles with speed control complaints occupied six positions – more than a third. The six model years, occupying the 7th, 8th,9th, 11th, 12th, and 14th positions on the list are, respectively, MY2007, MY2009, MY2005, MY2004, MY2008, and MY2014.

The Watch List uses publicly available data such as NHTSA consumer complaints, and manufacturer reported Early Warning Reports on deaths and injuries and the Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS),  and employs “peer-reviewed analytic methods to identify emerging motor vehicle safety defects that merit additional engineering and statistical review,” according to a TSI press release.

For example, recently, Boyd Martin, a mechanical engineer based in Braintree, Mass., reported two low-speed surge events in his wife’s 2011 Camry that resulted in property damage crashes. His wife is a cautious driver, Boyd said, who had only put 10,000 miles on the car. Both incidents took place in the parking lot of his company. The first occurred on July 9th; the second occurred on July 23. In both cases, Sylvia Martin was slowly maneuvering into a space, when the Camry surged forward “at full throttle,” hitting a stockade fence. After the second event, the Camry was towed to the body shop for repair. According to Sylvia Martin’s written account: “A short time later Ray called my office and told my husband that as the truck driver was taking the Camry off the flat-bed truck the driver started the engine to move the car to parking lot. The car engine raced and bolted forward. Fortunately he was able to push hard enough on the brakes to stop the car before there was further damage.”

“About an hour after he gave us that call, that’s when we started to look into it on the Internet, and began to realize that we were not alone.”

Boyd Martin says that Toyota has inspected the vehicle, but has made no conclusions yet; he is still waiting for Toyota to release the results of his EDR download. He wasn’t expecting much.

While the Corolla did not make the Watch List’s top 15, Ruginis identified plenty of similar complaints in the NHTSA data – low speed surges, many of which occurred when the driver was braking and many that caused crashes. In his defect petition to NHTSA, Ruginis pointed out that the agency’s so-called most thorough examination ever, identified low-speed surges as the most prominent UA scenario, yet one which it had never investigated. From the agency’s 2011 Toyota UA report:

Further review of the stationary and low speed incidents (combined) found that parking lot entry and exit accounted for the largest share of these incidents (40% of VOQs 64% of crashes. Many of the parking maneuver narratives reported incidents characterized by high engine power either after the driver applied the brake or immediately after shifting the transmission.”

Ruginis’s own review of NHTSA complaints by owners of 2006-2010 Toyota Corollas found 163 reports in which the driver experienced a surge at low speed or no speed; 99 drivers mentioned that the brakes were already depressed when the surge occurred or the surge occurred when the brakes were depressed; 83 incidents resulted in crashes.

The NHTSA complaint data mirrors what’s happening in the insurance subrogation field, says Dennis Lyons, of SD Lyons Automotive Forensics in Seekonk, Massachusetts. Lyons, who regularly conducts forensic inspections, says that his inspectors noticed an uptick in Toyota UA crash cases “well before it hit the front page,” immediately after the company introduced its drive-by-wire electronic throttle control system.

“The common denominator was parking or low-speed maneuvers — either pulling into the coffee shop or through the coffee shop,” he says. Lyons estimated that Toyota vehicles accounted for 36 percent of these types of cases that pass through his business; the next closest manufacturer accounted for 8 percent of those cases. “It’s my opinion that there is something definitely wrong, something abnormal about the frequency of Toyota UA issues compared to other manufacturers.”

Toyota EDR: Friend or Foe?

Normally, in all things Unintended Acceleration, the BS flows from Toyota to NHTSA, so everyone’s got their story straight. This time around, the agency and its “regulatory partner” apparently didn’t have enough time to consult.

Toyota responded to one reporter’s questions about the significance of the EDR data with:

“This data supports our conclusion that this was not a sudden unintended acceleration event but a collision that resulted from late braking, which is not unique to drivers of Toyota vehicles.”

NHTSA looked at the same data and said that because the various data points are not synchronized, the driver could have been touching the accelerator pedal in the millisecond between the one-second snapshots of data – this was most likely a case of dual pedal application.

So it’s definitely a case of late braking – so why, if the driver was braking, didn’t the vehicle speed drop? Why did it double?

Or, it’s definitely a case of dual pedal application – so why did the EDR show that nothing ever touched the accelerator pedal?

The Safety Record showed the readout to a prominent EDR expert who laughed at both explanations. Toyota has never been able to duplicate a UA during a test drive – it’s really hard to do. So, that portion of the inspection is pretty much for show, he said. As for the EDR data: “The vehicle was basically at idle and the ‘late’ braking would not have resulted in a speed surge.” He was similarly unimpressed with NHTSA’s fancy footwork. While technically correct, he allowed, “the sheer probability of that happening and not being recorded in either the current, prior or later snapshot is so remote that it really is a cop out on their part.”

Bob Ruginis said he was “flabbergasted,” when a Toyota representative told him that the EDR readout was ignored in determining that the incident was not the result of a manufacturing or design defect. “It was not logical to me,” he said. “My thoughts were: they’re not looking at it because it doesn’t show what they want it to show. If they looked at it and came up with an idea that supported them they would have put it in.” Toyota’s current explanation, Ruginis speculated, seemed to be the result of a meeting where “they sat around and tried to figure out, okay what can we say? Of course, it’s all conjecture – which is what they do.”

This the-EDR-says-whatever-we-want-it-to-say is of a piece with the history of contradictory positions the pair have taken on the value of Event Data Recorder downloads.

In February 2010, Toyota spokesman Mike Michels told The Wall Street Journal: The device is a prototype and "is still experimental," said Toyota spokesman Mike Michels. "We have found anomalies in the data that are part of our development of the system. It is our position that it is not reliable for accident reconstruction."

