An official report on the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has criticised its early-warning system for automotive safety issues and its data collection processes, and has made 17 recommendations for change. The administration says it will implement all of the recommendations by June 2016.
IHS Automotive perspective | |
Significance | The Office of Inspector General has released its findings following an audit of the Office of Defect Investigation (ODI) of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), responsible for identifying and investigating potential auto safety defects. The findings include 17 recommendations for addressing inadequacies identified. |
Implications | The report is highly critical of the ODI, and will result in notable changes to the NHTSA's processes. Most issues uncovered involved inadequate data collection and processing, as well as inadequacies in statistical analysis. The report suggests these issues caused the agency to be unable to spot recall issues and act on them in a timely manner. |
Outlook | The NHTSA has committed to implementing all 17 of the inspector general’s recommendations. Whether the changes will result in an increase or decrease in the number of recalls is not clear; it will result in changes in reporting methods for some automakers and, it is hoped, improve the NHTSA’s ability to find and react to safety issues more quickly. |
The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has come under fire for the handling of its investigations from an audit by the Office of the Inspector General. The report’s critical findings are indicated by its subtitle, "Inadequate Data and Analysis Undermines NHTSA’s Efforts to Identify and Investigate Vehicle Safety Concerns". The review concludes that the NHTSA’s Office of Defect Investigation (ODI), which is responsible for investigating vehicle safety issues and requiring recalls, has processes for collecting vehicle safety data that are "insufficient to ensure complete and accurate data". The review notes that the issue is in part a result of the NHTSA’s lack of detailed guidance on what information automakers and consumers should report. As a result, "decisions regarding key aspects of early warning reporting and data are left to manufacturer’s discretion", and have resulted in inconsistent reporting across automakers.
Additionally, the report criticises the ODI’s processes for verifying that manufacturers are submitting complete and accurate early warning data. Meanwhile, the reports says consumer complaints "often lack detail, including information to correctly identify the vehicle systems involved", noting that roughly 50-75% of complaints incorrectly identify the affected parts and roughly 25% do not provide enough information to determine a safety concern exists. The report also indicates that the ODI does not follow "standard statistical practices" when analysing early-warning reporting data, impacting the office’s ability to differentiate trends and outliers, and saying that it does not thoroughly screen consumer complaints. Finally, the report says the ODI does not properly train or supervise staff; it has a training plan, the report says, which has not been implemented.
As a result of these collective issues, the report says, significant safety concerns have been overlooked. The report also notes that the ODI’s process for determining when to investigate potential safety defects is insufficient. It states, "While ODI has identified factors for deciding whether an investigation is warranted, it has not developed sufficient guidance or reached consensus on how these factors should be applied", and that "ODI’s investigation decisions lack transparency and accountability."
The report recommends 17 improvements the ODI should make in looking to address the deficiencies, many of which involve developing consistent processes and ensuring that those are followed, including supervisory reviews of ODI investigators' work and automaker submissions, as well as making it easier for consumers to report complaints accurately. The report’s recommendations are general, leaving the NHTSA the flexibility to determine how best to implement solutions.
Outlook and implications
The Office of the Inspector General's report, which was given to the NHTSA on 30 April, lists many examples of each of the identified failings. Many relate to the General Motors (GM) ignition-switch recall that prompted the audit, but several did not. According to the report's conclusion section, on 16 June the NHTSA formally responded and said it would follow all 17 recommendations and intends to have them implemented by June 2016. The full report can be downloaded at www.oig.dot.gov/library-item/32523.
The report provides a template for near-term actions the administration, which has a new boss - NHTSA administrator Mark Rosekind took over in January - can take to improve its analysis, investigation, and recall processes. This could result in more recalls, but more important is the potential for finding and addresses significant safety issues more quickly; both the Takata airbag inflator recalls and GM’s ignition-switch recall have been extremely high-profile examples of issues that might have been addressed earlier and were not. In the GM case, an external review of the automaker’s processes identified the areas in which GM failed (see United States: 6 June 2014: GM investigation into faulty switches reports no cover-up, 15 employees dismissed), and the company immediately began working on methods to improve its processes for reviewing safety issues.
Whether improved analysis leads to more recalls or not, changes to the early-warning reporting procedures will mean stricter guidelines for automaker report submissions and closer oversight of the automakers' reporting systems by NHTSA.
Rosekind will be able to use this report as fuel for effecting change in the organisation he has been tasked with improving - he has already indicated he will be more proactive in using available tools for compelling compliance. It is too early to predict what the changes will mean for the number of recalls. While the report, among other things, criticised the agency for not having properly trained initial reviewers, who needed to go through an average of 330 complaints per day and reportedly only passed about 10% on for investigation, and it will spark changes to the processes, it is not clear yet what the real impact on the recall rate will be. It will take several years to determine if these revisions are effective at catching more issues and catching them sooner.