Making vehicles safer, keeping unsafe vehicles off the roads and reducing highway deaths and injuries from vehicle crashes are the goals and responsibilities of a federal agency with a name that doesn’t roll off the tongue.
The agency, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, or NHTSA (pronounced nit-sa), is part of the U.S. Department of Transportation. It is a government agency that has a tremendous impact on every American, including offering help to resolve safety defects in the vehicles that they buy.
It is also a valuable resource for consumers who want to know what vehicles are safest in a crash, to learn about safety recalls that affect vehicles they bought new or used, to complain about a safety problem or to get all kinds of safety-related information including child-passenger safety.
“This is the agency with the most effect on the everyday life of a consumer,” said Tim Hurd, chief of media relations for NHTSA. “Anyone who rides a car, rides in a bus, walks in front of a truck, depends on this agency to set safety standards and fight the number one cause of death for young Americans ages 5 to 29. There are 41,000 motor vehicle deaths a year and millions of injuries.”
In its more than 30 years, the agency has forced the auto industry to steadily improve the safety of American automobiles. And it has worked to educate the public about motor vehicle safety and change its behavior.
Seat belts are a good example of what the agency has accomplished in 30 years. It counts getting more people to buckle up one of its biggest successes.
“Seat belts weren’t required until this agency was created in 1966,” said Hurd. In the early ’80s seat-belt use was minimal. Now close to 70 percent of people in cars wear seat belts. Through 1998 more than 112,000 lives were saved through the use of safety belts.”
Another major achievement is the lowest fatality rate on America’s highways, which safety researchers attribute partly to the increased use of seat belts.
“The seat belt is the most effective piece of safety equipment in a car,” Hurd said. “It allows you to survive half the crashes that would otherwise kill you.”
Still there is more to do. Hurd said the agency’s biggest frustration is “that there are any deaths. Every death on the highway that we could have done more to prevent is something we don’t want to see.”
NHTSA, which employs 591 people in its Washington, D.C., office as well as its 10 regional offices and two test facilities, one in East Liberty, Ohio, and the other in San Angelo, Texas, has a wider effect on the every day life of the American public than most will ever know, said Patricia Waller, senior research scientist emeritus at the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute and past director of the institute.
And though she describes herself as an “outspoken critic of NHTSA,” she says its accomplishments have been “nothing short of miraculous.” NHTSA came into existence in 1966, in the heyday of consumer activism.
Until then, “it was up to an auto company as to whether it wanted to abide by the standards,” said Clarence Ditlow, head of the Ralph Nader-founded Center for Auto Safety in Washington. “If the vehicles didn’t meet them, you didn’t have to recall them.
Nader had written the book “Unsafe at Any Speed,” an indictment of the design of the Chevrolet Corvair. That set the stage for the act that gave NHTSA its powers, Ditlow said.
The official view in Detroit was that motor-vehicle deaths were the fault of the driver, not the car, said Brian O’Neill, president of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, a lobbying and research organization in Arlington, Va., largely financed by the insurance industry.
With the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act, NHTSA was authorized to issue vehicle safety standards and require manufacturers to recall vehicles with safety-related defects.
Since 1966 NHTSA has instituted 57 vehicle-safety standards and more than 215 million vehicles have been recalled to correct safety defects. Its New-Car Assessment Program informs the consumer about how well vehicles meet the safety standards for front and side-impact protection.
The frontal tests are conducted at 35 miles per hour, or 5 m.p.h. faster than required. Each year, NHTSA conducts crash tests on cars, pickups, sport-utility vehicles and mini-vans that are new, popular or redesigned, or have improved safety equipment. The number tested varies according to the amount Congress appropriates for NHTSA to buy vehicles.
NHTSA then rates them on a five-star scale–five is the highest, one the lowest–on how well they protect drivers and passengers in front and side collisions.
In 1979, when new-car assessment testing began, 33 percent of passenger cars received four- or five-star ratings. By model year 1997, that had risen to 85 percent.
In the real world, the fatality risk for belted drivers in head-on collisions fell 20 to 25 percent from model years 1979 to 1991.