In July 2010, George Person, a former head of NHTSA’s Recall (Mis-) Management Division, leaked to The Wall Street Journal the results of a preliminary report on Toyota EDR data, which purported to show that 60 percent of the incidents were the result of driver error. The data was rife with contradictions and inconsistencies; the sample incidents were assembled by convenience, rather than any scientific method. No seasoned crash investigator could conclude anything from these data – certainly not that Toyota electronics are exonerated.  Yet, the leak was framed as another strike against driver’s accounts of their own experiences: “The U.S. Department of Transportation has analyzed dozens of data recorders from Toyota Motor Corp. vehicles involved in accidents blamed on sudden acceleration and found that the throttles were wide open and the brakes weren't engaged at the time of the crash, people familiar with the findings said.”

By 2012, Toyota was publishing technical papers in SAE International, claiming:

For the three vehicle models tested, the Toyota EDR pre-crash data and other parameters were accurate when compared with the HS-CAN data or observations. Based on the testing and analysis performed for this study, the Bosch CDR readout tool for Toyota vehicles can increase the understanding of vehicle crashes and help advance safety research and investigations.

Toyota Quietly Settling Cases

In the post-Bookout verdict era, Toyota has been quietly settling death and injury claims alleging that an electronic defect caused the unintended acceleration crash. The Bookout case, our readers will recall, emanated from a September 2007 UA event that caused a fatal crash. Jean Bookout and her friend and passenger Barbara Schwarz were exiting Interstate Highway 69 in Oklahoma, when she lost throttle control of her 2005 Camry. When foot-braking would not stop her speeding sedan, she threw the parking brake, leaving a 100-foot skid mark from right rear tire, and a 50-foot skid mark from the left. The Camry, however, continued speeding down the ramp and across the road at the bottom, crashing into an embankment. Schwarz died of her injuries; Bookout spent two months recovering from head and back injuries.

In October, Toyota hastily settled the case –  hours after an Oklahoma jury determined that the automaker acted with “reckless disregard,” and delivered a $3 million verdict to the plaintiffs — but before the jury could determine punitive damages. The jury was persuaded by the testimony of two plaintiff’s experts in software design and the design process, Michael Barr and Jerome Koopman, who reviewed Toyota’s software engineering process and the source code for the 2005 Toyota Camry, and testified that the system was defective and dangerous, riddled with bugs and gaps in its failsafes that led to the root cause of the crash.

These confidential settlements are reportedly buttoned up to an unusual degree, attorneys say; they can’t breathe a word of their existences.

So, the government got paid, the lawyers got paid, the victims with the most egregious cases are getting paid. The only ones left hanging are the Toyota owners stuck with an unsafe vehicle that hasn’t ruined somebody’s life – yet.

Bob Ruginis has been designing software and hardware for 35 years, starting in 1977, at Chrysler, when microprocessors were a dazzling new automotive technology. He went on to work with embedded systems in applications ranging from military to toys, and teaching other engineers how to use them. He says he’s disturbed to learn that the automotive sector doesn’t use structured programming, relying instead on haphazard programming practices and multiple patches.

Ruginis was also a loyal Toyota fan, who spent his driving career buying new Toyotas and driving them until they died. But after fewer than 62,000 miles this Toyota – and the entire company – is dead to the Ruginis family.

Bob and Kathy Ruginis are still hoping that Toyota will do the right thing and compensate them for a vehicle they are afraid to drive, but cannot afford to park, and do not want to foist on some unsuspecting future owner. The Safety Record has heard this story many times, from drivers who are anguished by this moral dilemma.

“I want to get rid of it, but I don’t want to sell it to someone who will end up having a crash and get hurt because the car is unsafe,” he says. Bob and Kathy Ruginis approached NHTSA and Kelley because, Bob says, “I feel Toyota is hiding something and I don’t want to hear about people getting hurt or killed and not having done anything about it. Having some reasoning and some evidence to show something is happening — if we hadn’t sent those letters, it would really affect us. We have consciences.”

NHTSA Finally Tackles Rear Underride

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One Ms. Marianne Karth of the Truck Safety Coalition and 11,000 signatories have succeeded where the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety – with all its fancy-pants testing – and the Canadians – with their much tougher standard – had failed, persuading the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to initiate a rulemaking to upgrade the rear underride standard.

Earlier this month, the agency published a notice in the Federal Register announcing that it would issue two separate notices – an Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking on rear impact

guards and other safety strategies for single-unit trucks, and an NPRM on rear impact guards on trailers and semitrailers. Apparently, it was a May 5 meeting between the Coalition and Secretary of Transportation Anthony Foxx that turned the tide. The advocacy group presented their signatures and made the case that amendments to FMVSS No. 223, Rear Impact Guards, and FMVSS No. 224, Rear Impact Protection were long overdue.

IIHS got the typical cold shoulder NHTSA presents to outside suggestions. The announcement made no mention of the 2011 petition the IIHS submitted to “require stronger underride guards that will remain in place during a crash and to mandate guards for more large trucks and trailers.”  Spokesman Russ Rader says that the agency neither denied it, nor issued any official response.

“They told us they were working on it,” he says. “We’re glad that NHTSA is working to move forward in taking this first step.”

