NHTSA Admits Faults, Asks For $90 Million More In Funding

The NHTSA has been at the center of automotive safety recall news during the past year. In that time, the organization has come after companies like Takata and GM for their role and handling of safety recall efforts. However, the NHTSA is now admitting that they are partially to blame for poorly handling the ignition switch recall from General Motors. One of the key problems was that NHTSA employees didn’t entirely know how airbag systems worked.

According to their own report on the issue, the NHTSA has admitted that they could have understood airbag systems better when the GM ignition switch recall was underway. According to a NHTSA report, “While it is clear that NHTSA was aware of an airbag non-deployment issue, and actively sought a root cause, alternate findings presented by other sources were discounted or not fully investigated.” The report referred to understanding the connection between the ignition switch faults and airbag deployment in vehicles such as the Chevy Cobalt. The problem was that when keys were “jarred” from the ignition and vehicles were switched off prior to an accident, no airbags deployed. It’s a fault that has been part of accidents, which have killed at least 100 people.

With a past in which the organization has admitted that it lacked understanding, NHTSA is vowing to push forward and change. NHTSA Administrator Mark Rosekind said in a statement his organization would like to improve. In that statement, Rosekind “Our obligation to save lives and prevent injuries must include sober self-examination. And when we find weaknesses, we have to fix them.” While GM may have known about the GM ignition switch recall effort as early as 2002, it wasn’t till 2014 that, “NHTSA opened a Timeliness Query investigation to determine if GM failed to report this defect as required by law.”

What is NHTSA planning to do in order to improve their organization? Their plan is to ask congress for $90 million in funding in order to hire some 380 new employees. No one has been formally let go or disciplined in relation to any shortcomings at the NHTSA. The hope on the part of the consumer safety organization is that bigger is better at the organization.

The organization has admitted that they didn’t fully understand how airbag systems worked with ignition systems. Do you think that the answer for the NHTSA is going to be more funding and more employees, or should the organization come up with a better proposal than saying that bigger is better?