National Highway Traffic Safety Administration
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The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA, often pronounced "nit-suh") is an agency of the Executive Branch of the U.S. Government, part of the Department of Transportation. It describes its mission as “Save lives, prevent injuries, reduce vehicle-related crashes.”[1].
One of NHTSA’s major achievements in pursuit of this mission is the data files maintained by the National Center for Statistics and Analysis. In particular, the Fatality Analysis Reporting System, or FARS, has become a resource for traffic safety research not only in the US, but throughout the world. Research contributions using FARS by researchers from many countries appear in many non-US technical publications, and provide the most solid knowledge on the subject.
The agency has an annual budget of US $815 Million (2007).
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[edit] History
In 1940, the United States implemented automobile design legislation, concerning sealed beam headlamps, which had recently been invented and were an important safety advance at that time. This regulation, virtually unchanged for the next 40 years, set a pattern of using auto safety design legislation to freeze innnovation at a point in time.
In 1958, the UN established the World Forum for Harmonization of Vehicle Regulations. The United States refused to join, but vehicles meeting these established safety standards were legal to import into the United States.
In 1965 and 1966, public pressure grew in the US to increase the safety of cars, culminating with the publishing of Ralph Nader's book Unsafe at Any Speed, and the National Academy of Sciences' "Accidental Death and Disability - The Neglected Disease of Modern Society".
In 1966, Congress held a series of highly publicized hearings regarding highway safety, and passed legislation to make installation of seat belts mandatory, and created several predecessor agencies which would eventually become the NHTSA, including the National Traffic Safety Agency, the National Highway Safety Agency, and the National Highway Safety Bureau.
The NHTSA was officially established in 1970 by the Highway Safety Act of 1970. In 1972, the Motor Vehicle Information and Cost Savings Act expanded NHTSA's scope to include consumer information programs.
Since this era, automobiles have become far better in protecting their occupants in vehicle impacts. The number of deaths on American highways hover around 40,000 annually, a lower death rate per mile travelled than in the 1960s.
NHTSA has conducted numerous high-profile investigations of automotive safety issues, including the Audi 5000/60 Minutes affair and the Ford Explorer rollover problem.
In the US, NHTSA has introduced a rule making Electronic Stability Control mandatory on all passenger vehicles by the 2012 model year. This is remarkably fast for a technology first brought to public attention in 1997, with the Swedish moose test.
Consumers today have a far greater amount of auto safety information available, due to the efforts of NHTSA and the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.
[edit] US safety performance since creation of NHTSA
In the mid 1960s, when what is now NHTSA came in being, the USA had safer traffic than any country in the world, whether measured by the number of traffic deaths per thousand vehicles, or the number of traffic deaths per 100 million miles.
In 2002, the US had sunk to 16th place (behind Australia, Austria, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Great Britain, Iceland, Japan, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, and Switzerland) in terms of deaths per thousand vehicles. In terms of deaths per 100 million miles, the USA had dropped from first place to tenth place.
Simple raw numbers of annual traffic deaths, all from readily available government data (FARS for US), show the pattern clearly using three comparison countries that are otherwise similar to the US.
| 1979 Fatalities | 2002 Fatalities | Percent Change | |
| United States | 51,093 | 42,815 | -16.2% |
| Great Britain | 6,352 | 3,431 | -46.0% |
| Canada | 5,863 | 2,936 | -49.9% |
| Australia | 3,508 | 1,715 | -51.1% |
If US fatalities had dropped by the same close to 50% amount experienced in the other countries, the US would now be suffering about 27,000 annual traffic deaths, instead of the actual 42,000. By not decreasing as has occurred in other countries, about 15,000 additional Americans are being killed on its roads annually [2].
While data leave no doubt of the enormity of the failure, the extent of NHTSA’s responsibility cannot be so easily determined. However, what is clear from decades of scientific research is that behavioral factors are vastly more important than vehicle factors. Even NHTSA’s own research established this in a classic large scale study performed in Indiana University in the mid 1970s. Based on multi-disciplinary examinations, the vehicle was identified as the primary factor in only 2% of 5,000 crashes investigated. Even for these, the vehicle factor was mainly related to poor maintenance of brakes and tires. (Detailed reports summarized in Treat JR. A study of precrash factors involved in traffic accidents. The HSRI Research Review. Ann Arbor, MI; May-August 1980.)