Three years ago, the IIHS didn’t gather signatures, but it did present lots of data to the data-driven agency. The Institute examined crash patterns leading to rear underride of heavy trucks and semi-trailers with and without guards, using the Large Truck Crash Causation Study, a federal database of roughly 1,000 real-world crashes in 2001-03.  It found that underride was a common outcome of the 115 crashes involving a passenger vehicle striking the back of a heavy truck or semi-trailer. Only 22 percent of the crashes didn’t involve underride or had only negligible underride, which they indicated was consistent with prior studies.  The study noted that “In 23 of the 28 cases in which someone in the passenger vehicle died, there was severe or catastrophic underride damage, meaning the entire front end or more of the vehicle slid beneath the truck.”

IIHS also performed a series of crash tests to assess the efficacy of various underride guards under different crash speeds and configurations (head-on and off-set) to determine what types of failures occurred.  The IIHS used the Chevy Malibu, a sedan with a high crash-test rating, as the bullet vehicle and trailers that were certified to Canadian and U.S. requirements as the targets.  Canadian requirements, required since 2007, are more stringent than the U.S. for strength and energy absorption.  In general the testing found significant performance differences between U.S. and Canadian guards – the Canadian guards performed significantly better.  The testing also revealed fundamental weaknesses in the attachments which don’t have to be tested as a whole system. 

In addition, IIHS pointed out that there were significant regulatory gaps allowing some heavy trucks to forgo guards altogether and if they are on trucks exempt from the regulations, the guards don’t have to meet 1996 rules for strength or energy absorption.

That petition followed a NHTSA November 2010 study showing that the guards were not very effective in preventing fatalities or serious injuries from rear impacts to tractor trailers. The study, conducted as part of the agency’s evaluation of Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards 223 and 224, used state crash data from Florida and North Carolina, showing a slight – not statistically significant – decrease in fatalities and serious injuries to occupants in a rear-impact crash with a tractor trailer. The agency noted, however, that the sample size might have been too small.

Rear guard protection has been a federal requirement since 1952, when the Bureau of Motor Carriers of the Interstate Commerce Commission required heavy trucks, trailers, and semitrailers to be equipped with a rear-end protection device designed to help prevent underride. The regulation contained no specifics as to the device’s efficacy, but merely required the guard to be “substantially constructed and firmly attached.”  In 1967, the Federal Highway Administration, attempted to begin a rulemaking to require a rear underride guard for trucks, buses and trailers, but industry fought off any substantive upgrade to the regulations for 44 years. In 1996, NHTSA published a final rule establishing two Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (FMVSS) – 223, Rear Impact Guards, and 224, Rear Impact Protection. FMVSS 223, the equipment standard, specified strength requirements and compliance procedures for rear impact guards on semitrailers. FMVSS 224, the vehicle standard, specified mounting instructions and location specifications for those guards.

The agency has done little to improve the rule since.

The IIHS, which has been advocating for a better rear underride standard for decades, has launched a series of research projects that have ranged from determining the scope of the problem to developing a new underride guard. Last March, the Institute published the results of its latest round of testing

The IIHS has continued its research into effective underride prevention. In 2013, the Institute published the results of further testing it performed –also using a 2010 Malibu as the bullet vehicle, striking a parked truck at 35 mph in three overlap modes: 100 percent, 50 percent and 30 percent.

All eight guards successfully prevented underride, including one from Hyundai Translead, whose earlier model failed a full-width test by IIHS. In the second test, in which only half the width of the car overlapped with the trailer, all but one trailer passed. However, when the overlap was reduced to 30 percent, every trailer except one from the Canadian manufacturer Manac failed. Manac sells dry van trailers in the U.S. under the name Trailmobile. The Institute uses a 30 percent overlap for the most challenging underride test because it is the minimum overlap under which a passenger vehicle occupant's head is likely to strike a trailer if an underride guard fails.

 

“We’ve been told that five of the major trailer manufacturers have upgrades in the works that they are doing voluntarily, and we are hoping to test those upgrades as soon as they are available late this year or early next year,” Rader says. “Manufacturers have indicated the changes they made were not expensive and did not add a substantial amount of weight. It’s not a difficult task to make guards tougher.”

 

NHTSA to Initiate Consumer Awareness Campaign on Tire Age – No Standard Needed

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NHTSA to Initiate Consumer Awareness Campaign on Tire Age – No Standard Needed.    

No surprise that NHTSA isn’t going to regulate tire age – but now that agency plans to initiate a consumer awareness campaign about tire aging after years of research data showing that aging can present a safety problem particularly in the high heat states.

NHTSA has (again) announced that it will not create a safety standard based on tire age.  In a recently released report NHTSA stated “At this time, the agency does not believe it is necessary for motor vehicle safety to add a tire aging requirement to its light vehicle tire standard.”  The basis for this decision was that revised safety standards promulgated following the passage of the TREAD Act in 2000 made tires more robust.  The agency also claimed that “light vehicle tires are performing better on the road as reflected in our most recent crash data” and that “TPMS (tire pressure monitoring system) on light vehicle tires since 2007 has helped alert consumers to underinflation that is also known to degrade tires faster.”

This comes as no surprise to veteran NHTSA watchers and those who have followed the tire age debate during the past decade. 

“The real problem associated with aged tires and aged tire failures is rooted not in the lack of a new test regimen, but in the tire labeling and manufacturers unwillingness to adequately educate dealers and motorists about when tires should be removed from service” said Sean Kane, President of Safety Research & Strategies, a long-time advocate for addressing tire aging hazards. 

It is undisputed that tire age is a factor in tire safety.  NHTSA research data has shown for years that tire aging can present a safety problem particularly in the high heat states.

