Don’t want your kids listen to Howard Stern, the Playboy Channel, Hip-Hop Nation or Raw Dog Comedy, at least while driving? No problem: Buy a Ford. It comes with a built-in Chinese Firewall that safeguards the harmonious upbringing of our children. At least while they drive. Read More >
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Category: Safety
The lame duck congress has adjourned for the year, and with it goes the effort to pass a suite of new auto safety regulations drafted as a reaction to the Toyota recall scandal of early 2010. Different versions of the Motor Vehicle Safety Act passed House and Senate committees earlier this year, but were attacked by industry groups and Republican lawmakers. When Republicans came out ahead in November’s midterm election, it was widely speculated that the MVSA might be one of the legislative casualties. Sure enough, the Detroit News reports that
Despite a late push in recent weeks by congressional aides and Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, supporters couldn’t overcome opposition to the massive bill
Of course, the fact that fatalities per Vehicle Mile Traveled on American roads are at their lowest level in history didn’t help. Nor did the fact that the hearings which gave birth to the MVSA were an embarrassment of a mockery of a sham. Nor did the fact that most automakers were already reacting to Toyota’s PR nightmare by making many of the more moderate reforms proposed by the bill. Not that any of that is stopping Rockefeller from trying again: he tells the DetN that he’ll take another shot at passing the MVSA when congress re-convenes.
After his role in the Toyota recall scandal, Brian Ross of ABC News has become the Mainstream Media’s go-to guy for auto safety exposés. Now, Ross reports on a story that had been largely championed by Christopher Jensen of the NY Times: Ford’s response to rear-axle breakage on Windstar minivans. Jensen reports that NHTSA opened an investigation into Windstar axle issues in May, when the auto safety watchdog had some 243 complaints in its database. At the time, Ford insisted that
the operator retains control of the vehicle at all times… the few reports alleging loss of control are inconsistent with how Ford would expect these front-wheel-drive vehicles to respond
Today, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety will issue its list of what it thinks are the safest vehicles in America. 66 vehicles will be on the list. 40 cars, 25 SUVs, and a minivan. Any guesses who will lead the list? Read More >
The AP [via Google] reports that Toyota’s board has voted to pay $32.4m on top of the $16.4 it already paid the US Department of Transportation in connection with its handling of several recalls. The first involved Toyota’s handling of gas-pedal entrapment by floormats in its vehicles that were part of the Unintended Acceleration scandal earlier this year. The other involved steering rods in certain 4Runners and T-100 pickups that were not recalled despite a 2004 Japanese market recall for the same parts on Hilux pickups.
This weekend’s homage to the car’s electrification, celebrating deliveries of the Leaf and the Volt to normal civilians, in addition to a whole fleet of electric THINK cars delivered to the State of Indiana, would be incomplete without mentioning that EVs can be a menace to society. These things are so quiet – that they creep up on you – just like that. Read More >
Speed cameras are right up there with ethanol, left-lane bandits and electric power steering on our automotive shit list, but The Fun Theory and Kevin Richardson think they may have found a way to make the robot nannies more palatable. If you pass a speed camera at or under the speed limit, you are entered into a lottery to win the fines paid by motorists who speed past the camera. In short, Richardson’s idea takes the revenue motivation for speed cameras away from local governments and democratizes it. But then you still have to submit to constant surveillance, and this also doesn’t prevent the increase in accidents that often accompanies speed cameras. But does this make speed cameras more palatable, or is this simply a pointless sugar-coating of a fundamentally flawed approach to road safety?
Don’t you hate how modern crash test standards and bunker-inspired design trends conspire to make it impossible to see out the back of most vehicles? So does the government agency that requires those crash-test standards. According to a new proposed rule [full proposal in PDF here]:
NHTSA is proposing to expand the required field of view for all passenger cars, trucks, multipurpose passenger vehicles, buses, and low-speed vehicles rated at 10,000 pounds or less, gross vehicle weight. Specifically, NHTSA is proposing to specify an area immediately behind each vehicle that the driver must be able to see when the vehicle’s transmission is in reverse. It appears that, in the near term, the only technology available with the ability to comply with this proposal would be a rear visibility system that includes a rear-mounted video camera and an in-vehicle visual display. Adoption of this proposal would significantly reduce fatalities and injuries caused by backover crashes involving children, persons with disabilities, the elderly, and other pedestrians.
But how many of the 228 annual fatalities blamed on backover incidents in light-duty vehicles would really have been solved by a backup camera, and how many were caused by plain stupidity or negligence? After all, even NHTSA admits that the proposed fix might not make a difference…
The IIHS’s latest bid for relevance comes in the form of an entirely unshocking revelation: crash a car and an small SUV together, and the car will be more expensive to repair. I know, I know… mind-blowing stuff. And it would be goofy enough if the IIHS had performed these crash tests simply for the data, but in fact the results gave them cause to exhume one of the most asinine crusades in the history of automotive regulation: regulating bumper height. Because, as the IIHS’s Joe Nolan puts it
We picked vehicles from the same manufacturer because we think automakers should at the least pay attention to bumper compatibility across their own fleets. The results show that many don’t.
