NHTSA Asleep at the Wheel — or NHTSA DUI

Senator Markey has written an excellent article on the tragedies of crash deaths and serious injuries that have resulted over the past decade — and the hidden dangers that all Americans have faced and continue to face.  Senator Markey wrote:

“In 2004, GM and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) had a secret meeting in which the attendees inexplicably agreed that cars that stalled on the road all by themselves was not necessarily a safety problem. Ten years later, the consequences of that meeting have been laid bare — the deaths of at least 21 people from a faulty ignition switch that caused Chevy Cobalts and Saturn Ions to turn off, causing cars to crash and preventing the deployment of airbags that could have saved lives.

NHTSA kept getting reports of fatal accidents caused by mysterious GM engine stalls — it even asked its contractors to investigate two of them in 2005 and 2006. But NHTSA did nothing with these reports, even though both of them found that the airbags did not deploy and that the engine was off at the time of the crashes.

In 2007, NHTSA asked for and received a secret document from GM related to the death of two Wisconsin teenagers. I made that document public for the first time at a May Senate hearing. It included a report by the Wisconsin State Patrol Academy that said that the ignition switch defect prevented airbags from deploying. It also found other examples of the same problem happening in other cars and identified a 2005 GM warning to dealers about the issue. That document correctly identified the safety defect, yet no action was taken by NHTSA”  See

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rep-ed-markey/asleep-at-the-wheel_b_5900530.html