Personal Injury Blog

NHTSA Unable to Control Auto Safety Technology

January 22nd, 2012
Auto Safety Technology

The federal agency lacks the technical expertise to monitor electronic auto safety technologies

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration lacks the capacity to respond effectively to any problems related to the growing use of electronic auto safety technology and automobiles.  Those concerns came through in a report by the National Research Council’s Transportation Research Board.

The report came after a study conducted by the National Research Council’s Translation Research Board into electronic safety technology after the Toyota recall scandal of 2009-2010.  Toyota Motor Co. was forced to recall millions of vehicles after a number of reports of sudden and unintended acceleration in these cars.  One of those accidents resulted in the deaths of 4 people in an accident in San Diego, when the Lexus they were traveling in, accelerated to uncontrollable speeds and crashed.

Many safety experts have held that the electronic safety technologies in Toyota vehicles are responsible for the sudden and unintended acceleration-related incidents involving these vehicles.  However, the National Research Council has not confirmed this belief.  According to the report, electronic safety technology was not to blame for these incidents of unintended acceleration.

However, the National Research Council finds that the federal agency had been unable to develop the kind of technical expertise required to investigate problems with electronic safety technologies.  The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration lacks technology safety experts to investigate accidents that are blamed on malfunctioning of electronic safety technology systems.   The agency found itself floundering when it came to investigating Toyota’s unintended acceleration crashes.  In spite of receiving a number of complaints from people around the country who claimed that their Toyota vehicles were accelerating without any pressure on the gas pedal, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration failed to identify unintended acceleration as a major safety issue, and did not pressure the Japanese automaker to initiate a recall.  The agency has been criticized severely for these failures.

Now, the National Research Council says that the federal agency lacks the technical expertise to investigate incidents like these and to monitor electronic auto safety technologies which are becoming popular.  A number of automobiles now feature electronic systems like lane departure warning systems and forward collision warning systems.  Some of these technologies can interfere with each other’s functioning, causing possibly dangerous malfunctioning.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has not been able to keep pace with the development of electronic safety technology.  This does not bode well for the future, when San Diego car accident lawyers expect that the vast majority of automobiles on American roads will have these systems in place.

Posted by Robert Reeves at 2:28 pm: No comments

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