As much of the rest of this article so clearly attests, NHTSA’s efforts have focused largely on those vehicle factors which research shows to be of microscopic relevance. The vehicle mix, and vehicle regulations in Canada are not all that different from those in the US, yet Canada cut its traffic deaths in half while those in the US declined by only 16%; this discrepancy strongly suggests that the factors that Canada (et al.) emphasized are much more important.
Any discussion of the effect NHTSA has had on US safety must start with broad results derived from data that are not in dispute – are not controversial.
[edit] Born from Oligopoly
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In the era when NHTSA began, a commonly repeated saying in the US auto industry was "safety does not sell." From a modern perspective, this seems unusual, since auto manufacturers now prominently feature safety features and positive safety ratings in their advertising, but the automobile market in the US at this time in history had some unusual characteristics.
At the time NHTSA was established, the US auto market was an oligopoly, with just three companies controlling 85% of the market. In economics, oligopoly is a type of market failure. US manufacturers (which had innovated the automatic transmission, air conditioning, and power steering in the post-War years) suddenly realized that any innovation in safety would be unprofitable.
Some of the major car safety innovations of the 20th century, like roll cage construction, seat belts and traction control, were therefore developed abroad in response to competitive market forces in those territories.
Government agencies have only a modest record of success in the area of innovation and breakthrough design, but they are widely perceived as good at establishing minimum acceptable standards.
Faced with this situation, the normally free market capitalist Americans sought government help. Car manufacturers appeared to be dragging their feet on improving vehicle safety in the American market. Some saw parallels to the 1906 case of Upton Sinclair and meatpacking. Command and control legislation appeared to many to be a wise course of action at the time.
This move was controversial, with other Americans feeling that if a certain passenger vehicle is not safe, the consumer is perfectly free not to purchase it. They would point to Volvo, which equipped its cars with seat belts beginning in 1959, and was available to Americans. The real market failure in this view was the lack of safety information. Other than providing this information, the government has no role.
The command and control group won this argument and NHTSA reflects this view. Cars that fall outside of NHTSA regulations are actually illegal for Americans to possess.
Today the US auto market has fragmented and is far more competitive, leading to advances in car safety, technological innovation, and price competition.
[edit] Unintended consequences
Design legislation led to many unintended consequences, especially in the early days of NHTSA.
Many of these spring from the fact that Americans in the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s often preferred not to wear seat belts - yet these are one of the single most important safety devices ever created. NHTSA struggled with this fact and came up with the seatbelt interlock in 1974, that prevented the car from starting unless the occupants were belted. The interlock provoked such an uproar that it was quickly pulled from the market.
Also in 1974, NHTSA banned the Citroën SM automobile, which contemporary journalists noted was one of the safest vehicles available at the time, due to a design issue unrelated to safety (bumper standards that took effect for 1973 and were aimed ineffectually at controlling the costs resulting from collisions) and because it was not equipped with sealed-beam headlamps, which at the time were outmoded but mandatory in the US.
Joan Claybrook, then NHTSA administrator appointed by President Carter in return for a political favor, was so ignorant of automotive safety-related matters that European car manufacturers found it incredible she was in charge of traffic safety for the world's largest auto market[citation needed]. Under Claybrook, NHTSA engaged in rulemaking of dubious and/or negative benefit to safety, such as requiring auto speedometers not to display calibrations higher than 85 mph (about 140km/h), refusal to approve the better headlamps on grounds that improved headlamp performance would encourage faster night driving, and lobbying hard for airbags designed around the assumption of unbelted vehicle occupants of adult-male size and weight. Such bags are too large and powerful for belted and/or smaller vehicle occupants, who can be severely injured or even killed when such bags deploy. Claybrook's airbag advocacy was factually and scientifically baseless and designed to create a personal legacy; she described airbags as "puffing like a pillow", when in fact overly-powerful airbags designed to comply with regulations her agency wrote resulted at least 150 deaths before the safety regulations were twice rewritten to permit less aggressive multistage-deployment bags. Too, the US air bag mandate violates Federal cost-effectiveness regulations for mandatory auto safety devices {{{author}}}, {{{title}}}, [[{{{publisher}}}]], [[{{{date}}}]]..
These cost-effectiveness regulations, frequently used as justification for lax crash avoidance safety performance standards, were simply and illegally disregarded by NHTSA under Claybrook's administration. When HID headlamps appeared on the market, NHTSA made no move to require automatic beam levelling or lens cleaning equipment, citing lack of cost-effectiveness. Both of these systems are glare-control measures required with these powerful headlamps under ECE Regulations followed outside North America.
