Lax U.S. recall scrutiny puts us at risk
NHTSA has steadily decreased its oversight of automakers, opening the door to safety issues
Will American decisions relating to vehicle safety potentially do harm to Canadians?
If we continue to tag along behind our neighbour to the south when it comes to regulations, it just might. Consumer Reports is blowing a whistle on a steady decrease in investigations by that nation’s top industry overseer, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA).
“NHTSA is the auto industry’s top safety regulator, and its investigations hold automakers accountable for safety defects, when they’re detected or reported, routinely spurring the recall of tens of millions of cars a year,” explains the magazine.
NHTSA’s investigations have led to today’s cars being safer than ever before. Some changes are implemented through tough recall strategies that hold manufacturers’ feet to the fire. But perhaps just as importantly, these changes move the industry forward as a whole, as all manufacturers adopt better design and safety features.
Now it appears the U.S. government is ripping the teeth from the automotive industry’s biggest watchdog. And this should be a concern for Canadians.
We adopt nearly all of the standards set forth by the U.S. when it comes to our automobiles. Their regulations become our regulations; we have our own layers of consumer protection, and our federal government now has the power to enact recalls even if a manufacturer balks. But for the most part, we have simply caught a ride with the person going in the same direction.
From a high of 203 investigations launched in 1989, 2017 saw just 13. The agency hasn’t issued a civil fine since late 2015. The last year of Obama’s administration saw the start of the downward slope, but under Trump, the NHTSA hasn’t even had a chief in place. The deputy administrator, Heidi King, is set to be sworn in, which may be progress in the right direction. She’s been the acting head since Trump took office and the previous Obama appointee, Mark Rosekind, stepped down.
If it feels like there’s a lot of politics going on, that’s because there is. Trump campaigned on throwing out or minimizing regulations affecting nearly every facet of American life. Gutting the car industry’s top safety overseer, however, is not just an American problem. It’s ours, too.
Jason Levine, executive director of the Center for Auto Safety, is part of a growing group of voices trying to warn the car-buying public that their safety is being punted.
“This administration appears to have a preference to not enforce the law,” he says. “This hands-off approach to law enforcement has led to a failure by NHTSA to conduct recall oversight in a way that ensures the success of the recall, and that holds manufacturers responsible for their defective vehicles.”
Manufacturers don’t set out to make dangerous cars. In fact, while road fatalities in the U.S. (around 40,000 per year) may stay stubbornly and tragically high, the cars themselves are safer; it’s the idiots playing on their phones, driving while impaired and/or speeding that contribute more and more.
However, as the Consumer Reports article notes, we’ve also seen some of the largest recalls and most deadly errors in the past decade. The Takata airbag recall remains the largest in the world, and there are still too many people driving around with defective airbags. The GM faulty ignition switches saw that company turned inside out for gambling with people’s lives. With NHTSA finally doing something, part of the “punishment” was an investigator brought in-house in 2014 to oversee an operations overhaul to ensure the ignition switch horror wouldn’t happen again. The results were a steady increase in the quality of GM’s product, and a buying public who could once again put faith in the brand.
A similar thing was instituted with Fiat Chrysler in 2015 after a safety scandal; they’re called “consent orders,” and while they put NHTSA and those manufacturers into a more co-operative relationship to head off trouble before it can reach the marketplace, the orders expire after three years and aren’t made with every manufacturer.
If an industry has been cleaned up, it would stand to reason that there would be fewer investigations required. Manufacturers have every incentive to make the safest vehicles they can, but history has also repeatedly borne out that containing a scandal will also make some companies stuff a massive problem down into their boot.
According to Levine, there is already a need for NHTSA to get more tough, not less. A Department of Transportation Inspector General report found “sloppy and incomplete documentation of manufacturer recalls.”
The GM ignition tragedies happened under NHTSA watch: it decided against an investigation as early as 2007. It wasn’t until 2014 that GM came forward, though the automaker had knowledge of the fatal flaw since 2001. There were 124 deaths the public would only find out about 13 years after they began.
“Even when it came to Takata airbags — the largest recall in history — NHTSA did not adhere to procedures … to address dismal recall-completion rates.”
Politicians can argue and carmakers can defend. Ultimately, the kneecapping of NHTSA should set off alarms for consumers for a very important reason: it is the only way to publicly find out how many complaints have been laid by owners for specific problems. If your issue is indeed a one-off, that will be reflected. But if you’re part of a group experiencing similar issues, you need to be aware of that, and a regulatory board needs to be able to fight for you.
In Canada, Transport Canada receives complaints, but we need the American numbers for our safety, too. We drive the same cars but have about a tenth of the population. Five reported incidents here might equal 50 in the U.S., and patterns will emerge sooner.
Levine sums it up, saying, “This sort of de-regulatory, anti-enforcement approach to auto safety puts drivers, passengers and pedestrians in the back seat and manufacturers at the wheel.”