In November 2004 Safety Research & Strategies petitioned NHTSA to initiate rulemaking to require a consumer-friendly date of manufacture molded into tire sidewalls and requested a Consumer Advisory. SRS’ petition requested that tire labeling rulemaking commence separately from the tire performance standards.  The agency denied this petition and the result was the continuation of an antiquated and unknown date code buried in the Tire Identification Number (TIN).  SRS reiterated its request in 2006 for the issuance of a Consumer Advisory when NTHSA was modifying the TIN requirements.  In a 2012 submission to NHTSA, SRS again asked for a requirement that tire manufacturers use a non-coded date of manufacture, mounted on both sidewalls so that consumers can easily determine the age of a tire and follow the age recommendations of auto and tiremakers. The agency did neither an advisory nor rulemaking on labeling and again allowed the industry to continue with a virtually indecipherable code to the dis-benefit of consumer safety. 

Nearly 20 years ago, automakers, such as Toyota and Volkswagen, first acknowledged that tires have limited service life – regardless of use or tread depth and that aged tires increased the risk of failure. In their 1990 owners’ manuals, foreign automakers warned motorists against the use of tires older than 6 years.  These advisories followed studies published in Germany in the late-1980s that found a disproportionate number of tire failures in tires older than 6 years.  Throughout that decade, tire age notices spread to many other vehicle manufacturers’ manuals, but the issue received little attention until federal investigations into the ATX and Wilderness tires showed that they were more likely to fail after several years in service. In the last few years, tiremakers Continental, Michelin, Bridgestone-Firestone, Yokohama and Cooper have also acknowledged that tires have limited service life and have issued Technical Bulletins specifying that all tires should be removed after 10 years regardless of the remaining tread depth. The bulletins also advised consumers to have their tires inspected annually once a tire reaches 5 years old.  Vehicle manufacturers and some tire associations have taken a stricter approach, recommending tire replacement after 6 years, regardless of tread depth. 

These guidelines are fairly useless without a fundamental change to the way a tire’s age is discerned. If you can’t find or understand the code, how will you know how old your tire is? The non-coded date of manufacture and the difficulty in locating the TIN hamstrings any conscientious consumer trying to follow them.

Aged tires, with acceptable tread and no significant visible signs of wear, find their way onto vehicles in a variety of ways: little or unused spares are rotated into service, consumers purchase used tires or buy a “new” tire that may have been sitting in inventory for 10 years, or consumers keep an old tire on a little-used vehicle.

This lack of visual indicators accounts for the continuing hazard of aged tires to consumers and service personnel, regardless of industry warnings and recommendations. It also underscores the need for a quick and easy way to determine a tire’s age. Consumers and service providers can’t adhere to safety guidelines, unless the tire age is readily accessible and understandable. Instead, they are left to decode the 11- or 12-symbol alphanumeric TIN. 

The result: Preventable death and injury crashes. SRS has provided NHTSA with a steady stream of catastrophic failures of tires that appear serviceable but have internal material degradation due to age and heat.  For their part, the manufacturers have settled hundreds of cases involving death and injury.  

Last year NHTSA’s Dr. Merisol Medri’s SAE presentation (click here for a copy) cited the following:

“Based on analysis of data from 2005-2007 including databases (NMVCCS, GES, CDS), 90 fatalities and over 3,200 injuries occurred annually as the result of crashes that were probably caused by tire aging or where tire aging was a significant factor.”

While NHTSA’s taken its position on tire age rulemaking, the non-regulatory National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) earlier this year announced its first tire safety investigation that will examine tire age and recalled tires (also the subject of recent ABC Nightline story).   

According to Sean Kane “the public are still at risk because they have little or no information about a mostly invisible hazard. The tire industry, vehicle manufacturers, and NHTSA recognize that tire age degradation presents a hazard – even on tires that have little use. It’s past time to give consumers the same level of awareness and the tools to protect themselves.” 

NHTSA Finally Gets Curious about Exploding Airbags

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NHTSA-watchers know that it sometimes takes a lot to pique the curiosity of the Office of Defects Investigations.

Take Takata airbags that explode, shooting shrapnel at hapless drivers. This defect, first surfaced in 2008, when Honda announced a major recall. It has returned to the news pages in 2009, 2010, 2011, and 2013 as Honda and four other automakers announced a cascade of recalls, each with its own specific defect root cause – one just a little different from the other. These explosions have caused two deaths and at least 22 injuries to date.

This month, NHTSA decided it was time to untangle the mess. Last Wednesday, based on six new complaints since the August 2013 recalls, NHTSA opened a Preliminary Evaluation into potentially defective airbags affecting 1.09 million Honda, Toyota, Nissan, Mazda and Chrysler vehicles.

According to the Opening Resume, the good folks at ODI discussed these incidents with Takata and decided that heat and humidity might be a factor since all six incidents occurred in Florida or Puerto Rico. Two reports came from Takata and one from Toyota. The remaining three came to the agency’s attention via the Vehicle Owner’s Questionnaire. The Opening Resume characterizes them as “minor in nature.”

Here are the VOQ narratives:

Right after the car was hit, the passenger airbag exploded, breaking the front windshield and hitting the driver in the head causing a cut of 7 stitches and catching on fire. Airbag never inflated. (VOQ 10568848)

Oncoming driver crossed center line making a left turn in front of Honda driver. Honda struck passenger side of turning vehicle. Both driver and passenger side airbags deployed. However, the diver side airbag inflator ruptured and propelled a one-inch piece of shrapnel into the driver's right eye. Loss of sight and severe lacerations to nose requiring 100 stitches. This vehicle is not included in NHTSA recall campaigns 08V593, 09V259 or 11V260. The Honda was bought used. Information supplied by legal counsel for injured Honda driver. (VOQ 10537899)

There was a loud explosion and the next thing I remember I was sitting in my car staring at the center of my steering console. The airbag was nowhere to be seen. The airbag has completely dislodged from the steering column. After searching for it I found it between the driver’s door and the seat. It has caused cuts and burns on both of my arms as well as the left side of my face. The EMTs told me I was lucky I had large glasses on as they probably kept me from getting hit in the eye. I also am suffering from hearing problems since the explosion of the airbag. My right ear has partial hearing with moderate ringing and pain, my left ear sounds like I'm sitting in a field of crickets. It makes horrible cracking and shrill whistling sounds. I am going to see my ear doctor tomorrow. The rest of me is sore but ok. (VOQ 10585224 )

 

Apparently, metal shards ripping your face to shreds and taking out an eye is “minor.” Hey, you’ve got two eyes.  

