Safety advocates say NHTSA lacks resolve
Administrator counters with record-high recall period
The nation’s top vehicle safety watchdog lacks expertise to properly assess defects and must rely too much on car companies, safety advocates say.
They contend that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is reluctant to order recalls when it will face a legal fight because of its small staff and tight budget. Advocates also complain about the number of officials whose next job after NHTSA is in the auto industry.
But those were the “old days,” the agency’s boss told the Detroit Free Press last week. Since 2016, the agency has restructured, added staff with expertise in today’s car technology and become more proactive, she said. In fact, 2015-18 are the top four years for recalls in U.S. history.
“Automakers share information with us, but I don’t think we just hear information and hang up,” said Deputy Administrator Heidi King, who awaits Senate confirmation to be NHTSA administrator.
“If there’s something I’m uncomfortable with, neither I nor anyone here is hesitant to pick up the phone and call and ask more questions. We take very seriously that we get it right.”
The proof lies in the future. In some of the biggest vehicle recalls in history, such as Firestone tires on Ford Explorer SUVs, Toyota’s unintended acceleration crisis, General Motors’ faulty ignition switches and Takata air bags, NHTSA did not take action until after crashes killed or injured many people.
“GM told them that the ignition switches were not an issue. Right,” said Janette Fennell, founder and president of safety advocacy agency KidsAndCars.org, referring to a defect ultimately linked to 124 deaths. “You don’t believe the fox when he’s in the henhouse.”
Said Sean Kane, president of Safety Research & Strategies, “They’re always going to be behind the curve. The big bang for this agency is setting good standards. That would help minimize the number of problems that would end up in the enforcement side or defect side.”
Picking battles
The Free Press examined NHTSA’s record and interviewed the agency’s top administrator in the wake of our Out of Gear investigation of Ford Motor Co.’s faulty transmissions on Focus and Fies
Jamie L. LaReau
ta sedans starting with the 2011 Fiesta. In that case, federal regulators in 2014 conferred with Ford and declined to launch a formal investigation or order a recall for transmission repairs, despite thousands of consumer complaints to the agency, including accounts of 50 injuries.
Typically, NHTSA does a defect investigation in cases of a loss of motive power — the energy used to drive the car — without warning to the driver that results in the inability to control the car, Kane said.
“But the waters are very muddy and inconsistent there,” said Kane, whose company has studied the Ford transmission problems.
“Ford would argue that the driver gets notice — a service light comes on,” said Kane. “NHTSA might accept that, even though that’s not adequate.”
Such a warning light was added to the Fiesta and Focus, but not until 2015 “to more easily satisfy NHTSA’s requirements,” Ford documents from the time show.
Kane said the agency would be reluctant to act because of the high cost of fixing the millions of cars with bad transmissions. Ford would likely resist, he said.
“Ultimately, NHTSA would have to litigate against a well-funded company that knows the issue inside and out. You’ve got a small agency, small staff and limited resources. Why would they want to pick that fight?” said Kane. “That’s why I say, if you’ve got a big enough defect, you’ll get away with it.”
Throw money at it
NHTSA leadership says the agency has become more proactive.
Last year, the agency received 65,000 consumer vehicle questionnaires, about 29,000 of which were safety complaints, said King, who has based her career on risk management and previously worked as an emergency medical technician who has “held the hands of car crash victims.”
Since 2016, NHTSA has been revamping its processes to be more proactive in tackling safety problems, honing a more robust and consistent process, said King. The result has been fewer open investigations into potential safety defects because the problems get recalled and fixed, said King. NHTSA presently has 63 open investigations, she said. Last year, the agency oversaw 914 vehicle recalls of a total of 29 million vehicles. In 2017, it oversaw 810 recalls impacting 31 million cars, it said.
Under the recall system, automakers issue voluntary recalls that account for the vast majority of such actions. NHTSA can order recalls if it sees a safety risk and the automaker hasn’t acted, though that can be subject to litigation.
“We’re seeing fewer things going to formal investigation because things are going to recall sooner. Once it goes to recall, it’s overseen by NHTSA,” said King.
In 2016, for example, NHTSA launched a compliance assistance hotline to educate automakers on safety standards. More automakers are working with their suppliers on recalls now than in the past, she said. The agency has added staff and is hiring to include more engineers and consultants with expertise to “make sure we keep up with changing technology,” King said.
“The way we review things now: Members of the team review one another’s work, and there’s a culture of open challenge,” King said. “Then, once a week, there is a further level of challenging by looking at the things that are
“You can’t trust regulations to protect our safety when the people writing them land high-paying jobs with the ... companies the rules are supposed to cover.” John Simpson Consumer Watchdog’s Privacy and Technology Project director, in a December report
bubbling up in the owners’ reviews.”
Small budget
The agency falls under the Department of Transportation, which also oversees airlines, railroads, trucking, water transit and highway infrastructure to name a few. While the majority of transportation-related fatalities happen in cars, NHTSA gets only 1%-2% of DOT’s budget. Last year, the DOT’s total budget was $76 billion, and NHTSA got just $899 million, according to DOT’s website.
The agency’s budget has been flat over the past few years, but Congress gave it more than requested, King said. It has a big enough budget to effectively do the job largely because the burden to identify a safety defect and initiate a recall lies on the automaker, said King.
“We are an aggressive safety oversight agency,” said King. “That is part of the reason why our budget is lower. We have the investigators who have the ability to bring in information from the manufacturers so we don’t have to do all the research ourselves. If I needed more money, I’d ask for it.”
