NHTSA fights accusations it failed to respond to GM safety complaints

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/16/nhtsa-gm-ignition-switch-complaints-hearing

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The government’s top auto regulator pushed back forcefully on Tuesday against the idea that lax federal oversight had contributed to fatal crashes involving General Motors vehicles, saying “when we had the information, we acted.”

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has been accused of failing to respond to thousands of consumer complaints about GM models that later were involved in fatal crashes. The transportation department fined the automaker $35m, the maximum penalty, earlier this year after GM recalled 2.6m cars with faulty ignition switches or other problems.

Senator Claire McCaskill, chairwoman of the Senate subcommittee on consumer protection, accused NHTSA at a hearing Tuesday of failing to pick up on a trend of consumer complaints about GM cars because “much like institutional problems at GM,” the regulator “operated in a siloed environment, where one division is often unaware of what may be happening in another division.” McCaskill said the lack of oversight had created “an environment that is colored with a crisis” of deadly vehicle flaws.

NHTSA deputy administrator David J Friedman sharply rejected the analogy. “There was a clear difference in what happened between NHTSA and General Motors in this situation,” Friedman said. “NHTSA was actively trying to find the ball. General Motors was actively trying to hide the ball. It wasn’t simply incompetence on their part. They had policies in place to not mention the word ‘defect,’ in order to shield information from NHTSA.”

McCaskill conceded that primary culpability lay with the carmaker, which an earlier government investigation found had committed a “failure to report a safety defect in the vehicle to the federal government in a timely manner.” The number of deaths attributed to GM’s failure to correct known vehicle flaws jumped from 13 to 19 on Monday, according to the lawyer overseeing compensation payouts, with some critics saying the number is much higher.

“I agree that GM is primarily at fault here,” McCaskill said. She has presented legislation to increase the cap on penalties for vehicle safety violations and to increase the regulator’s budget for auto safety enforcement.

At Tuesday’s hearing, Friedman rejected the results of a New York Times investigation published on Friday that said NHTSA had ignored as many as 2,000 consumer complaints about flawed GM vehicles.

“The information in that article is very misleading,” Friedman said. “What you’re talking about is an incident rate that is in the few thousandths of a percent. It was not a very large signal in comparison to the stalls that we were seeing in other cases.”

Friedman said NHTSA had conducted 42 investigations of complaints about stalling in the last decade and issued 31 recalls. “When we find the data that indicates there’s a defect or a defect trend, we have followed it,” he said.

A separate House of Representatives report published Tuesday found that NHTSA has been struggling to keep up with technological advances and other changes in the auto industry. In addition, the regulator suffers from a vacancy at the top, having lost its director in January. The Obama administration has yet to nominate a replacement.

“I would urge the White House to make filling the vacancy for the nation’s top auto and safety official a priority,” McCaskill said. “Especially as the agency evaluates its personnel and financial resource needs and continues to work to modernize in order to keep pace with an auto industry far more technologically advanced than it, NHTSA needs an administrator and a deputy administrator – not one person doing both jobs.”