The world's first halogen headlamp bulbs, high-performance designs known as H1 and H3, were introduced in Europe in 1962 and 1964, respectively, and quickly became standard the world over, but they were not permitted in the US until 1997. Likewise, the first two-filament high/low beam halogen headlamp bulb, another high-performance design called H4, was introduced in Europe in 1971 and immediately became the world standard, but was not legalized in the US until 1992. Other lighting-related lags speciously attributed to cost-effectiveness regulations selectively obeyed by NHTSA are evident in US regulations; for example, virtually every country in the world has since at least the early 1970s required rear turn signals to emit amber light so they can immediately be discerned from adjacent red brake lamps. US regulations still permit rear turn signals to emit red light, citing the same cost-effectiveness regulations that were deliberately disregarded when airbags were mandated.
NHTSA also administers the controversial Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) program. The Wall Street Journal and others have argued that this program distorts market incentives, forcing people to buy smaller, less safe vehicles. CAFE may indeed be a driving factor behind the explosion in demand for SUVs, which are considered "light trucks" for CAFE purposes and therefore do not have to meet the stricter standards for vehicles classified as "cars." The counter argument is that politically reflecting the actual cost of oil and its externalities to the US consumer is not politically feasible.
[edit] Aerodynamics brings change to NHTSA
Automakers faced an inherent conflict between NHTSA's stringent headlight legislation, which froze U.S. headlight technology in 1940, and the Corporate Average Fuel Economy standard, which effectively mandated that automakers develop ways to improve the ability of the car to cleave the air. As a result, in the early 1980s, automakers lobbied for a modification of the mandate for fixed shape sealed-beam headlamps.
NHTSA adopted Ford's proposal for low-cost aerodynamic headlamps with polycarbonate lenses and transverse-filament bulbs.
For the 1984 model year, Ford introduced the Lincoln Mark VII, the first car since 1939 to be sold in the US market with architectural headlamps as part of its aerodynamic design. These composite headlamps, when new to the U.S. market, were commonly but improperly referred to as "Euro" headlamps, since aerodynamic headlamps were already common in Europe. Though conceptually similar to European headlamps with nonstandardized shape and replaceable-bulb construction, these headlamps conform to the SAE headlamp design standards contained in U.S. Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard 108, and not to the international safety standards used worldwide outside North America.
Consistent with allowing automobile designers appropriate levels of freedom to do their work, the minimum allowed performance and materials durability requirements of this new headlamp system were actually lower than those of the old sealed beam system.
The years since then have seen an explosion of innovation in automotive headlight technology for Americans, including lights that see around corners and high powered lighting technology.
[edit] The Grey Market
The United States has chosen to make its automobile design regulations incompatible with those of other industrialised nations, such as the European Union and Japan. Importation of vehicles not in conformity with government design legislation is a criminal offense for Americans.
Since NHTSA regulations have no provision for equivalency, and full NHTSA type approval costs approximately USD $2 million, the availability of some cars to American consumers is restricted. This particularly impacts low volume manufacturers.
Because of the unavailability of certain cars, a grey market for vehicles naturally arose in the late 1970s. This provided an alternate, legal method to acquire desirable vehicles only sold overseas, and still obtain NHTSA certification.
The success of the grey market, however, ate into the business of Mercedes-Benz of North America Inc, which launched a successful congressional lobbying effort to eliminate this alternative for consumers in 1988.
It is no longer possible to import a non-US vehicle into the United States as a personal import, with few exceptions.
In 1998, NHTSA granted vehicles over 25 years of age dispensation from the rules it administers, since these are presumed to be collector vehicles.
A car can be certified though a handful of 'Registered Importer' organizations (DOT/NHTSA compliance work) and an ICI laboratory for EPA work, bringing in a number of cars to spread the cost of type approval and destructive testing.The Smart Fortwo car is imported in this manner.
Destructive crash testing is not always needed if the vehicle can be shown to be substantially similar to a model sold in the US.
The Show or Display law allows import of vehicle[s] "of such historical or technological significance that it is in the public interest to show or display it in the United States even though it would be difficult or impossible to bring the vehicle into compliance with the Federal motor vehicle safety standards. This provision is intended to facilitate the importation of a make or model of a vehicle which its manufacturer never certified for sale in the United States." However, this provision still demands compliance with emissions standards.
Vehicle Importation Guidelines [3] List of Registered Importers [4]
[edit] See also
Fatality Analysis Reporting System
[edit] Sources
- Traffic Safety
- National Archives entry
- Washington Post article
- DOT's list of operating administrators of the NHTSA