In 1997 NHTSA began conducting side-impact testing on vehicles. The agency is considering off-set testing, which some safety experts believe better represents real-world crashes, and is studying the best way to test the propensity for vehicles to roll over.
Since the new-car assessment testing began, the agency has sacrificed 585 passenger cars and 242 light trucks. NHTSA tested 64 1999 models and 55 2000 models. It plans to test 72 2001 vehicles.
Test results are at www.nhtsa.dot.gov or the Auto Safety Hotline, 888-DASH-2-DOT or 888-327-4236.
“People are using our information to find the safest cars,” said spokeswoman Liz Neblett, citing the 33,000 visits a week from April 29 through May 20 to get crash-test results from the Internet. “And they are using the hot line to give us the information we need to investigate problems and institute recalls. We need the consumer to tell us if there is a safety problem; they are the basis of our information.”
But motor vehicle safety-related defects and recall campaigns is where the public probably has the most contact with NHTSA.
In many cases, recalls for safety-related defects are initiated by the manufacturers who’ve found a design flaw or manufacturing error. Examples of safety defects include fuel system problems that can cause stalling or fires; seats and seat backs that fail; and air bags that deploy unexpectedly. Recalls also can involve items such as tires and child seats.
When it finds a defect, the manufacturer must notify NHTSA and remedy the problem free. NHTSA ensures the recall is carried out.
In other cases, however, NHTSA orders a recall. That’s when it relies on complaints to its auto safety hot line. Calls to the hot line have risen to 736,245 in 1999 from 252,487 in 1988 and range from potential safety-related problems to requests for information.
If NHTSA and an automaker disagree over whether a problem is a safety defect, the agency can be at a disadvantage, said Bob Adler, professor of legal studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he has worked with, studied and taught about agencies such as NHTSA that regulate industries.
That is because when it comes to investigating complaints, NHTSA depends on an honor system, Ditlow said. It asks the automaker for information and expects to get it.
“The government relies on good-faith responses,” Ditlow said. “If the manufacturers are responding in bad faith you’ve got a problem. Clearly the ignition switch is a good example that Ford was not acting in good faith.”
The case to which Ditlow referred involves NHTSA’s investigations into ignition switches that the agency worried had caused fires when the vehicles were not running and the keys were not in the ignition. About 25 million Ford vehicles built from 1983 to 1992 had the switches.
In May 1998 State Farm sent the agency a report suggesting that Ford had misled the government during NHTSA investigations in 1992, 1994 and 1995. State Farm claimed Ford’s failures delayed a safety recall. State Farm based its accusations on Ford documents uncovered in a suit filed in 1996 against Ford in Texas in which State Farm was involved.
In the report to NHTSA, State Farm contrasted what Ford told NHTSA with Ford documents obtained in the Texas case. Those documents showed that Ford engineers knew more about the problem than they told the agency.
Ford officials contended they had not misled the agency and that the reasons documents were not provided included imprecisely worded information requests.
But NHTSA disagreed and fined Ford $425,000 for withholding information. Without admitting fault, Ford agreed in March 1999 to pay the fine, the largest ever paid NHTSA for delays or omissions in providing information.
And despite denying a hazard, Ford, in April 1996, announced a “safety recall” of 8.7 million 1988 through 1993 U.S. and Canadian cars and trucks to fix ignition switches as part of a customer satisfaction program.
The agency and automakers may wrangle over defects and how to handle them, but the number of fatalities on America’s highways have been dropping.
In 1966, motor vehicle-related fatalities numbered 50,594, or a fatality rate of 5.5 per 100 million vehicle miles traveled.
“At that time it was believed that you couldn’t get the rate below 3,” Waller said.
Yet in 1998, the most current data available, the rate was 1.6. Though that totals 41,471 fatalities each year, it is an improvement over what it would be if the rate had remained at 5.5 because vehicle miles traveled have continued to rise.
“If we were experiencing the traffic death rate per hundred million vehicle miles that we had in 1966, we would have had over 152,000 traffic deaths last year,” Waller said.
“I don’t mean that they did it by themselves, but they did it by providing national leadership and national coordination, for example, by creating a governor’s highway safety representative and program in every state.”
