_________________________________________________________________

* Consumers Union is a nonprofit membership organization chartered in 1936 under the laws of the State of New York to provide consumers with information, education and counsel about goods, services, health, and personal finance; and to initiate and cooperate with individual and group efforts to maintain and enhance the quality of life for consumers. Consumers Union's income is derived from the sale of Consumer Reports, its other publications and from nonrestrictive, noncommercial contributions, grants and fees. In addition to reports on Consumers Union's own product testing, Consumer Reports with approximately 4.4 million paid circulation, regularly carries articles on health, product safety, marketplace economics and legislative, judicial and regulatory actions which affect consumer welfare. Consumers Union's publications carry no advertising and receive no commercial support.

Mr. Chairman, distinguished members of the Committee, good morning. My name is David Pittle, and I am the Technical Director and Senior Vice-President of Consumers Union (CU), publisher of Consumer Reports. We applaud you for holding this hearing to discuss two very important consumer safety issues: 1) the recall of Bridgestone/Firestone tires on Ford light trucks and other sport utility vehicles (SUVs), and 2) NHTSA's proposed information program for comparing the emergency handling and stability of SUVs. With me are David Champion, Director of Consumers Union's 327-acre Auto Test Center in Connecticut, and Sally Greenberg, CU's Senior Product Safety Counsel here in Washington.

CU conducts comprehensive tests of more than 40 new vehicles each year and provides consumers with ratings about the performance, handling, efficiency, comfort, stability, and safety of these vehicles. CU also tests tires each year for their braking, handling, cornering, and traction characteristics on dry, wet, snow-covered, and ice-covered surfaces. We do not conduct long-term durability tests of the kind done by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Each month, an estimated seventeen million consumers read and consider our published test reports, product ratings and buying advice as they ponder their choices.

Product safety has long been an overriding concern for CU, and over the past decade, has become a top priority for the car-buying public as well. We have learned from more than six decades of conducting unbiased laboratory tests and consumer use tests that products that look alike don't always act alike. This principle certainly holds true for motor vehicles and automotive replacement parts.

To make sound buying decisions, the American consumer needs reliable, objective information about product performance and quality to help him or her make a rational choice from among competing products. To many consumers, that also means buying safe products, ones that protect their families and do not present unreasonable risks. Here, the American car-buying public must be able to rely on NHTSA to set adequate safety standards and insure that automotive products offered for sale meet those safety standards. Furthermore, if a product is found to be unsafe, it must be recalled promptly and effectively. In short, NHTSA is the only economically disinterested entity that stands between the consumer and an unsafe product. As charged by Congress, it is uniquely and singularly dedicated to protecting the public from automotive hazards often not seen, not measured, and not understood by the average consumer.

But in the end, consumers ultimately rely on Congress, first, to insure that NHTSA has the resources and the authority it needs to protect the public; second, to use its oversight power to insure that the agency is fulfilling its mandate; and third, to allow the agency to set safety regulations without being derailed because industry voices objections. Against this background, we offer the following observations and recommendations.

BRIDGESTONE/FIRESTONE RECALL

1. CU, like motorists across the country, was chagrined to learn that since 1992 there have been more than 50 lawsuits, and possibly as many as 100 lawsuits, related to the Firestone tires subject to the current recall. Many of those lawsuits were settled with protective orders in place, with the effect that critical safety information has been kept from the public. The Senate has had before it S. 957, Senator Kohl's bill, which requires courts to consider the impact on public health and safety before granting such protective orders. CU believes that when a lawsuit is settled, information affecting public safety should never be allowed to be sealed and thereby kept from the public. If NHTSA doesn't now have the power to subpoena information affecting public safety within the confines of these protective orders, Congress should correct that shortcoming in their authority. The ever-increasing extent of the Firestone recall and allegations of previous protective orders shine a bright light on the dangers of these orders to the public's health and safety. One cannot help believing that if this information had been open to NHTSA and the press, many of the tragic deaths and injuries from these tires would have been avoided.

2. Car and tire manufacturers are required to report to NHTSA within a few days of when they discover an automotive safety problem. But the law may be unclear for safety recalls that involve vehicles outside the United States. If there is ambiguity in the way the statute can be read, that ambiguity should be clarified by Congress. American consumers were understandably angered upon learning that the same vehicles they were driving, and similar tires to those they were driving on, were previously-and quietly-subject to safety recalls in other countries. We believe manufacturers must be required to share such recall information with NHTSA. Congress should either make changes to the statute or direct NHTSA to amend its regulations to insure that recalls in foreign countries are brought to NHTSA's attention.

