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Feds Delay New Roof-Crush Rule til October

Safety agency bows to protests from consumer leaders, safety advocates, Congress

By Joseph S. Enoch
ConsumerAffairs.com

July 1, 2008

In a letter to the heads of the Congressional committees that have jurisdiction over the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), Secretary Mary Peters wrote: “Because of the number of new comments we received and the additional analyses that are required, additional time is now needed to complete the final rule. We will issue a final rule by October, 2008.”

Peters's letter follows months of protests by consumer advocates and some U.S. senators who felt that after 35 years without any substantial change, the new roof crush standard the agency planned to propose would not do enough to save consumers' lives.

Although rollovers comprise less than five percent of all crashes, 25 percent of all vehicle fatalities are from rollovers – approximately 10,000 every year, according to the campaign website for Ralph Nader, the longtime consumer advocate who is running for president as an independent in 2008 and who has loudly protested NHTSA's new proposal.

“American auto companies want a weak standard that will kill more Americans and produce more quadriplegics and paraplegics,” Nader said at a protest outside the Department of Transportation in May.

But probably one of the greatest catalysts for the delay is a bi-partisan letterletter written to Peters last month by Senators Mark Pryor (D-Ark.), Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) and Danielle Inouye (D-Hawaii).

“We are writing to express our concerns with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s (NHTSA’s) proposed rule on vehicle roof strength,” the senators wrote. “We also write to encourage you to extend the current deadline for issuance of the final rule and set a new date for that purpose. ... We believe that an extension is necessary to best protect the American public.”

The current rule requires that a vehicle's roof withstand 1.5 times the weight of the vehicle, slowly applied to one side of the roof by a metal plate called a “static crusher,” without caving into the cabin more than five inches.

The new rule as it was written would have upgraded that standard to a 2.5 times strength-to-weight ratio, applied to both sides of a vehicle's roof.

But the agency never gave any clear explanation as to how it came to this new standard, according to the senators' letter.

“Given the lack of data and clear explanation from the NHTSA supporting the need for this strength-to-weight ratio (SWR) standard, it is difficult to think that the selection of this number was anything more than arbitrary,” the senators wrote. “In addition to appearing to be an arbitrary choice, the minimal impact that such a test is estimated to have on saving lives is also of great concern to us. The NHTSA’s own estimates are that a 2.5 SWR standard would only save between 13 to 44 lives a year. The NHTSA does not conduct similar estimates or analysis for other SWRs, such as 2.0, 3.0, 3.5, or 4.0.”

Consumer advocates and the senators also believe the proposal should utilize dynamic tests, which they say more accurately represents the violent motion of a rollover. Industry advocates argue dynamic tests are unusable because the motions are not repeatable. Many luxury foreign manufacturers such as Volvo, Mercedes-Benz and BMW put some of their vehicles through dynamic tests.

The most controversial aspect of NHTSA's proposed rulemaking was a clause that would have preempted many consumers from filing lawsuits against automakers should they end up injured in a rollover.

“If this provision (preemption) is included in any final rule, this would constitute an unprecedented incursion upon the Constitutional rights of consumers, who will remain uncompensated for the needless deaths and injuries that occur due to the foreseeable negligence of manufacturers,” the Senators wrote in their letter.

At a June 4 hearing, Senators warned James Ports, NHTSA's Deputy Administrator, that if the agency can't write an adequate proposal that will save lives, Congress will step in and do it.

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