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Deadline Nears for S.U.V. Crash Compliance
By CHRISTOPHER JENSEN
There won’t be any public celebrations, but Sept. 1 is a small and contentious landmark in automotive safety. It is the deadline for the auto industry to voluntarily make S.U.V.’s and pickups less deadly in frontal and side-impact collisions with passenger cars.
The new S.U.V. standards are meant to address the so-called “compatibility issue.” In frontal impacts with passenger cars, the high-riding frame of an S.U.V. or pickup often did not match up with the frame of the smaller car to help dissipate the energy. That meant a lot more damage could be done to the car and its occupants. Side impacts — where there is little metal to protect passengers — could be devastating.
Earlier this year the automakers told the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration that all their vehicles would be in compliance by the deadline.
But what’s intriguing is that the changes are not the result of a regulation from the N.H.T.S.A., which stepped aside and allowed a voluntary standard to be developed and adopted by the automakers and the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, an organization financed by the insurance industry.
Advocates of the voluntary program said it allowed important safety advances to be made more quickly than if N.H.T.S.A. had to follow what some consider a long, deliberative and slow regulatory process. Thanks to the voluntary program lives are already being saved, they said.
“This is a voluntary agreement and we do informal checking,” said Rae Tyson, an agency spokesman. That checking has shown general compliance, he said. He also said the agency is working on a study to see if there has been any reduction of serious injuries or fatalities in car-truck crashes.
But for some consumer advocates like Henry Jasny, the general counsel at Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, and Joan Claybrook, a former N.H.T.S.A. administrator — the question remained whether anyone is monitoring the automakers for compliance.
According to Joe Nolan, the senior vice president of the Insurance Institute, “There isn’t an official, designated arbiter of keeping tabs on this.” Out of some form of due diligence, the agency “will scan through the various submissions that are given to N.H.T.S.A.”
Mr. Jasny said his group assumed the N.H.T.S.A. was watching over the compliance program. But it is a voluntary agreement. The agency has “no compliance requirements, so they can’t enforce it,” said Mr. Jasny. “There is not much they can do about it.”
In 2003, when it seemed possible that the agency would start work on a compatibility standard, the agency was offered an alternative. A voluntary program was proposed by the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers and the I.I.H.S.
The institute liked that approach, said Mr. Nolan, because it would be much quicker than having N.H.T.S.A. come up with regulation. There was also an incentive for the automakers. “The automakers would have a hand in crafting the legislation rather than letting N.H.T.S.A. go off on their own and do their own research,” he added.
That is precisely what bothered consumer advocacy groups like Public Citizen, headed at the time by Ms. Claybrook. Her complaints ranged from the standards being devised in private meetings to worries about a lack of oversight and weak, nonbinding results. Those arguments failed to convince Dr. Jeffrey Runge, the N.H.T.S.A. administrator at the time, and the auto industry proposal was a go.
The voluntary agreement had two major components. First, cars would need to do a better job protecting heads in side-impact crashes. Second, the fronts of S.U.V.’s and trucks would be engineered to make them less likely to over-ride a car’s bumper. The changes were to be phased in, with the final deadline being Sept. 1, 2009.
The institute and automakers said there was a reason to believe the program was working. A 2005 study by the institute reported “an overall reduction of 19 percent in passenger-car driver deaths in both front-to-front and front-to-side crashes involving both S.U.V.’s and pickup trucks already designed to the agreement’s front-to-front compatibility requirements.”
But some consumer groups still argue that the agreement was an example of N.H.T.S.A. abdicating its responsibility to the detriment of motorists, and that it was unwise to allow the auto industry to operate on an honor system. And in fact, the automakers have been filing progress reports with the agency since the program started in 2003, but the amount of detail provided by automakers varies.
Mr. Jasny said it was possible the program had led to some safety improvement, but he said that, over the long run, consumers would have been safer with a more demanding and enforceable standard.
Mr. Nolan said there was no mechanism to punish an automaker for failing to comply. “It is an obvious weakness of a voluntary standard, you need at some point to get some teeth in this,” he said. But, he added, the adverse publicity of not complying could hurt.
“The idea is these guys want to be seen as doing the right thing,” he said
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