Motor Vehicle Safety Act of 2010: Groups discuss ways to strengthen auto safety oversight

The issues raised by the Toyota crisis have mileage. Yesterday, the U.S. Senate held the fifth hearing on auto safety on Capitol Hill since the Toyota unintended acceleration issue rose to national prominence last fall.

The hearing by the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee was to discuss the Senate's version of the Motor Vehicle Safety Act of 2010, which aims to strengthen the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration ( NHTSA) in the face of the problems highlighted by the Toyota situation, and criticisms that the agency did too little, too late to prevent the sudden acceleration problem.

Not so long ago, safety advocates were at loggerheads with automakers and sometimes the government in trying to force the industry to adopt such safety advances as air bags and crash tests. At the Wednesday hearing, Dave McCurdy, president of Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, the largest auto industry lobbying agency said, "Safety is a top concern and safety sells, and consumers are interested in safety as never before."

To be sure, the three groups still have their differences. The main one, as noted by Sen. Jay Rockefeller, the committee chairman, is one of culture. While safety advocates say the government hasn't done enough, auto industry representatives are concerned about the cost of new safety features and often want to slow down legal timetables to require new features, he said.

It was NHTSA's culture that came in for the most criticism by the safety-advocate witnesses, however. Joan Claybrook, a former NHTSA administrator who recently retired as head of safety watchdog Public Citizen, and Clarence Ditlow, executive director of the Center for Auto Safety and a Consumers Union board member, criticized the agency's culture of secrecy.

"The agency has become too isolated from consumers," said Ditlow.

Claybrook echoed the sentiment, saying, "The Agency looks at itself as being under siege, from manufacturers for every initiative it takes, from safety advocates, and from the Department of Transportation. It has 1 percent of the DOT budget and deals with 95 percent of the transportation deaths," she said. Claybrook noted that Public Citizen had sued the Agency 10 times to get it to reveal safety data.

The Motor Vehicle Safety Act of 2010 aims to address these concerns by increasing NHTSA's funding, requiring it to update its public databases and make more Agency data public. It would also give NHTSA the ability to impose larger fines on automakers for not complying and give the agency more power to declare vehicle defects "imminent public safety hazards," therefore hastening investigations.

That didn't stop automaker representatives, safety advocates, and even NHTSA administrator David Strickland from criticizing some of the bill's provisions, however. Most importantly, Strickland said that while the imminent defect provision gives NHTSA the power to inform the public of problems it deems significant, it falls short of giving NHTSA the power to initiate recalls on its own.

McCurdy and Mike Stanton, president of the Alliance of International Automobile Manufacturers, criticized the bill's requirements that automakers install Electronic Data Recorders (EDRs) in all vehicles as "too prescriptive." Instead, they said the bill should set standards for information that need to be collected and shared, and not specify the technology for doing so, McCurdy said.  

Consumers Union thinks that there is a lot of important safety data to be gathered from EDRs and that it is important to create specific requirements for the categories of data that the devices should collect.

Still, the hearing was far less contentious than the previous auto safety hearings this year.

Once the Committee finalizes and passes the bill, it will have to be voted on by the full Senate and agreed to by the House, which has its own version of the bill.

Read how Consumers Union feels the automotive safety net could be improved.

— Eric Evarts