Weak Roof Crush Rule Threatens Victims' Rights

Based in part on flawed cost-benefit analysis, a proposed rule to reduce injuries sustained when vehicles roll over and their roofs are crushed inward fails to require the level of safety available in current technology and threatens to eliminate the rights of roof crush victims to sue manufacturers. Caving in on Roof Strength During rollover crashes, vehicle occupants are forced upward into the vehicle roof, and weak roofs compound the risk by crushing inward. A crushing roof can compromise other safety features, such as side air bags and door latches, and automakers' failure to implement rollover pretensioners in seat belt technology means that seat belts can likewise fail during rollovers. Rollover crashes kill 10,000 people each year, including the 50,000 who have died since the Ford-Firestone debacle in 2000 revealed in shocking detail the dangers of rollover crashes to a horrified public. When the news media began covering the Ford-Firestone scandal (and exposed the federal government's inaction despite early warning signs of the threat), the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) began work on the first improvement in over 30 years to the standards governing roof strength. The result was unveiled in August: a proposed rule that NHTSA claims will require vehicle roofs to sustain a force of 2.5 times the vehicle weight, up from the current standard of 1.5. As Public Citizen observes, however, in comments filed last week, NHTSA proposes simultaneously changing the way vehicles would be tested for compliance with the 2.5 standard. Citing analysis from a veteran automotive engineer, the consumer safety group argues that the combination of these changes will result in effectively requiring a much more modest increase to a mere 1.64 times vehicle weight. Moreover, secret industry documents reveal that the auto industry has available to it feasible, cost-effective technology that can strengthen vehicle roofs more effectively than NHTSA's proposed standard would require, but NHTSA's proposed rule fails to mandate the use of this technology or set the standard at a level commensurate with it. Meanwhile, NHTSA refuses to release those records to the public. Crushing Victims' Rights While setting a standard lower than the automakers are capable of achieving, NHTSA simultaneously insists that compliance with the weak rule should shield auto makers from lawsuits by victims of roof crush. If reviewing courts defer to the agency's assertions about preemption, NHTSA will have shut the court house doors on severely injured victims, many of whom can be left so crippled that they will be unable to care for themselves. Eliminating victims' recourse to the courts will shift the financial burden of rollover injuries from the auto industry to the taxpayer. Crunching the Numbers One of the bases for the weak rule is a preliminary regulatory impact analysis (PRIA) that auto safety advocates argue is "riddled with errors":
  • It underestimates the benefits to be gained from stronger standards by manipulating the universe of vehicle occupants whose deaths and injuries would be averted.
  • It also underestimates benefits of stronger standards by basing its estimates on post-crash observations of vehicle conditions. In the dynamics of rollover crashes, vehicles can be so crunched that the occupants have zero (or less than zero) headroom, even as subsequent changes to the vehicle architecture from further rolls can leave a vehicle showing more headroom or less visible inward crush.
  • It overestimates the costs to the auto industry by failing to account for existing technology, such as the lightweight, high-strength material used in the Volvo XC-90, that could result in cost-effective achievement of more stringent standards.
  • Finally, it assumes away ethical and moral questions that complicate the simple comparison of costs and benefits. It translates serious injuries into the fractional equivalent of a fatality (with the most severe injuries counted as 0.7124 deaths), and then it monetizes the resulting figure with a lowball $3.5 million estimate. Additionally, it fails to account for the automakers' profits in the period when they knew about the need for stronger roofs but failed to manufacture them. "In this case," Public Citizen argued in its comments, "automakers have known for years about the costs of inaction for occupants and have instead resisted or even acted to aggravate risks."
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