Lucrative lures
Joan Claybrook would disagree. She is familiar with NHTSA’s thin budget, having run the agency from 1977 to 1981. Its budget should be three times more than it is now to be effective, she said.
“They’ve never really had the money to do the right job, and that includes personnel, equipment and skill,” Claybrook told the Free Press.
It also has lacked toughness at the top, said Claybrook, who now works with the Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, which she helped found in 1989. The NHTSA administrator has “a huge amount of authority,” but, she asserted, some leaders have hoped to win a lucrative job at an automaker someday.
In fact, Consumer Watchdog, a nonprofit public interest group, reported in December 2018 that at least six senior safety officials recently left a top job at the agency to work for self-driving car companies.
“You can’t trust regulations to protect our safety when the people writing them land high-paying jobs with the very companies the rules are supposed to cover,” John Simpson, Consumer Watchdog’s Privacy and Technology Project director, said in the December report.
Last year, Uber hired Nat Beuse, a senior NHTSA official. The Consumer Watchdog report noted that Ron Medford, NHTSA’s former deputy director, also joined Google’s self-driving car program as safety director. Former NHTSA Administrator Mark Rosekind joined self-driving startup Zoox in 2017, and NHTSA’s former Chief Counsel Paul Hemmersbaugh joined General Motors to oversee legal and policy work on automated cars. Finally, David Strickland, also a former NHTSA administrator, is counsel and spokesman for the Self-Driving Coalition for Safer Streets, composed of Waymo, Lyft, Uber, Ford and Volvo.
Jumping from NHTSA to a lucrative private sector job is not a recent development. The watchdog group said from 1984 to 2010, the Department of Transportation inspector general found that 40 officials left NHTSA for jobs with automakers, their law firms or auto industry consultants.
Ford-Firestone
One of the biggest auto safety crises in recent history was the Firestone tire tread separation on Ford Explorer SUVs in 2000. In that case, the tires could fail, leading to rollover accidents. The defect is linked to 271 deaths and 800 injuries in the United States.
Yet NHTSA stalled in investigating it or issuing a recall, said Kane.
“A series of gruesome high-profile crashes and resulting news stories about the safety of Ford Explorers and Firestone tires compelled NHTSA to begin investigating,” Kane said in testimony before the National Academy of Sciences in 2011.
But the agency was alerted to the problem years earlier. In 1998, a State Farm researcher sent an email to the agency detailing 21 cases of Firestone tire failures, the Los Angeles Times reported in 2000. The article said NHTSA ignored the warning, and investigators overlooked 26 similar reports that consumers had previously sent the agency.
NHTSA’s investigation of the Explorer found no reasons to blame America’s then-best-selling SUV in the tire-related fatal crashes, Kane said in his 2011 testimony.
In August 2000, Bridgestone/Firestone and Ford recalled about 14.4 million tires that were original equipment on Ford vehicles, mainly the Explorer.
After all the recalls for defective tires were announced, Explorer tire-related rollover deaths abated temporarily, then they spiked again, Kane testified. Yet, he said, “A secret investigation of the additional deaths did not result in any further action by the agency.”
Kane said the Explorer at the time had an inherent design flaw that increased the risk of the driver losing control of the vehicle at highway speeds. That’s the kind of problem that is expensive to fix, therefore it “tends to be overlooked,” said Kane. “So with the recall, the tires were replaced, but did it solve the problem? No.”
Compounding the problem was the fact that NHTSA had not updated the standards for stability and handling since 1972, he said.
“The roof-crush standard remained in place until 2012,” said Kane. “People were being killed because the Explorer roof caved in.”
Toyota unintended acceleration
On Aug. 28, 2009, California Highway Patrol Officer Mark Saylor was driving a 2009 Lexus ES350 sedan when he, his wife, daughter and brother-in-law were all killed when the car’s accelerator stuck and it crashed into an embankment in San Diego.
The crash was captured on a 911 call made by Saylor’s wife. At the time of the crash, NHTSA did not have an open investigation of Toyota sudden acceleration, said the Center for Auto Safety, a consumer group.
But beginning in 2001, with the introduction of electronic throttle control in 2002 Toyota Camry and Lexus ES300 cars, consumer complaints had increased “fourfold” in Toyota and Lexus models, the Center for Auto Safety wrote. NHTSA received five defect petitions, denied four and did not order a vehicle safety recall, according to the Center for Auto Safety.
“The investigations as a whole show significant weakness in the NHTSA enforcement program which Toyota exploited to avoid recalls until the tragic crash in San Diego in August 2009,” the Center for Auto Safety wrote in a report.
Toyota ultimately recalled nearly 8 million vehicles in the U.S. for two mechanical defects. NHTSA has estimated that 89 deaths may be attributable to unintended acceleration in Toyotas in the United States from 2000 to 2009.
New organization
NHTSA’s lack of consistent procedures fails not only to address defects, but to prevent further damage, said safety advocates.
For example, in 2012, Congress passed a law that required NHTSA to write a regulation by October 2015 that carmakers must put seat belt reminders in for every seat in a vehicle, not just the driver and passenger seats.
NHTSA failed to meet that deadline, said KidsAndCars.org’s Fennell. So last year, her group and the Center for Auto Safety sued the DOT. The court made it clear that it expected DOT to publish a proposed rule by Oct. 31, 2018. NHTSA failed again and the date was extended to May 31, 2019. “And to no one’s surprise, they haven’t done that either,” said Fennell.
NHTSA’s boss King said the changes it set in motion continue to be tweaked.
“The engineers who do this work have embraced it, ... and if they see a way to improve the system, they own it and they drive it,” said King. “I see a pivot in the culture toward ownership and constant assessment.”