Unfixed Recalled Vehicles Still Endangering Americans – Jeeps in this Case
July, 2014
July, 2014
July, 2014
We do have data on the percentage of all bankruptcies that are due to medical bills in America. That percentage is 60%.
There is now a play that conveys the preventable anguish that results when the tragedies of serious illnesses and injuries degenerate into medical bankruptcy. The play is Mercy Killers.
See excerpts from the following Single Payer Action announcement.
“Single Payer Action has been a proud sponsor of Michael Milligan’s one act play — Mercy Killers.
“If you haven’t seen it yet, here’s a clip about the play from when we helped bring Mercy Killers to West Virginia.
And here’s another from Real News Network about a recent Mercy Killers tour of Maryland.
Michael will be taking Mercy Killers around the country.
Here is the events schedule from the Mercy Killers web site.
Hope you get a chance to see this riveting play.
If you would like to schedule a performance in your area, you can do so through the Mercy Killers contact page.
Onward to single payer.
Russell Mokhiber
Single Payer Action”
July, 2014
Safety advocates are being forced to oppose new proposed legislation that would create another Safety Loophole.
In the current world of Congress we see the following work to make Americans less safe rather than more safe.
Please see attached letter from safety advocates to U.S. House of Representatives Committee leaders.
We see this safety loophole in the making while Americans are dying of crash injuries at a rate of nearly 100 per day and seriously injured at a rate of about another 400 per day. Why?
Einstein taught over a century ago that E = MC (Squared). Today we need another formula: Evil = Money x Corruption (Squared).
Lou
July, 2014
Colman McCarthy addressed the forthcoming Congressional Hearings and raised important questions (and generously mentioned my efforts). His article is at http://ncronline.org/news/people/safety-advocate-takes-gm-spinners
The next Hearings are scheduled for Thursday July 17. Seehttp://www.detroitnews.com/article/20140708/AUTO0103/307080079/1148/rss25
In the 1960s, Colman’s articles in the Washington Post were very powerful contributors to the removal of lead from gasoline and reducing air pollution. The removal of lead from gasoline (and the consequent reduction of lead in the blood of urban children) now is recognized as one of the major public health advances in the last century.
And it is evidence today of how America can solve its problems. One of Colman’s great books is very timely today Solutions to Violence.
This book is inspirational and conveys the message in its stories that caring reduces violence and increases peace.
With gratitude and hope for further progress,
Lou
July, 2014
NY Times reports:
Hyundai is recalling about 419,000 vehicles in the United States in three separate actions for brake, electrical and suspension problems, according to reports the automaker posted Friday on the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration website.
The largest recall covers about 225,000 Santa Fe crossovers from the 2001-6 model years. A rust problem could cause a front suspension coil to break, possibly puncturing a tire, according to the automaker’s report. The recall will be regional, covering vehicles originally sold or registered in 20 states that use a lot of road salt in the winter: Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, West Virginia, Wisconsin and the District of Columbia. Hyundai said it learned of the problem through warranty claims.
Consumer advocates have complained for years that regional recalls save automakers money, but because people can move frequently, the recalls can easily miss vehicles. Automakers and N.H.T.S.A., which allows such recalls, say the practice makes sense.
In a another rust problem involving GM brake lines, GM resisted recall and again NHTSA failed to act. In July the NY Times reported:
“Last week, Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, and Senator Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, wrote to N.H.T.S.A., saying they wanted information about the way the agency handles investigations, including defect petitions of the type filed in the G.M. brake case. The senators said they wanted to make sure such investigations “are responded to in a timely and complete manner.”
Hopefully Congressional oversight will stimulate NHTSA to do better protecting people than corporate profits. The Congress should be able to gain bipartisan support for safety because most of the States not in regional recalls are red States.
See https://www.careforcrashvictims.com/assets/Oct2013-Monthly%20Report-HealthInsurance.pdf
And in this election year, citizens, groups, and media can use free crash death mapping tools that show crash deaths over the past decade by State and by Congressional district. For example, Kentucky lost 8,666 people to crash injuries over the years 2002 – 2011. In 2011 alone, the number dying of crash injuries in KY averaged 2 people per day.
Crash death mapping tools are available at
https://www.careforcrashvictims.com/CrashDeathMappingTools.php
Lou
July, 2014
July, 2014
Today an excellent article in the NY Times sheds light on the important questions of what and when did GM and NHTSA know (and could and should have known) about defective vehicles using OnStar data?
“As General Motors overhauls its approach to safety, one powerful tool may be a technology that dates back two decades — the OnStar in-car assistance system.
Yet in the automaker’s recent flurry of recalls, with new safety problems announced in millions of cars, the automaker says none were prompted by analysis of the voluminous OnStar data it collects. And the company declined to discuss how it is using OnStar to investigate safety problems, citing competitive reasons. It would say only that OnStar is being used to notify owners of G.M. vehicles about the recent recalls, which now have reached about 29 million for the year….
At the heart of the OnStar system is a link to the vehicle’s computerized brain, which collects more than 1,000 separate measurements on virtually every aspect of the vehicle’s health. What are the fluid levels? How is the engine running? Are the air bags functioning? Did they just deploy?
Subscribers who receive OnStar’s monthly diagnostic emails see a few dozen of those measurements. G.M. itself gets them all. The company can analyze that data, looking across thousands or even millions of vehicles in search of safety problems. But G.M. remains tight-lipped about how it uses OnStar data.
“OnStar, like many other parts of G.M., will be leveraged, where applicable, as part of the larger company efforts to improve the overall quality, safety and total ownership experience related to its vehicles,” a G.M. spokeswoman, Kelly Cusinato, said in a statement.
Jack R. Nerad, senior analyst at the auto research firm Kelley Blue Book, said that some at G.M. might be worried that if OnStar data analysis became a significant way to spot safety problems, the company could face pressure to share its methods and even its technology.
“You could have people start asking, why shouldn’t everyone benefit from this?” he said….
G.M. would not comment, for instance, on how OnStar data could be used to track moving stalls — which after years of being labeled a matter of “convenience” are now considered a safety problem.
But a former OnStar employee who spoke on the condition of anonymity said that while the system might not capture data on the ignition switches specifically at issue in numerous recent recalls, other data points could, in theory, act as proxies for detecting stalls….
“If you look for the engine being off, while at the same time the car shift is in drive, then that’s one way,” he said….
While much automotive research is done in a lab, at a proving ground or with company-owned vehicles, OnStar allowed G.M. researchers to analyze how tens of thousands of real-world vehicles performed over time.
“This approach represents a new, useful approach to assessing field crash rates, potentially providing better estimates of field effectiveness than has been possible through current approaches,” the 2011 study concluded….
“We’re all a little in the dark,” said James S. Rogers, a lawyer based in Seattle who is representing clients in cases related to the G.M. ignition switch recalls. He said that consumers should be told specifically if G.M. uses their data to root out safety problems, and if so, how.
Mr. Toprak, the Cars.com analyst, said G.M. might be keeping silent about OnStar’s role in its current safety efforts to avoid public pressure.
“It might open up the discussion that G.M. knows everything, that they’re capturing all of this data, but they’re not doing anything about it,” he said.