April 10, 2025
In the February issue of Traffic Injury Prevention, David C. Viano, its chief editor, published a doge’s dream: a road map to reroute the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) back a quarter of a century into the past (Budget cuts at NHTSA: programs to cease and areas to cut). Cut the whole budget by 60 percent! Seventy-five percent of research budget must go! Two hundred and seventy-two staffers – off with their heads!
Viano’s judgements were swift, broad, and scornful. Among them:
What a difference two years and a new administration makes. In 2023, Viano, a former GM research scientist turned engineering consultant, who publishes research and testifies on behalf of manufacturers in civil litigation, published a short editorial in Traffic Injury Prevention entitled “Government regulations have improved automotive safety.” In it, he lists many of the safety improvements wrought by government regulations: “Today, vehicles have crashworthy structures, advanced airbags, pretensioning seatbelts among other features improving crash protection. Today, vehicles are equipped with Electronic Stability Control (ESC), Automatic Emergency Braking (AEB), Anti-lock Braking Systems (ABS) among other features preventing crashes.”
But this current editorial, like some of Viano’s other research, is peppered with sloppy analyses and unsupported conclusions.
The set-up for his slash-and-burn recommendations is a comparison between road accident fatalities for 15 countries – many in the EU – from 2002 to 2021 relative to each countries’ fatalities in 1979. Without accounting for any other variables – cultural, regulatory, road and vehicle maintenance, vehicle age, driver behaviors – Viano lays the gap between the U.S.’s record and other developed countries solely at NHTSA’s feet.
Our first question is: Can Viano’s statistical foundation be relied upon?
In 2013, The Safety Record wrote about Viano’s testimony in Heco v. Johnson Controls, a case that involved a 2000 Dodge Neon driver’s seat back that collapsed during a rear impact and resulted in spinal cord injuries, rendering Dzemilia Heco, the belted 45-year-old driver, a quadriplegic. (read Situational Science ) Johnson Controls hired Viano to testify about seat safety in rear impacts. Viano claimed that the seat was not defective, based in part on statistical analyses he performed with his associate Chantal Parenteau, using a NHTSA database he uses for much of his work: the National Automotive Sampling System-Crashworthiness Data System (NASS-CDS). His arguments, along with other industry-funded experts, were based on a zero-sum game framework that claimed stiff seats compromised low-speed impact injury protection at the expense of the less frequent high-severity rear impacts – the same arguments used to delay NHTSA from moving forward with an updated seat strength standard.
The plaintiffs’ expert statistician, Norma Hubele, a professor emeritus of statistics at Arizona State University and co-author of a statistics textbook, asserted that Viano and Parenteau made numerous errors. She testified that they had used the wrong methodology; too-small sample sizes; incorrect standard error for computing their national estimates; risk rates and exposures; and used non-standard confidence intervals. At a hearing, Parenteau testified that “most” of the research she and Viano published in Traffic Injury Prevention was related to litigation. Chittenden County, Vermont, Superior Court Judge Geoffrey Crawford threw out most of Viano’s testimony.
We are inclined to do so here.
In his editorial, Viano notes that “other countries set 10-year targets, prioritized and implemented countermeasures in the infra-structure, driver behavior and vehicle technologies.” In fact, in January 2022, NHTSA published the National Roadway Safety Strategy, a layered approach to reducing traffic deaths and injuries by improving roadway design, encouraging responsible behavior and travel at safer speeds, expanding post-crash care to increase survivability and expanding the availability of advanced technologies that help to prevent crashes and minimize their impact, such as automatic emergency braking.
From there, he attacks NHTSA’s entire research program as useless and makes one point about one example: research on the Test Device for Human Occupant Restraint (THOR) dummy and BrIC (brain injury) criterion. Viano states that the $2 million THOR dummy, with 250 channels of data – much of it unanalyzed – is much more expensive than the $300K Hybrid III dummy. Beyond that, he does not explain exactly what research NHTSA has done on the THOR, its use in FMVSS performance tests, what it offers in terms of verisimilitude over the Hybrid III, or what effect it has had on safety, manufacturers or suppliers.
