NHTSA Isn’t Moving Fast Enough to Investigate Auto Safety Defects

• The DOT’s Inspector General has conducted an audit of the way the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) analyzes safety defects in vehicles, and, well, it could be better.
• NHTSA’s Office of Defects Investigation has been updating its processes, but the new software and office organization weren’t enough to investigate more than a handful (88) of the 75,267 consumer complaints the agency received in 2019.
• The report made 12 recommendations for NHTSA to speed things up and now considers all topics “resolved but open pending implementation.” In other words, time to get to work.

Figuring out what’s wrong—potentially wrong—with a vehicle these days takes time. Too much time, according to the Department of Transportation’s Inspector General (DOTIG), which recently published an audit report on why it has been taking the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) so long to analyze safety defects.

The gist of the 40-page report is that NHTSA has made some improvements in its processes, but far more needs to be done.

Before we get into the weeds of the report, titled “NHTSA Has Not Fully Established and Applied Its Risk-Based Process for Safety Defect Analysis,” let’s remember why understanding how NHTSA conducts its investigations and recalls is important. One well-known recent case of a major safety defect was the case of the defective Takata airbag inflators, which killed 24 people and injured over 400. The DOT Inspector General wants NHTSA to speed up its information collection and analysis processes to address any similar safety defects, hoping to avoid any future situation where casualty numbers reach similar levels.

Office of Defects Investigation Not Investigating Enough Defects

For the report, the DOT specifically looked at NHTSA’s Office of Defects Investigation (ODI) because it “plays a key role by gathering and analyzing relevant information, investigating potential defects, identifying unsafe motor vehicles and items of motor vehicle equipment, and managing the recall process.” The ODI implemented new procedures in 2016 and 2020, including restructuring its office and modernizing the software it uses to store and analyze data. This was not enough to stave off a number of blistering criticisms from the DOTIG. The ODI didn’t meet timeliness goals, did not upload documents to its public website in a timely manner, doesn’t have an integrated information system for safety defect investigations and recall processes, and, finally, the ODI “does not consistently follow its procedures for issue escalation and lacks guidance for other pre-investigative efforts.”

In other words, NHTSA needs to do better.

The report provides details about these criticisms. For example, on the last point—issue escalation—the DOT found that the ODI doesn’t consistently follow procedures to determine which problems need to be prioritized and deserve an investigation. In 2019, for example, NHTSA received 75,267 consumer complaints, and 32,482 needed “further substantive review.” NHTSA issued 966 recalls that year, but the ODI only opened 88 investigations.

Automakers Moving Faster Than NHTSA

The main reason for this low number of investigations is, in part, that automakers decided to launch some recalls before the ODI pursued its own investigation. This system fits in nicely with ODI’s measurement of success, the DOTIG said, because it “count[s] the number of vehicles recalled each year, rather than by the number of potential safety defects investigated.”

The DOTIG made a dozen recommendations to speed things up safely, and NHTSA said it concurred with 10 of them. NHTSA sort of agreed with another (ways to meet timeliness goals) and did not agree with the DOT report about developing consistent rules for negotiating safety defect issues with manufacturers. Given NHTSA’s response, DOTIG said it considers “all 12 recommendations resolved but open pending implementation.”

Will any of this result in more and faster recalls? Stay tuned.

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