In May 2009, 18-year-old Ashley Nicole Parham.of Oklahoma died in a 2001 Honda Accord, after her vehicle another car in the school parking lot, tripping an explosion that sent a piece of metal right into her carotid artery. In 2010, Kristy Williams, a Georgia college student, was stopped at a light, when her airbags deployed, expelling metal shards, which severed her neck and carotid artery and required two weeks in intensive care. Williams’ case against Honda was settled for an undisclosed sum. On Christmas Eve, Guddi Rathore was at the wheel of her 2001 Honda Accord, when a U.S. postal service truck pulled out in front of her. The minor fender bender caused the airbag to explode. The metal shards severed the arteries in her neck, killing Rathore in front of her three young children, also occupants in the Accord. According to news reports, the Rathore family settled with Honda and the U.S. government earlier this year for $3.5 million.

For its part, The Safety Record is curious why ODI has waited a year to follow up on the high heat and humidity angle. In Honda’s 2013 Defect and Noncompliance notice, it mentioned an inflator rupture involving a vehicle from Puerto Rico, and “another potential concern related to airbag inflator production that could affect the performance of these airbags.” We hope the PE does not simply focus on this new aspect of a 13-year-old problem.

And while we’re at it: Paging Mr. Vincent! Paging Mr. Vincent! (That is O. Kevin Vincent, NHTSA’s Chief Counsel.) Several injury incidents and at least one death occurred in vehicles outside of the recalls.  The Parnham case settled; the Rathore case settled; several other cases settled. In the latest batch of blow-ups, one of those plaintiff’s attorneys you invited to help ODI fight automotive defect crimes reported another case that should send up one the those “red flags” that the TREAD Act “demands” a follow-up. Will you look into those settlements? Did they settle for more-than-an-ambulance-chasing-nuisance amount? Will we see a Timeliness Query for Takata or Honda? Will you follow up, Mr. Vincent? Or will we, like the poor driver in VOQ, only hear crickets?  (See NHTSA Message to the Defense: Call us Before We Call You) 

NHTSA gave Takata and Honda the benefit of the doubt in 2009, when it closed a Recall Query, concluding that their many shifting explanations were adequate to forestall a civil penalty. But that was five years ago. The Safety Record sees in the publicly available documents the typical shuck and jive from automakers in a rolling recall. One thing is abundantly clear: Takata had lousy manufacturing and quality control processes. In 2006, its Monclova, Mexico propellant plant exploded. The airbag inflators keep exploding, the metal continues to fly, and the only ones paying the real penalty are the death and injury victims.  But in this new world of defect scrutiny, might we see more recalls covering even later models than previously disclosed?       

While You Were Out …

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We’re all familiar with the Friday afternoon news dump – release something controversial at close of business on the last day of the week. Don’t leave reporters much time for digging or tracking down interview subjects, and hope everyone is too busy livin’ for the weekend to pay attention. The holiday news dump is a variation on this theme and last week, as Americans were preparing to grill hotdogs and wave sparklers, some big news broke out: Graco added 1.9 million infant carriers to an earlier recall of 4.2 million safety seats for harness buckles that were nearly impossible to unlatch, making it the largest child seat recall in U.S. history. NHTSA released some after-the-fact testing and another Special Order related to a dubious customer satisfaction campaign related to rear-impact Jeep fires. GM found yet more vehicles with a bum ignition switch that needed to be recalled and laid out its compensation protocol for past victims of its malfeasance. Head below for the details:

Graco Harness Buckle Recall

Five months after Jennifer Timian of the NHTSA’s Recall Management Division sent Graco a blistering recall acknowledgement letter reaming out the manufacturer for minimizing the safety hazard of harness buckles that do not unlatch, Graco has surrendered. It added 1.9 million infant carriers to an earlier recall of about 4 million convertible and booster seats with a harness buckle that was so difficult to unlatch, that consumers reported the need to cut their children out of the seat.

Graco’s Feb. 7 Part 573 Notice of Defect and Noncompliance did a 180 in tone and substance from its original recall notice in February, in which the child safety seat-maker made it clear that it would rather eat ground glass than concede that harness buckles that become stuck by design or contamination could present a safety hazard in an emergency:

While Graco and NHTSA have not reached an accord over the nature or severity of this  issue, Graco in an abundance of caution has agreed to submit this 573 report and engage in a recall for the Subject Child Restraints.

It reluctantly recalled about 4 million convertible and booster seats, including Cozy Cline, Comfort Sport, Classic Ride 50, My Ride 65, My Ride w/Safety Surround, My Ride 70, Size 4 Me 70, Smartseat, Nautilus, Nautilus Elite, and Argos 70 models. But, Graco declined to recall an additional 1.8 million rear facing infant seats. 