Just take his word for it. It’s bad.
He attempts to compare the size of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) research budget to that of NHTSA’s budget, claiming NHTSA’s budget “dwarfs” IIHS’s. He doesn’t make clear how he is arriving at what is presumably the NHTSA research budget figure, which is never actually named. It’s not even clear he is referring to NHTSA’s research budget, because he calls it “NHTSA’s budget.” He only gives the IIHS research budget figure and its percentage of some unstated or defined NHTSA budget figure.
Show your work.
Viano notes that “NHTSA has become the largest employer of doctoral level researchers in engineering, biomechanics and statistics related to automotive safety in the past 5 years. There has been an increase in funded programs at several Universities that has made NHTSA and its contractor network the dominant source of research and development (R&D) in automotive safety, surpassing the work at vehicle manufacturers and suppliers.” Nonetheless, NHTSA’s research budget should be cut by 75 percent because it is “ineffective” – by what measure?
NHTSA’s research programs produce significant safety information, which yields tangible reductions in motor vehicle deaths and injuries. For example, in July 2019, NHTSA published findings showing that, contrary to Viano’s arguments, weak seats lead to serious injuries, and there are effective countermeasures. The study, Front Seat Modeling in Rear Impact Crashes: Development of a Detailed Finite-Element Model for Seat Back Strength Requirements, using sled tests correlated to the FMVSS 301 rear impact barrier test, concluded that in rear impacts, a 40° seat back rotation should be considered a failure because of the injury-producing potential. The authors recommended that dynamic rotation of the seat back be limited to 35° to prevent injury to the seat occupant and occupants seated directly behind it. NHTSA commissioned the study, conducted by EDAG, Inc., to reexamine the feasibility of increasing seat back strength by using computer finite-element (FE) modelling. EDAG researchers used computer modelling to look at injury prevention measures to the seat back, the recliner, and the seat bottom that did not add significant weight or manufacturing costs. (You can read more about that study here: Is NHTSA Ready to Strengthen Seat Backs?)
Similarly, in 2019, IIHS published its findings on the relative performance of seat designs in high-severity rear impacts to assess whether a necessary trade-off existed in occupant injury protection in low-severity rear impacts. The study specifically addressed the industry argument that stiff seats compromised safety in more common low-speed crashes. In short, the organization found: “Better occupant-retention metrics in the high-severity test were not linked with increases in low-severity injury test metrics or real-world injury claim rates.” [Emphasis added] The IIHS study concluded the results of its study “suggest that modern seat designs are capable of maintaining a level of high-severity crash protection, as measured by seat back rotation and vertical pelvis displacement, without a necessary reduction in low-severity crash protection.”
NHTSA has also been at the forefront of Advanced Driver Assistance Systems research. Most recently, as a member of the Partnership for Analytics Research in Traffic Safety (PARTS), it participated in the technical publication A Study on Real-world Effectiveness of Model Year 2015–2023 Advanced Driver Assistance Systems. The paper, published in January, examined the real-world effectiveness of five ADAS features in passenger vehicles in reducing system-relevant crashes. PARTS was formed in 2018 as an independent, voluntary, data -haring partnership among 11 OEM automobile manufacturers and NHTSA; it is operated by the not-for-profit MITRE Corporation as an independent third party. This study “generated the most comprehensive dataset on ADAS system-relevant crashes to date. It covered 98 million vehicles from 168 models spanning model years 2015–2023 contributed by nine OEM partners that were involved in 21.2 million police-reported crashes across 16 states from 2016–2023. The study linked standardized vehicle and crash data, resulting in 7.7 million crash-involved vehicles, 2.1 million of which were relevant to the ADAS features studied. Compared to the previous effort, this study included data from three additional states, three new model years, and seventy-five more vehicle models, nearly tripling the amount of study data available. This expanded dataset enabled more detailed analyses of system attributes and crash characteristics.”
