When President Biden signed the huge bipartisan infrastructure invoice into regulation two years in the past this week, it began a clock for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, referred to as NHTSA, to draft plenty of new security laws, together with one prompted by a multi-year CBS News investigation.
That two-year clock expired Wednesday with no new proposed regulation to enhance the 56-year-old federal security commonplace for car seats. A CBS News investigation that started in 2015 uncovered that the 1967 energy commonplace leaves car entrance seats inclined to break down in rear-end crashes, placing youngsters within the again seat at elevated threat of harm or demise.
This week marks 13 years since 16-month-old Taylor Warner, was killed when the household minivan was rear-ended whereas at a cease signal. The pressure of the crash prompted her father Andy’s seat to break down backward, colliding with Taylor, who was strapped in her automobile seat.
“It’s disappointing that after years of hard work with CBS and so many lives lost or negatively affected NHTSA didn’t make this a priority and allowed the deadline to pass,” Taylor’s mom Liz Warner informed CBS News. “Our goal from the beginning has been to make sure this doesn’t happen to other families and their innocent children and by dragging their feet more and more people suffer.”
Two years in the past when the infrastructure invoice grew to become regulation, Andy Warner informed CBS News, “I don’t want her to die in vain.”
Safety advocates together with the Center for Auto Safety in Washington, D.C., additionally expressed frustration with the missed deadline.
“The Center is disappointed that NHTSA has been unable to meet the Congressionally mandated deadline and begin the process of improving federal safety standards to prevent deaths and injuries due to seat back collapse,” stated Center for Auto Safety government director Michael Brooks. “We encourage the agency to prioritize this rulemaking, particularly since there have been decades of neglect in safety requirements for rear seats.” The Center additionally renewed its name on automakers to enhance their seat designs in ways in which purpose to guard all of the passengers in a car.
Last week 10 Democratic senators wrote to NHTSA in search of an replace on the standing of the ten auto-safety enhancements referred to as for within the invoice, together with the seat-back laws. While praising NHTSA for its work in making an attempt to scale back traffic-related deaths, they stated, “now is not the time to turn on cruise control when it comes to road safety,” based on their letter. “After the passage of the [infrastructure bill], regulators have the green light from Congress to implement necessary, life-saving traffic safety provisions.”
Fatal motorcar crashes hit a 16-year excessive in 2021 however have ticked down barely since then, to virtually 43,000 final yr.
“When Congress passed the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, we told NHTSA that it is time to act on seat back safety,” stated Democratic Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts. “Now, the statutory deadline has passed, and lives are still at risk…I will be keeping the pressure on until families and parents know the front seats of their cars will not suddenly turn into deadly threats to their children seated behind them.”
Senators Markey and Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, led the trouble within the Senate to alter the seat energy commonplace. They are joined by Ben Ray Luján, Jack Reed, Chris Van Hollen, Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar, Dick Durbin, Ron Wyden and Sherrod Brown within the letter to NHTSA Acting Administrator Ann Carlson.
“NHTSA must stop stalling its implementation of the infrastructure law’s traffic safety wins as traffic deaths and injuries remain troublingly high. The public deserves swift action requiring rear seat alerts to prevent child hot car deaths, keyless ignition shutoff technology, strengthening seatback safety, and other key measures passed in this historic bill,” Sen. Blumenthal informed CBS News.
In an announcement to CBS News, NHTSA pointed to work it has accomplished, together with a proposed rule to require computerized emergency braking in new autos and accomplished a directive from the infrastructure invoice when it issued a brand new regulation permitting for adaptive driving-beam headlights in new autos.
“The agency is currently working to complete all Bipartisan Infrastructure Law requirements,” a NHTSA spokesperson stated in an announcement to CBS News including, NHTSA “has already made significant progress on several of those directives.”
In December 2022, NHTSA indicated it will full its required rulemaking on the brand new seat energy commonplace in “an unspecified amount of time that allows due consideration of public input,” in accordance the senators’ letter.
It seems little has modified for the reason that identical senators inquired final yr. NHTSA’s on-line dashboard exhibits the seatback regulation as being within the “Prerule Stage.”
“The only thing more important than moving quickly is getting it right,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg informed CBS News in an interview in late August. “We’ve got an amazing team at NHTSA that is working crazy hours under enormous pressure to issue a number of rules that are required by Congress. We’re going to get through that process. We’re going to do it as quickly as we responsibly can, but the No. 1 priority is to get it right.”
Calling auto security reforms the No. 1 place the place the Department of Transportation can scale back accidents and deaths, Buttigieg stated the objective was to finish the work no later than January 2025.
“We want to get every piece of this that we can done before the end of this term.”
In the course of the multi-year investigation, CBS News discovered crash check after crash check displaying what can occur when a seat collapses: the motive force is launched into the again seat, the place youngsters are sometimes seated.
Yet reporting discovered that every one the seats that failed in a lot of these rear-end collisions met or exceeded the half-century-old federal energy commonplace.
In the early 1990’s, NHTSA’s personal researchers warned the company about seatback collapses, citing examples of main or deadly accidents.
And carmakers have lengthy recognized it is a matter. During a 1996 deposition, a General Motors engineer stated the automaker began tying down its check dummies as a result of they had been “expensive” and the possibilities of shedding them “were pretty high.” Another deposition with a GM engineer revealed that the fee to repair the issue was “on the order of a dollar or so” per seat.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/nhtsa-misses-new-safety-regulation-deadline/