3. Congress should take this opportunity to insure there are adequate deterrents to non-reporting of safety information by passing the Administration's legislation calling for heavier fines for failure to report. We urge the Committee to evaluate what level of fine would serve as a realistic deterrent to companies that manufacture products falling under NHTSA's jurisdiction and fail to report safety defects-recognizing that many of them are multi-billion-dollar corporations. CU believes NHTSA's legislation filed last year to increase fines for failure to report a safety defect, raising the penalty from $1,000 to $5,000 for each violation, and raising the maximum penalty from $925,000 to $4 million, is a step in the right direction. We are concerned, however, that these levels are still too low to be effective as a deterrent to non-reporting of defects.

4. There are valuable lessons to be learned from the Firestone recall, and now is the time to put those lessons to use in preventing future problems. We urge Congress to direct NHTSA to establish a far more proactive and coordinated outreach program to acquire available injury information.

a. NHTSA should reach out to repair shops to learn about problems with motor vehicles and automotive products.

b. NHTSA should better track information that comes in through its Auto Safety Hotline.

c. NHTSA's staff should vigorously track private lawsuits to determine whether there is a disproportionate number of suits filed on certain products.

d. NHTSA should improve its data collecting capabilities related to dangerous or defective products; State Farm Insurance reported that it had informed NHTSA that it had received 21 damage reports on Firestone tires. Yet, NHTSA has said in media reports that it has no record of receiving that information. NHTSA needs gather the kind of data State Farm provided in a far more systematic fashion.

e. NHTSA should upgrade the requirements of its durability testing of tires.

NHTSA PROPOSAL ON ROLLOVER INFORMATION

CU notes that the vast majority of the Firestone tire failures have occurred on the Ford Explorer, a sport utility vehicle, and that many crashes reportedly involve the vehicle rolling over after tire failure. While members of this Committee may be aware that sport utility vehicles tend to roll over at a much higher rate than passenger cars, the motoring public does not sufficiently understand the full impact of this problem. Since 1973, CU has been conducting emergency avoidance maneuver testing of all vehicles, and, since 1988, we have been running stability tests for all SUVs and other light trucks we evaluate. Both involve dynamic testing; i.e., driving a vehicle through emergency maneuvers to evaluate its performance.

In 1988, CU petitioned NHTSA to use a dynamic or driving test to set a safety standard for vehicle stability. NHTSA granted CU's petition, but gave up in 1994, stating that the resulting tests would impose significant costs to SUV design. In 1996, CU once again petitioned NHTSA, this time asking the agency to 1) develop a dynamic test to evaluate the emergency handling of SUVs, 2) require that all SUVs be put through that test, and 3) make the test results available to consumers.

NHTSA granted our petition in 1997 and thereby raised expectations that it would develop a dynamic test. CU's comments to NHTSA's proposal, submitted just two weeks ago, notes that after conducting a series of dynamic tests on just 12 vehicles, NHTSA backed away from dynamic testing, instead recommending the use of a static measure known as SSF, as the basis on which to rate vehicles. In our comments, CU said:

While we believe any information that helps educate consumers about rollover has merit, after a thorough analysis of NHTSA's proposal, we cannot, unfortunately, endorse NHTSA's decision to use only the Static Stability Factor (SSF) to measure vehicle rollover propensity

And continued:

CU believes that the value of SSF to consumers is preferable to consumers having no information at all. At the very least, it clarifies the fundamental differences among categories of vehicles. But it is not a satisfactory regulatory response to an important issue of auto safety. It is too crude a measure to reliably distinguish among models within the same class of vehicles.

We urged NHTSA to continue trying to develop a dynamic test. We have submitted a full copy of our comments to NHTSA to the Committee staff and ask that it be included in the record.

We always have concerns about Congress preventing NHTSA from taking action that the agency deems necessary to promote highway safety. Nevertheless, when Senator Shelby introduced his amendment in the Transportation Appropriations bill to delay NHTSA's action until the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) studied whether SSF is the best stability measure, with Senator Hollings joining him, we were pleased that the amendment also directed the NAS to study the benefits of dynamic testing and to include consumer representatives in the NAS study.

In summary, CU believes we are all at a crossroads, and we need a change of direction. We feel pleased that NHTSA finally has an administrator. Dr. Bailey brings fresh leadership and an impressive set of credentials to put the spirit of service to the consumer back in the agency. We are also pleased that the Committee, and in particular the chairman, has expressed a sincere interest in setting the agency back on a proper course. And no matter what you hear about public confidence in government, consumers need and deserve a strong auto safety agency that has the will to act on their behalf. They need stronger standards, more vigorous attention to injury data, and a relentless commitment to recalling defective products. Consumers Union stands ready to work with you to bring about these sorely needed changes.
 

[ Health ] [ Finance ] [ Food ] [ Product ] [ Other ]
[ About CU ] [ News ] [ Tips ]
[ Home ]


Please contact us at: http://www.consumersunion.org/contact.htm
All information ©2000 Consumers Union