Decades passed, and so did the mechanical systems, into automotive history. The car makers began to seek the wise counsel of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration: did FMVSS 124 apply to electronic systems? Yes it did, NHTSA said.

In 1995, after seven years of issuing interpretations relating electronic systems to the mechanically-based standard, NHTSA began the process of upgrading the standard to address the needs of the modern automobile. The agency asked many questions about electronic systems failsafes and redundancies, such as “Are there other predictable points of failure of an electronic control system?”

But the Great and Powerful Car Companies did not want a new regulation. They said:  We do not need any new rules – we don’t even need the current rule. Nay, market forces and litigation pressure are sufficient to assure fail-safe performance without a federal motor vehicle safety standard.

Despite the resistance, NHTSA published a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking in July 2002, explicitly stating its applicability to new types of engines and throttle controls; and adding new test procedures to address different types of powertrain technology, including one to the measurement of engine speed under realistic powertrain load conditions on a chassis dynamometer. The agency considered this test ‘‘technology neutral.”  The new standard would not expand in scope, nor become more stringent.

But the Great and Powerful Car Companies did not like this. They fought against the agency’s attempt to establish fail-safe criteria.  Leading the charge were the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers and . . .  Toyota Motor Corporation. The proposed rule had too many problems they said, and the agency lost heart. In November 2004, NHTSA withdrew the rulemaking, saying it would do further research on issues relating to chassis dynamometer-based test procedures for accelerator controls.

More years went by, and people began to complain in great numbers that the accelerator controls in Toyota vehicles did not work right. And, lo! There were deaths and injuries “resulting from engine overspeed caused by malfunctions in the accelerator control system.” The lawsuits against Toyota began to pour into all the courts in the land. There were so many of them, that a judge had to combine them into one gigantic case, in which many lawyers would do battle. Many car buyers read the news about these problems with accelerator controls and decided that they really would rather have a Buick, or a Ford, or a Honda. Anything but a Toyota. And, the U.S. Congress took a sudden interest in the ancient accelerator regulation, and began to clamor for a law that would force NHTSA to update the standard.

And so, the wish uttered 15 years earlier by the Great and Powerful Car Companies came true. Toyota became the target of multi-district litigation, its customers fled and a new regulation was on the horizon.

The End.

Now, wasn’t that a nice story, boys and girls?

The legislation, proffered by Rep. Henry Waxman’s Energy and Commerce Committee and Sen. John Rockefeller’s Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation would require NHTSA to establish four new standards to prevent unintended acceleration and mandate system redundancy and toughen the current Event Data Recorder standard. The legislation would also establish a new Center for Vehicle Electronics and Emerging Technologies and arm the agency with bigger civil penalties and the authority to order a recall in the case of imminent threat of injury and death. It proposes to give the public more information in the Early Warning Reports – changing the presumption of disclosure from major secrecy to maximum disclosure.

Among the detractors are the usual suspects who think the proposed legislation goes way too far and those who think it is horribly inadequate. Republicans headed the too-much-legislation group. The vote at the House committee was 31-21 divided along party lines. (The Senate Committee has not yet voted on it.) In news accounts, Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas), the ranking minority member of the House Commerce and Energy Committee called it, “a very bad, bad bill. It’s certainly not good for the automotive industry in America.”

The Automotive Service Association was amassing its members to fight a proposal to add a right to repair provision in the Senate version, which would penalize manufacturers who don’t make repair and diagnostic information readily available to independent repair shops.  The ASA said the provision isn’t necessary in the wake of a 2002 voluntary agreement, brokered by the National Automotive Service Task Force, which has taken care of the problem. The task force is a joint venture among automakers, the service, equipment and tool industry to improve the sharing of repair information and customer service.  Right-to Repair supporters, such as the Tire Industry Association and the Automotive Aftermarket Industry Association say that the task force does not represent them and that the information gap remains sufficiently wide.

So far, the too-much crowd has made some progress watering down the bill by removing some of the rulemaking deadlines, adding language to some standards which would allow the Secretary of Transportation to scuttle them as “unnecessary,” and changing the wording of rulemakings designed to “prevent” unintended acceleration to “mitigate” SUA.

This will, no doubt, please the forces of not-enough, i.e., safety advocates, even less than the original bill. They complain that the proposed standards are insufficient to prevent future episodes of sudden acceleration because they do not ensure that death reports submitted to NHTSA are documented; that the public has ready access to defect information affecting their safety; that civil and criminal penalties are adequate; that NHTSA and automakers are not held to the highest level of ethical conduct.

A letter signed by former NHTSA administrator Joan Claybrook, Jacqueline S. Gillan, of Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, Clarence Ditlow of the Center for Auto Safety, Jack Gillis of Consumer Federation of America, Janette Fennell of  KidsAndCars.org and Andrew McGuire of the Trauma Foundation made 13 helpful (Read the letter here) suggestions to strengthen the bill. Among them: giving NHTSA the authority to issue criminal sanctions against intentional corporate misconduct, elimination of the conflict-of-interest at the NHTSA test site, which is actually owned by Honda; refine and expand the reporting categories for EWR data; disclose ex-parte meetings with manufacturers during defect investigations; compel NHTSA to actually issue a final rule for a new electronics standard; and specify in the legislation which elements of Event Data Recorder must be included in a new mandatory standard.

We do agree that the details matter. As for the bill being very, very bad for the auto industry, there isn’t a regulation that the OEMs haven’t characterized as very, very bad for them. Safer vehicles, however, are always good for consumers.