The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration ( NHTSA , often pronounced "nit-suh") is an agency of the Executive Branch of the U.S. Government, part of the Department of Transportation. It describes its mission as “Save lives, prevent injuries, reduce vehicle-related crashes.”
As part of its activities, NHTSA is charged with writing and enforcing safety, theft-resistance, and fuel economy standards for motor vehicles, the latter under the rubric of the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) system. NHTSA also licenses vehicle manufacturers and importers, allows or blocks the import of vehicles and safety-regulated vehicle parts, administers the VIN system, develops the anthropomorphic dummies used in safety testing, as well as the test protocols themselves, and provides vehicle insurance cost information. The agency has asserted preemptive regulatory authority over Greenhouse gas emissions, but this has been disputed by such state regulatory agencies as the California Air Resources Board.
Another of NHTSA’s major activities is the creation and maintenance of the data files maintained by the National Center for Statistics and Analysis. In particular, the Fatality Analysis Reporting System, or FARS, has become a resource for traffic safety research not only in the US, but throughout the world. Research contributions using FARS by researchers from many countries appear in many non-US technical publications, and provide a significant database and knowledge bank on the subject. Even with this database, conclusive analysis of crash causes often remains difficult and controversial, with experts debating the veracity and statistical validity of results.
History
In 1940, the United States implemented automobile design legislation, concerning sealed beam headlamps, which had recently been invented and were an important safety advance at that time. This regulation, virtually unchanged for the next 40 years, set a pattern of using auto safety design legislation to freeze innovation at a point in time.
In 1958, the UN established the World Forum for Harmonization of Vehicle Regulations, which began to promulgate what would eventually become UN's Economic Commission for Europe or ECE Regulations on vehicle design, construction, and safety performance. The United States declined to join the forum or adopt its (or any other) vehicle safety regulations at that time. However, vehicles meeting the ECE safety standards were legal to import into the United States.
In 1965 and 1966, public pressure grew in the US to increase the safety of cars, culminating with the publishing of Unsafe at Any Speed , by Ralph Nader, an activist lawyer, and the National Academy of Sciences' "Accidental Death and Disability—The Neglected Disease of Modern Society".
In 1966, Congress held a series of highly publicized hearings regarding highway safety, passed legislation to make installation of seat belts mandatory, and enacted Public Law 89-563, Public Law 89-564, and Public Law 89-670 which created the U.S. Department of Transportation on October 15, 1966). This legislation created several predecessor agencies which would eventually become the NHTSA, including the National Traffic Safety Agency, the National Highway Safety Agency, and the National Highway Safety Bureau. Once the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards came into effect, vehicles meeting the ECE safety standards but not the U.S. standards were no longer legal to import into the United States.
The NHTSA was officially established in 1970 by the Highway Safety Act of 1970. In 1972, the Motor Vehicle Information and Cost Savings Act expanded NHTSA's scope to include consumer information programs.
Since this era, automobiles have become far better in protecting their occupants in vehicle impacts. The number of deaths on American highways hover around 40,000 annually, a lower death rate per mile travelled than in the 1960s.
NHTSA has conducted numerous high-profile investigations of automotive safety issues, including the Audi 5000/60 Minutes affair, the Ford Explorer rollover problem and the Toyota: Sticky accelerator pedal problem.
In the US, NHTSA has introduced a proposal to mandate Electronic Stability Control on all passenger vehicles by the 2012 model year. This technology was first brought to public attention in 1997, with the Swedish moose test.Consumers today have a far greater amount of auto safety information available, due to the efforts of NHTSA and the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.
Regulatory comparison
In the mid 1960s when the framework was established for US vehicle safety regulations, the US auto market was an oligopoly, with just three companies (GM, Ford, and Chrysler) controlling 85% of the market. At that time, the USA had safer traffic than any country in the world, whether measured by the number of traffic deaths per thousand vehicles, or the number of traffic deaths per 100 million miles.
The Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards are contained in the United States Code of Federal Regulations, Title 49, Part 571. This is commonly referred to as 49CFR571 , with any particular FMVSS appended after a period, as for example 49CFR571.301—the location of FMVSS 301. Additional Federal vehicle standards are contained elsewhere in the CFR. For instance, 49CFR564 contains the specifications and requirements for the various types of replaceable headlamp "light source" (bulb). FMVSS 209 was the first standard to become effective on March 1, 1967.
Although a system of uniform auto safety performance and equipment regulations had been in place in Europe since 1958, the US did not seek to adopt or harmonize with these ECE regulations, which have since been adopted by virtually all industrialized countries outside North America. Compared to the ECE regulations, US regulations are fundamentally different in philosophy, content, emphasis, and enforcement protocol. Vehicles conforming to the internationalized (originally European) ECE regulations are allowed or required throughout the entire rest of the world, but such vehicles are illegal in the US because they don't conform to the US regulations.
Despite the evolution of the North American auto market to include most of the world's major automakers, and the ongoing proliferation of US safety regulations, the previously-existing market oligopoly still exerts strong influence: US vehicle equipment and construction regulations are based almost entirely on SAE standards, which were written almost entirely by US automakers.
In a 2004 book, by former General Motors safety researcher Leonard Evans, government-data (FARS for US) showed other countries achieving safety performance improvements over time greater than those achieved by the US:
Research on the trends in use of heavy vehicles indicate that a significant difference between the U.S. and other countries is the relatively high prevalence of pickup trucks and SUVs in the U.S. A 2003 study by the U.S. Transportation Research Board found that SUVs and pickup trucks are significantly less safe than passenger cars, that imported-brand vehicles tend to be safer than American-brand vehicles, and that the size and weight of a vehicle has a significantly smaller effect on safety than the quality of the vehicle's engineering. Comparisons of past data with the present in the U.S. can result in distortions, since the level of large commercial truck traffic has substantially increased from the 1960s while highway capacity has not kept pace with the increase in large commercial truck traffic on U.S. highways. However, other factors exert significant influence; Canada has lower roadway death and injury rates despite a vehicle mix comparable to that of the US. Nevertheless, the widespread use of truck-based vehicles as passenger carriers is correlated with roadway deaths and injuries not only directly by dint of vehicular safety performance per se , but also indirectly through the relatively low fuel costs that facilitate the use of such vehicles in North America. Motor vehicle fatalities decline as gasoline prices increase. NHTSA has issued few regulations in the past 25 years. Most of the reduction in vehicle fatality rates during the last third of the 20th Century were gained from the initial NHTSA safety standards during 1968–1984 and subsequent voluntary changes in vehicle crashworthiness by vehicle manufacturers
Importation and safety standards
The United States blocks the importation of vehicles built to international ECE Regulations rather than the U.S. safety regulations. Because of the unavailability in America of certain vehicle models, a grey market arose in the late 1970s. This provided an alternate, legal method to acquire vehicles only sold overseas. The success of the grey market, however, ate into the business of Mercedes-Benz of North America Inc., which launched a successful congressional lobbying effort to eliminate this alternative for consumers in 1988, despite the lack of any evidence suggesting grey-market vehicles were less safe than those built to comply with U.S. regulations. As a result, it is no longer possible to import foreign vehicles into the United States as a personal import, with few exceptions—primarily Canadian cars with safety regulations substantially similar to the United States, and vehicles imported temporarily for display or research purposes. In practice the gray market involved a few thousand luxury cars annu
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