Industry News: New Audit Shows NHTSA Failed To Implement A Number of Recommendations

[William Maley]

Back in 2011, the U.S. Transportation Department's Office of Inspector General (OIG) performed an audit into the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) after its handling of the Toyota unintended acceleration crisis. The OIG made ten recommendations on how NHTSA identifies and addresses safety defects such as developing a formal training program and documenting explanations as to why they have missed deadlines. Five years on, NHTSA hasn't put all of those recommendations into practice.

 

According to Reuters, the OIG released a new audit showing the agency had not implemented all of the recommendations agreed upon in 2011 to help protect drivers. Out of the ten recommendations, NHTSA has only put three into practice.

 

The audit showed that NHTSA had not implemented any sort of training for their employees to investigate possible defects.

 

"As a result, (NHTSA's defects investigation) staff may not be sufficiently trained to identify and investigate potential vehicle defects, or ensure that vehicle manufacturers take prompt and effective action," the OIG states in the audit.

 

The OIG also found NHTSA didn't document reasons as to why they delayed completing investigations in a timely fashion, along with retaining safety records.

 

NHTSA spokesman Gordon Trowbridge tells Reuters the agency agrees with the recommendations and will apply all of them by June 30th.

 

Source: Reuters, Office of Inspector General

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[G. David Felt]

WOW, Wonder who is responsible for making this happen and are they still employed or have they been fired for lack of doing their job?

 

NHTSA = Not Here To Supply Action

 

NHTSA = Nobody Home Take Salary Away

[Drew Dowdell]

I completely agree that there is something amiss at the NHTSA.  I've been tracking an issue with GM trucks for a while, but because the reports are spread over many different models, the issue appears to be minor if just looking at one model.   Basically, if you look up issues with a GMC Yukon, you may see 15 to 20 notes on it and when taken in the context of how many they built, it doesn't look like much.  But when you expand it to all of vehicles built in that generation of platform, Yukon, Yukon XL, Tahoe, Suburban, Silverado 1500, Silverado HD, Sierra 1500, Sierra HD, Avalanche, Escalade, Escalade EXT, Escalade ESV... etc etc..... then you come up with a number at least several hundred if not over 1,000.  And it's a part that all of those trucks share.  

 

However, since there doesn't appear to be a way to link similar vehicles that differ mostly in badging, there is no way to get a clear picture. I had to manually count the entries in the database. 

 

I have already contacted GM about the issue and they say they've done testing and that no recall will be pending because they do not believe there is a safety issue.  That is the extent of their comment.