|
 Young said the couple turned to each other immediately. "That's just
like that crash over in St. Croix County in 2006," they said.
The October 2006 crash of a Chevy Cobalt stayed with Young, who
spent 20 years as a specialist in accident reconstruction. The car,
driven by 17-year-old Megan Ungar-Kerns, lurched and hit a telephone
box and two trees. No airbags deployed, and her two passengers were
killed. None was wearing a seatbelt.
Young sent a report to the U.S. vehicle safety agency, the National
Highway Traffic Safety Administration, with his finding that the
ignition had been turned from "run" to the "accessory" position
prior to the crash, shutting off the car's engine and disabling the
airbags.
But NHTSA, which is responsible for keeping dangerous vehicles off
the road, did not act until after the GM recall in February of this
year, when the agency began investigating the timeliness of the
automaker's handling of the safety defects.
The agency now finds itself under intense scrutiny for failing to
spot a defect blamed for at least 12 deaths since 2005.
Consumer safety groups say NHTSA should have pressured GM to order a
recall as early as 2007. The agency's acting chief, David Friedman,
has been called to testify before a House of Representatives panel
in April looking into whether NHTSA failed to heed warning signs. A
Senate panel is also planning hearings.
FEDS SAY REPORTS "INCONCLUSIVE"
Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx, whose sprawling department
oversees NHTSA, has defended the agency, saying data about the
ignition switch from was "inconclusive".
"It just didn't point to an investigation" by NHTSA, he said,
describing the broad probe that companies fear.
That evidence included two reports completed in 2006 and 2007 by
outside investigators hired by NHTSA. The reports zeroed in, as
Young had, on the ignition problem.
Both were the results of so-called Special Crash Investigations,
which the agency initiates when it wants to take a deeper dive into
accidents and their underlying causes, to help see if a wider NHTSA
investigation is warranted.
After the 2006 Wisconsin crash, the Chevy Cobalt driven by Megan
Ungar-Kerns, now Megan Phillips, was taken to an impound lot. Former
state trooper Young met a NHTSA contractor from Indiana University
and shared his findings. "I made them aware," he said.
The team from Indiana University searched NHTSA's own database in
2006 and found at least six consumer complaints of the ignition
switch cutting off the engine. Their report included a service
bulletin GM had sent to its dealers in October 2006 alerting them to
the defective part.
"This investigation revealed that inadvertent contact with the
ignition switch or a key chain in the 2005 Chevrolet Cobalt can in
fact result in engine shut-down and loss of power," the report said.
An earlier Special Crash Investigation report, begun in 2005 and
completed in 2006 by Calspan Corp, focused on a July 2005 accident
in Maryland that killed 16-year-old Amber Marie Rose, whose airbag
failed to deploy after her Chevrolet Cobalt hit a tree at about 69
mph.
Investigators said the ignition key was in the "accessory" position.
Rose was not wearing a seat belt and was legally drunk at the time
of the accident, according to the report.
Despite the two reports by outside investigators that drew similar
conclusions, NHTSA did not move to open a formal investigation.
If NHTSA had taken that step, it might have put pressure on GM to
consider a recall, said retired NHTSA attorney Allan Kam, who has
been hired as an expert by a plaintiff's attorney in a lawsuit
against GM. Kam said it would be "a fair criticism" to say the
agency needs better internal coordination.
General Motors says it first learned about the ignition defect in
2001. The automaker says the weight of the key ring or jostling of
the key can cause the ignition to shut off suddenly, and the company
has apologized repeatedly for its slow response. It has launched an
internal probe.
NHTSA said in a statement that in both Special Crash Investigations
the results were inconclusive.
"In this case, the data available to NHTSA at the time did not
contain sufficient evidence of a possible safety defect trend that
would warrant the agency opening a formal investigation," the agency
said.
[to top of second column] |
"MORE THAN ENOUGH INFORMATION"
Transportation Secretary Foxx on Friday said "out of an abundance of
caution" he had asked the department's inspector general to review
whether NHTSA had properly investigated reports of ignition
problems.
Some consumer groups say the conclusion is clear.
"They had more than enough information," said Clarence Ditlow,
executive director of the independent Center for Auto Safety. "They
could have issued a recall as early as 2007."
The center conducted a study analyzing all fatal accidents in
2003-2007 Saturn Ions and 2005-2007 Chevy Cobalts and found that in
303 front-end collisions, the airbag did not deploy. GM called the
report "pure speculation."
With a staff of 600, NHTSA has struggled to uphold its mandate of
policing auto manufacturers over dangerous defects at a time when
advanced electronics make today's cars more complex, safety
advocates say.
"The agency is certainly understaffed and outgunned," said Sean
Kane, founder of Safety Research & Strategies Inc and a regular
expert witness for plaintiffs lawyers. Still, Kane said he found the
agency's actions in the GM case "hard to fathom" given the amount of
information available to it.
NHTSA has faced criticism before for its oversight. It came under
fire for waiting to open an investigation into blowouts of Firestone
tires in Ford Explorers until 2000, about 10 years after initial
reports of accidents. That controversy prompted Congress to pass the
TREAD Act, which ordered manufacturers to report additional
information on defects to NHTSA, much of which is not made public.
NHTSA has several databases it uses to find patterns in reports of
defects. The Early Warning Reporting system draws from information
supplied by manufacturers on deaths and injuries. The Fatal Accident
Reporting System is based on police reports. Those tools, and the
40,000 complaints NHTSA receives each year, are used by the agency
to spot a defect or enough of a pattern to warrant further
investigation.
The tools also provided the data that the Center for Auto Safety
used for some of its reports.
FLAT AIRBAGS
Even if NHTSA found the data inconclusive, others investigating
crashes were suspicious.
Tennessee state trooper Michael Marvin immediately noticed something
unusual when he was called to the scene of an accident on New Year's
Eve 2009, and he looked inside a 2006 Chevy Cobalt that had hit a
tree. Inside, he found the body of Hasaya Chansuthus, a 25-year-old
woman who was killed upon impact with no airbags to cushion the
blow.
"If you hit something head on like that — and it wasn't a really old
car — the airbags should have deployed," Marvin said.
And a mechanic who earlier this year looked at a 2006 Chevy Cobalt
owned by Walter Luba also noticed a problem. Luba, of Mount Morris,
Illinois, had the car looked at after an incident in which it
suddenly locked up, hitting a snow bank and flipping into oncoming
traffic.
He escaped and survived. His neighborhood mechanic later told him it
was a power loss to the engine that caused his wheels to lock, and
Luba has since confirmed his car was included in the recall.
For former state trooper Young, the evidence was there all along.
"I'm not here to critique their work. I'm here to do my job," Young
said of federal regulators. "When I detected something that was a
little unusual, I passed that information on, and it apparently took
them 8 or 10 years."
(Additional reporting by Ben Klayman and Paul Lienert in Detroit,
Marilyn Thompson in Washington; editing by Caren Bohan and Peter
Henderson)
[© 2014 Thomson Reuters. All rights
reserved.] Copyright 2014 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published,
broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
 |
