Safety Research &
Strategies is an active advocate for motor vehicle safety. Our efforts to
improve public safety include special investigations, media campaigns, public
speaking engagements and submissions to National Highway Traffic Safety
Administration. We specialize in issues
that are important, but may receive less recognition from other organizations.
President and founder Sean
Kane has been personally responsible for numerous recalls, including an
historic vehicle buy-back program, involving millions of tires and vehicles.
SRS has also been involved
in:
·
Changing the
date-of-manufacture code on tires to make them easy for consumers to understand
and advocating for consumer information on the hazards of tire age degradation.
·
The effort to
preserve NHTSA’s records – an important resource that
provides historical context to complex safety issues.
·
Identifying and
advocating for change to the failed tire recall system and RFID in tires.
·
Closing
regulatory loopholes that allow manufacturers to put in fewer seatbelts than
their seats can accommodate, leaving some middle position rear occupants
without any restraint system.
·
Advocating for
public access to critical Early Warning Reporting Data.
·
Advocating for
improving NHTSA’s Roof Strength rule.
·
Identifying the
continuing hazards associated with recalled Firestone ATX and Wilderness and
the recall renotification campaign in 2006.
Below are summaries and
links to some of SRS’ advocacy work.
Defective Tire
Valve Stems
Premature
cracking and leaks in Chinese-made tire valve stems, the cause of at least one
fatal crash and many other tire failures, led Safety Research & Strategies
and Orlando attorney Richard Newsome to alert the public to the problem in June
2008. Press Release
Defective
valve stems from
Tire
Aging:
One of SRS’s recent and visible
campaigns has been devoted the examination of tire age degradation—a frequently
invisible problem—and linking the problem to real-world crashes. Mr. Kane and the SRS staff have been
advocating for regulations that include non-coded date of manufacture and tire
sell-by dates, and consumer information on this hazard. Their work has been covered extensively in the
media, presented at tire industry meetings and to government regulators. Below are links to SRS’ advocacy work on tire
aging:
June 2, 2008 NHTSA Issues Consumer
Advisory
SRS efforts lead to NHTSA
Consumer Advisory warning that aged tires, regardless of tread, are subject
to greater stress increasing the likelihood of catastrophic failure. SRS has called on the agency to issue an
advisory since 2004. “While this doesn’t
solve the tire aging problem, it is a significant step toward improving
information available to consumers” said Sean Kane, president of SRS.
As of June 2, 2008 SRS has
documented 159 incidents in which tires older than six years experienced tread
/ belt separations—most resulting in loss-of-control crashes. These incidents
were the cause of 128 fatalities and 168 injuries. We have also included an
additional 10 cases involving tires older than five years at the time of
failure (half of which were more than five-and-a-half years old at the time of
failure). These 10 incidents account for an additional 14 fatalities and 24
injuries. This list represents incidents
that SRS has identified primarily through a survey of litigation, which is one
of the only publicly available sources of these incidents.
SRS June 2, 2008
Submission to NHTSA Tire Aging Docket
SRS December 20,
2006 Submission to NHTSA Tire Aging Docket
SRS September 28, 2006 Submission to NHTSA Tire Aging Docket (Statistical analysis of the agency’s “Phoenix Tire Dataset”)
SRS May 25, 2005
Submission to NHTSA Tire Aging Docket
Ford Motor Company added a 6-year
tire replacement recommendation, regardless of tread wear, to its website and
all 2006 owner’s manuals.
DaimlerChrysler acknowledged it too will add a 6-year replacement
recommendation.
In response SRS has requested Ford,
DaimlerChrysler, and the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers support a
NHTSA-issued Consumer Advisory in order to reach a wider audience.
Tire Recalls and
Tire Safety: The RFID Solution
November 1, 2007
The current
tire recall system designed to alert and capture defective models is
ineffective and outmoded. Despite many
technological advances, consumers trying to identify a defective tire still
rely on a 38-year-old recall system that rarely averages more than a 20 percent
return rate, leaving millions of potentially deadly tires on consumers’
vehicles.
Other important tire safety issues ranging from aging
to counterfeiting can benefit from an improved identification system. Radio Frequency Identification tags offers a
solution.
NHTSA Document Destruction
In the fall of 2006 SRS learned that NHTSA Technical Information Services (TIS) Reading Room was planning to be shut down when the agency moved to a new building in 2007. The TIS library is a resource—often the only resource—for access to historical documents related to the agency’s regulatory, investigative, and policy history. SRS, with support from other research, advocacy, and library organizations pressed for preservation of this important resource and in a March 16 2007 letter received word from Chief Information Officer Margaret O’Brien that the library will stay in operation. However, in a April 2, 2006 meeting with the CIO, the agency offered no guarantee that the Reading Room would stay open and that important resources and documents would be preserved.
For more details see below:
SRS April 6, 2007 Overview of NHTSA Technical Information Reading Room
March 16, 2007: NHTSA promises to preserve library after Safety Research & Strategies spearheads efforts to prevent shutdown. NHTSA March 16, 2007 letter to SRS
SRS January
27, 2007 Letter to NHTSA Margaret O’Brien, Chief Information Officer
SRS January 5, 2007 letter to NHTSA Margaret O’Brien, Chief Information Officer
SRS
November 20, 2006 letter to NHTSA Kevin
Mahoney, Corporate Customer Services
March 27,
2007: Government
Sued for Release of Secret Safety Data
Safety Research & Strategies, Inc. commissioned
Quality Control Systems Corp. to examine the data on the continuing growth in Ford
Explorer tire-related fatal crashes long after the well-known Firestone tire
recalls. This study would examine tire-related death and injury claims
involving Ford Explorers submitted by Ford Motor Company to the National
Highway Traffic Safety Administration. These data were required by
the TREAD Act passed in October 2000 in response to
Ford Explorer-Firestone tire-related rollover deaths. While NHTSA has held that these claims data
are not confidential, the agency has refused to release the information under
FOIA. As a result, QCS has filed a Freedom of
Information Act lawsuit in federal District Court to obtain the data in
order to begin its work for Safety Research & Strategies. MORE
Firestone Tire Recall
Re-Notification Program:
In May 2006, SRS presented original research to NHTSA
showing that the efforts by Ford and Firestone to recall Wilderness AT and ATX
tires in 2000 and 2001 had failed to gather many of the spares. These tires
were original equipment on the Ford Explorer, and included a full size spare
that was stored under the vehicle. These tires were implicated in a spate of
Ford Explorer rollover crashes causing more that 200 deaths hundreds of serious
injuries. SRS was able to show that many
of the spares were not replaced in those recall campaigns and were forgotten as
the vehicles passed to new owners. Some of the tires, which had never been used,
looked new and were put into service.
Motorists who used these tires suffered catastrophic tire failures as
the tires were not only defective, but further degraded internally from age. At
least five lost their lives as the recalled spares were unknowingly put into
service.
In response to SRS’s information,
Firestone announced in July 2006 it would initiate a recall campaign seeking
spares that were missed during the original recalls.