And why not? Well, maybe because the odds of hitting a vehicle made by the same manufacturer that made your car are so astronomically unlikely that testing “bumper compatibility” let alone calling automakers to task for not paying enough attention to this meaningless metric is the height of self-important stupidity. But of course the IIHS wasn’t going to just leave things there…
Drunk driving is often heralded as a model for government-led shifts in personal behavior, as the social taboo around drinking and driving has become stronger with time. But what about other drugs, both illegal and legal? Most drugs do not impair driving ability as obviously as alcohol, and intoxication is not always easy to spot… in fact, it’s not technically illegal to drive when taking a legal medication that may impair driving. As a result, NHTSA is noticing a distinct uptick in the number of positive tests for legal and illegal drugs performed on drivers who died in car wrecks.
According to data compiled by NHTSA, 63 percent of the 21,798 drivers who were killed in motor vehicle crashes in 2009 were tested for drugs. Of these, 3,952 tested positive for drug involvement, representing 18 percent of the total for that year. The report also showed drug use reported by the states among fatally injured drivers increasing from 13 percent in 2005, to 15 percent in 2006, 16 percent in 2007, and 18 percent in 2008.
The drug data released today was collected by NHTSA as part of its Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) and included information collected from the states under three broad categories: whether the driver was tested, the type of test conducted, and the test results. The types of drugs recorded in FARS include narcotics, depressants, stimulants, hallucinogens, cannabinoids, phencyclidines (PCPs), anabolic steroids, and inhalants. The groups include both illicit drugs, as well as legally prescribed drugs and over-the-counter medicines.
NHTSA Investigation Action Number AQ10001, opened November 18, 2010 notes:
The agency, particularly in recent months, has been informed of incidents involving allegations of personal injury and death claimed to have been caused by safety defects and failures to conform to minimum Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (FMVSS) on rental car vehicles for which a safety recall to remedy the safety defect or noncompliance had allegedly not been performed prior to the rental car company’s lease of the vehicle. NHTSA understands that there is presently a petition before the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) seeking to prohibit at least one rental car company from renting vehicles on which safety recall campaign remedies remain outstanding. The purpose of this audit query (AQ) is to investigate recall remedy completion by rental car companies on the above-listed safety recall campaigns. These campaigns were chosen due to their inclusion of vehicles used in the rental market. This information is expected to provide the agency an indication of how completely and how quickly rental car fleets, in general or individually, perform necessary recall-related repairs or other remedies on the vehicles owned and then leased for use on the roadways.
But rental companies wouldn’t risk the safety of their customers for a buck would they? The Enterprise/Alamo/National syndicate tells Bloomberg it grounds cars upon receiving recalls… Hertz and Avis have yet to chime in. The weirdest part of it all: only vehicles made by GM, Ford and Chrysler are being investigated. Why are the Accents and Rios receiving recall repairs while Avengers and Malibus are left to be investigated for “failures to conform to minimum Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards”? Whiskey Tango Foxtrot? A list of vehicles under investigation can be found below the fold.
Hyundai could have timed this announcement a bit better. Wouldn’t the following announcement have been a fine crowning of TTAC’s Korea week? Instead, the week ended unceremoniously with a reflection on thee shitboxes. From shitbox to market leader: Hyundai has kicked Toyota from the pedestal as the largest Asian carmaker in Europe. In a way. Read More >
On-road fatalities per vehicle-mile-traveled in the United States have fallen to their lowest level in recorded history (and dropping fast)… so safety advocates must be thrilled with the success, right? Wrong. After all, success is almost more dangerous to a crusade than failure. Luckily for the hand-wringing faction, a study by the National Research Council has re-defined what it means to be safe enough on America’s roads: rather than comparing fatalities to America’s past (which makes the current environment seem great), the key is comparing America’s safety record to completely different countries. Take it away, New York Times:
While France and 15 other high-income nations cut their traffic fatalities by half from 1995 to 2009, the United States showed only a 19 percent reduction over that same time period. Britain dropped the number of fatal accidents by 39 percent over the last 15 years, and Australia by 25 percent.
And what makes the US different than these other countries (other than the fact that we apparently don’t care about traffic deaths)? The problem, it turns out, is our insufficiently intrusive government.
Because driving is one of the freedoms Americans take most seriously, the government faces fundamental challenges to any attempt to reduce traffic fatalities. As the Secretary of Transportation’s crusade against distracted driving proves, raising awareness does nothing until the market has as much incentive to fix the problem as contribute to it. Luckily, when it comes to the problem of out-of-control elderly drivers, the free market seems ready to offer an actual solution: video games. A study published in the Journal of the American Geriatric Society [PDF here] indicates that cognitive training for seniors can actually make a major impact on elderly accident rates.
American roads have never been safer according to statistics released by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) for the first half of 2010. Already in 2009, the number of people killed per 100 million vehicle miles traveled had dropped to 1.13 from 1.26 in 2008. This 5.3 percent drop in accidents already represented the lowest rate on record.
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