 

This time, Graco’s phrasing was more careful. While the word “defect” was never whispered, Graco’s memory of the first recall was all soft-focus:

Based on its discussion with NHTSA, Graco determined that a safety recall was warranted with regard to forward-facing toddler and harnessed booster car seats due to the probability that, and in addition to the ergonomic issues noted above, the physical orientation and use patterns of those seats with older children increased the potential for foreign material to interfere with the buckle mechanism over time. This in turn could make extraction of the child occupant more difficult in an emergency situation, thereby increasing the risk of injury.

This is what is alleged to have happened to Leiana Marie Ramirez, who died in a vehicle fire three days before her second birthday, strapped in a Graco Nautilus child safety seat. Her mother  Samika Ramirez was southbound on Arroyo Seco Parkway in South Pasadena, when Samika pulled her Nissan Altima to the side of the divided highway, suspecting that she had a flat tire. Another driver, who hadn’t noticed the stopped Altima, struck it in the rear, touching off a fire. According to the police reports, Samika tried 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. The Ramirez family filed a civil lawsuit against Graco in October 2012, as NHTSA was opening an investigation into the problem. At the time of the recall, Graco had not reported this lawsuit to NHTSA, as it is required to do, under the Early Warning Reporting regulations.

Graco really had no choice but to widen the recall. NHTSA was threatening to go to an Initial Determination if Graco didn’t recall the infant carriers as well. And when the agency is ready to go to the mat, a manufacturer can count on lots of negative news stories about its products and its corporate behavior. That’s perhaps, more costly to the bottom line than a recall.

Chrysler Jeep Wrangler Fires

In other holiday news, the agency has issued a Special Order to Chrysler demanding to know when in the heck it was going to initiate the trailer hitch remedy it grudgingly agreed to implement more than a year ago after former Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood and former NHTSA administrator David Strickland cut a deal with Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne to avoid a legal struggle. One year after Chrysler filed its Part 573, not one Jeep has been remedied, and at the rate Chrysler is going, it will take it nearly five years to implement it. The agency has taken umbrage:

For many owners, a recall remedy deferred by parts availability easily becomes a defect remedy denied. Moreover, additional delays in implementing this recall will inure to Chrysler’s benefit at the expense of vehicle owner safety. Although NHTSA acknowledges that recall campaigns may have low completion rates for any number of reasons, the agency has no intention of allowing Chrysler, or any other manufacturer, to delay recall completion to the detriment of safety.

Our readers may recall that NHTSA and Chrysler were on a collision course last spring over the unfortunate tendency of older Jeeps with behind-the-axle, rear-mounted fuel tanks to burst into flames when struck from the rear – especially at higher speeds. The Center for Auto Safety had been petitioning NHTSA for a Jeep recall since November 2009, when it formally requested that the agency open an investigation into fuel-fed fires in Jeep Grand Cherokees from the 1992-2008 model years. The advocacy group alleged that the plastic fuel tank’s placement and the lack of adequate shielding – similar in design to the infamous Ford Pinto – made it more vulnerable to rupture or leakage from rear-impacts and in rollovers.

In August 2010, the agency granted the CAS petition and opened a Preliminary Evaluation. In June 2012, ODI bumped up the investigation to an Engineering Analysis Chrysler was pretty adamant that it didn’t see a problem here, and NHTSA was equally insistent that something be done. NHTSA formally requested that Chrysler conduct a recall, and with the deadline for a formal reply looming, LaHood, Marchionne, and Strickland met in Chicago and came to a compromise.

Chrysler agreed to outfit 1.5 million, 1993-1998 Jeep Grand Cherokees and the 2002-2007 Jeep Liberty SUVs with trailer hitches, installed on vehicles not already so equipped “provided the condition of the vehicle can support proper installation.” Chrysler agreed to inspect vehicles with aftermarket and Chrysler-designed tow hitches “to assess whether the hitch and surrounding areas show evidence of sharp edges or other puncture risks. For those vehicles with after-market hitches, Chrysler will replace it with a Chrysler tow hitch “provided the condition of the vehicle can support proper installation.” In closing the Engineering Analysis, the agency said that it “had no reservations” about the trailer hitch “fix.”  Chrysler described it in its Defect and Non-Compliance Notice as “an incremental improvement” to safety in low-speed rear impact crashes.

These Special Orders, (coming so regularly now, we don’t know if they are that special any more.) are signs that NHTSA is trying mightily to acquire a spine. But this one, in particular, shows why the agency has a long way still to go.

After the Secretary of Transportation cuts the deal, ODI questions the effectiveness of the remedy in a meeting with Chrysler.

The automaker tries to allay these concerns by providing “drawings of the hitches and a limited set of test data.” When ODI questions the sufficiency of those offerings, Chrysler says it won’t do anything else.

NHTSA is then forced to conduct its own tests. And if a report about those crash tests can be believed — eight rear impact crash reconstruction tests conducted from August 2013 to January – at speeds of up to 40 mph, all is well.

When NHTSA shares it glad tidings about the tests with Chrysler, NHTSA finds out that Chrysler had waited until December 2013, to select a hitch supplier and actually placed an order in late January 2014. The first run of hitches wasn’t actually produced until May 14, and Chrysler wouldn’t have all its parts stockpiled until next month.

Basically, Chrysler’s actions might be construed as a chronic middle finger to ODI.  And the Special Order? Pretty wimpy compared to some of the zingers coming out of the Chief Counsel’s office these days.

CAS, which has tirelessly championed this issue, rightly points out that its consumers who are getting the shaft. The tests, while nice, fall short of those the agency did the Ford Pinto of the 1970s, and short of today’s FMVSS 301 fuel tank integrity test, which requires a 50-mph 30 percent offset from a 3015 pound moving barrier with low front end — more severe than the ones NHTSA for the Chrysler tow-hitch “fix.”

In the meantime, CAS reports, four people have died and two have been seriously injured in rear-impact Jeep collisions since Chrysler announced its remedy last June.

Ignition Switch Nightmare Continues

GM celebrated the holiday week, as they do every week since Marietta, Georgia attorney Lance Cooper broke the news that General Motors knew it had a defective ignition switch in the 2005-2007 Cobalt and other models for at least a decade, by announcing an expanded recall. Chrysler also announced that it was adding 696,000 2007-2009 Chrysler Town & Country minivans and Dodge Journey SUVs to its 2011 ignition-switch recall of 196,000 Journeys, Caravans and Town & Country vehicles due to ignition keys that could slip from the “run” to “accessory” position, shutting down the engine, and the power steering and airbags with it.

On Monday of the holiday week, the GM recall ballooned to 8.4 million vehicles globally. This compelled Time journalists, bored with the sheer repetition of ignition recall, after ignition recall, after Congressional hearing, after document dump, after revelation that yet another GM insider warned them about this defect years ago, are forced to come up with ridiculous fun facts about the fiasco, such as: “The recalled vehicles could wrap around the Earth more than four times and The longest time between recalls hasn’t even been longer than the World Cup. Funny stuff! (Remember when Time was relevant?)

GM also announced its compensation plan for owners of ten Chevrolet, Daewoo, Open/Vauxhall, Pontiac and Saturn vehicles with a death or injury claim for a crash that occurred before December 2014. One key case killer: airbag or seat belt pre-tensioner deployment. Any evidence of either in a crash and the claim is ineligible. What technical support does GM have for drawing its bright line in that particular place? Kenneth R. Feinberg, Administrator of the GM Ignition Compensation Claims Resolution Facility, couldn’t answer that question at his holiday week presser.

 

NHTSA’s Message to the Defense: Call Us Before We Call You

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This week, while heads were rolling out the doors of the RenCen (GM headquarters) in downtown Detroit, the Chief Counsel of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration was laying down the law for defense lawyers at a Chicago legal conference.

Amid the presentations at the American Conference Institute’s 7th Annual Summit on Defending & Managing Automotive Product Liability Litigation devoted to defeating class-actions, the liability of autonomous cars and one of our personal faves –tire aging (with a shout-out to SRS’ Sean Kane!), was a warning from the government.

First, Chief Counsel O. Kevin Vincent lulled them with a feel-good “rah-rah-ree” paean to industry. And then, he made the hair on the back of their necks rise: A manufacturer’s obligation to report a defect within five days of its discovery is the law, and after a long hiatus from doing its job, NHTSA intended to take “an aggressive stance” in enforcing it.

The first offense line in the discovery of a defect was not the Office of Defects Investigation, Vincent said. It was the manufacturers themselves.

“We don’t have analysts, but your clients do. You all have ability to find these defects,” he said.

A manufacturer cannot delay a defect finding, while a safety problem meanders through an internal process involving multiple committees. It cannot hide its knowledge behind a wall of attorney work product and attorney-client privilege. It cannot wait until it’s gotten the supply chain ready to implement the recall.

And it better not wait until after it settles a plaintiff’s case for big bucks. The TREAD Act obligated NHTSA to “follow up on civil litigation that sends up red flags,” he said.  And they’d be looking for signs of foot-dragging in large civil litigation settlements. Not right away, certainly. Civil actions take years, he said. (This gives the safety problem plenty of time to fester.) How much of a settlement was enough to catch NHTSA’s attention? Vincent wouldn’t name a figure. Continue reading →

Office Chair from Hell Finally Recalled

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After years of subjecting an unsuspecting public to an office chair with “welds” that break, flipping the occupant backwards, Office Depot, the exclusive seller of the sudden ejection machine, is recalling 1.4 million units sold between 2003 and 2012. According to a release issued by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, the office supply company had received 153 reports of the seat plate weld cracking or breaking, including 25 contusions, abrasions, injuries to the head, neck and a fractured back and hip.

That hip fracture was sustained by Nancy Losey of San Antonio, Texas, who in March 2010, was sitting in a Gibson chair when it suddenly collapsed. The chair was manufactured by the Wonderful Year Furniture Company, imported by Swinton Avenue Trading Company, based in Boca Raton, Fla, and sold by Office Depot.  The seat plate underneath her chair had separated from the chair base, because of a weld failure at that juncture. Ms. Losey fell to the floor and broke her hip, requiring a hip replacement surgery.

 In October 2012, San Antonio attorney Paula Wyatt, who represented Losey in a product liability case against Swinton Avenue Trading, set this resolution into slow motion, by writing to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission alerting them to Losey’s injuries, and the amazing similarities between the Gibson and the Biella Office Chair, which bore the same product registration number and same bad weld in same critical place, but had already been recalled in April 2012. At the time, the Biella only had 11 complaints, compared to 18 between 2009 and 2010, for the Gibson. But, there were fewer Biella’s out there – 307,000 units. Under that recall, the remedy was a $55 store card – the price of the chair.

 The CPSC opened an investigation, but there was no immediate action. And today there was no immediate response to our question: Why in the heck did this take so long? CPSC spokesman Scott Wolfson did say:

“CPSC produced a humorous video a few years ago to promote the use of SaferProducts.gov and it involved a man falling off of an office chair.  The video was based on actual incidents and today’s recall of a related hazard with office chairs is another example of the importance of reporting safety incidents via SaferProducts.gov.”

The Safety Record Blog gave Wyatt an assist by writing about this evil piece of furniture (see Office Depot Declines to Launch Recall for a Chair that Launches Occupants Backwards and CPSC Investigates the Chair Office Depot Tried to Forget), and highlighting the frustrations of one Jesse Clackum, who blogged about her fruitless attempts to make the Swinton Avenue Trading Company take responsibility for the collapsing chair. In late 2006, Clackum, based in Florida, was one of the Gibson Leather Office Chair’s hapless victims. Her version of a Swinton Avenue Trading Company office chair, retailing at $119.00, was only 14-months old when it collapsed after the weld at the base of the chair failed. Clackum immediately contacted Office Depot looking for restitution, but the office supply retail giant blew her off, and told her that she should have bought the extended warranty.  Clackum tracked down the manufacturer – the Swinton Avenue Trading Company, an entity which turned out to be unreachable – no phone number, just a PO address. Continue reading →

ABC Exposes Broken Tire Safety System

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Yesterday, ABC’s Nightline and Good Morning America took two issues that Safety Research & Strategies has been chipping away at for a decade, and gave them big play: the broken tire recall system and tire age. Producer Cindy Galli and investigative reporter Brian Ross, working with reporters at local ABC affiliates, bought recalled and very old tires, told victims’ stories and skewered the Rubber Manufacturer’s Association.

The stories raised a number of key issues:

• The tire recall system doesn’t work: Recalled tires aren’t always caught by retailers and there is no quick, easy or efficient way for any consumer or tire technician to check the recall status of a tire.
• Aged tires are sold and put into service unknowingly because the date code is buried in the Tire Identification Number, and expressed in a non-standard format. Tire age recommendations by vehicle and tire makers are not well known to service professionals or consumers.
• The tiremakers’ trade group, the Rubber Manufacturers Association (RMA) has conceded that the tire recall system does need improvement, but continues to maintain that tire age has no bearing on safety, and has fought off regulations to keep old tires off the road.

ABC highlighted the National Transportation Safety Board’s first tire safety investigation into a February crash that killed two and injured seven members of the First Baptist Church in New Port Richey, Florida, when a two-year-old left rear recalled BF Goodrich tire suffered a tread separation. The tire had been recalled in July 2012. The NTSB is also investigating a second fatal incident involving an aged tire. With its investigative powers and advisory role to other regulatory agencies on safety policy, the NTSB’s recommendations have the potential to be a game-changer. Will the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration listen? Continue reading →

Safety Research & Strategies Sues FHWA for Guardrail Documents

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Safety Research & Strategies, an automobile and product safety research and consulting firm, has sued the Federal Highway Administration for the public release of documents regarding the safety of guardrail end terminals used on highways nationwide. The ET-Plus model end terminals, manufactured by the Dallas-based Trinity Industries, have been allegedly linked to deaths and severe injuries, leading state and federal highway officials to question their efficacy and safety.

The civil lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court, alleges that the FHWA violated the Freedom of Information Act by improperly withholding records and failing to respond to two separate administrative appeals on the failure to release documents pertaining to the agency’s interactions with Trinity and with the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials. SRS originally sought the documents in November and January. 

Guardrail designs have evolved since the 1960s. Earlier designs used blunt ends that acted like a spear, penetrating the vehicle occupant compartment in a crash. The turned-down twist design of the 1970s buried the exposed ends, but acted like a ramp in a crash, causing vehicles to rollover. Today’s preferred design on some highways is the Energy-Absorbing End Terminal, which absorbs the crash energy, bends the end terminal away from the vehicle, and extrudes it through a slot into a flat metal ribbon. In the early 1990s, Texas A&M designed the ET-2000 in cooperation with the Texas Department of Transportation. Originally manufactured by Syro, Inc., the ET-2000, a variant of the Energy Absorbing End Terminal design, addressed some of the safety failures of earlier guardrail designs. The FHWA first approved the ET-2000 in the early 1990s, and its field performance was satisfactory. Continue reading →

Markey Calls for NHTSA Transparency

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Documents released Wednesday by Massachusetts Senator Edward Markey show that Wisconsin State Police came up with the same two-and-two as NHTSA’s Special Crash Investigation team during its 2007 investigation of a 2005 Chevy Cobalt crash that led to two deaths.  Too bad neither NHTSA nor GM thought they added up to four.

On October 24, 2006, Megan Ungar-Kerns, 17, was at the wheel of her 2005 Cobalt, returning from a trip to Walmart on a rural Wisconsin highway, when her vehicle suddenly drifted off the roadway at about 60 mph. The Cobalt hit a raised driveway and sailed through the air about 60 feet, before striking a telephone pole and two trees. The trio was not wearing their seatbelts and no airbags deployed. Natasha Weigel, 18, and Amy Lynn Radebaker died of their injuries. Ungar-Kerns survived with permanent injuries.

A crash investigation report issued by the Wisconsin State Police in February, noted the October 2006 GM Technical Service Bulletin about inadvertent power loss due to the ignition switch moving from the run to accessory position. They determined no other cause of the crash:

“The two front seat airbags did not deploy. It appears that the ignition switch had somehow been turned from the run position to accessory prior to the collision with the trees,” the report stated.

Markey released it and a few other documents that GM submitted to NHTSA, as part of the Death Investigation (DI), during a transportation appropriations hearing held by the Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation. DOT Secretary Anthony Foxx was the sole witness. The report didn’t add much new to the known narrative, but spotlighted legislation he has sponsored with Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal requiring manufacturers to submit more detailed information to NHTSA in the event of a fatal crash.

The Early Warning Reporting System Improvement Act “would require NHTSA make the information it receives from auto manufacturers publicly available in a searchable, user-friendly format so that consumers and independent safety experts can evaluate potential safety defects themselves,” according to a Markey news release. Continue reading →