It found:
…a 49% reduction in front-to-rear crashes for vehicles equipped with AEB across all vehicle segments and model years. Further, the study measured a statistically significant improvement in the reduction of rear-end crashes, from 46% across model years 2015–2017 to 52% across model years 2021–2023, indicating that advancements in AEB over time have yielded tangible benefits. For every 1,000-pound decrease in vehicle weight, the study measured an approximate 4% reduction in front-to-rear crashes for vehicles equipped with AEB. Understanding this effect is crucial as vehicle weight increases on U.S. roads [5]. The study also measured a 9% reduction in single-vehicle frontal crashes with non-motorists for vehicles equipped with PAEB, marking the first time PARTS has quantified a statistically significant measure of PAEB effectiveness. Systems with active interventions (LDW + LKA and LDW + LKA + LCA) showed effectiveness in reducing single-vehicle road-departure crashes, although rates were low and varied with speed limit.
These insights could not have been gained without NHTSA leadership, direction, and sponsorship.
NHTSA research is the foundation of all rulemaking. No Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard – the minimum level of safety a vehicle must meet to be sold in the U.S. – can be promulgated, amended, updated or evaluated without robust study. Indeed, the ADAS study provides a strong basis for the establishment of the newly minted FMVSS 127 – Automatic Emergency Braking Systems for Light Vehicles. This new regulation requires all light passenger vehicles to be equipped with AEB systems capable of detecting lead vehicles and pedestrians by September 2029. In writing this rule, NHTSA noted that automakers’ 2016 voluntary commitment to equip vehicles with AEB systems and the addition of Forward Collision Warning and AEB into NCAP had led to about 65 percent of new vehicles meeting the lead vehicle test procedures. But, the agency said, the technology has matured, and we can do better:
However, the test speeds and performance specifications in NCAP and the voluntary commitment would not ensure that the systems perform in a way that will prevent or mitigate crashes resulting in serious injuries and fatalities. The vast majority of fatalities, injuries, and property damage crashes occur at speeds above 40 km/h (25 mph), which are above those covered by the voluntary commitment.
NCAP and, even more so, other voluntary measures are intended to supplement rather than substitute for the FMVSS, which remain NHTSA’s core way of ensuring that all motor vehicles are able to achieve an adequate level of safety performance.
At the same time, NHTSA-conducted, supported and contracted research provides a training ground for the next generation of safety engineers. The Crash Injury Research and Engineering Network (CIREN), which Viano wants to eliminate, has done great work in advancing our understanding of the injury issues associated with side air bags and passive seat belts, among many other features. These multidisciplinary teams of clinical and engineering personnel in academia, industry and government investigate injury causation in crashes by combining data collection with medical and engineering evidence. At the same time, they act as automotive safety workforce development projects.
If you want to read a much more detailed accounting of NHTSA’s impact on safety, check out Warren Hardy’s Driving Change: NHTSA’s Role in Advancing Road Safety. Hardy is the chief editor of the SAE International Journal of Transportation Safety and a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Ohio State University who conducts trauma mitigation research related to injury tolerance and mechanism. He examines U.S. motor vehicle fatality rates over time, compares them to those of other countries, and discusses the agency’s leading global role in rulemaking and research and the challenges to continuing our progress. He concludes:
NHTSA and the work it supports is as important now as ever. A robust agency is needed to promote a safer future for us all. The highly skilled workforce that NHTSA has cultivated is vital to the successful execution of research projects and the use of the data these projects generate. Funding for the projects themselves is crucial to making advances in transportation safety. These projects provide data that are used by more than just the transportation safety community. The data pertain to sports injuries, unintentional and intentional injuries of all types, and warfighter protection. The students trained under the funding provided by NHTSA are the future of transportation safety and injury reduction in general. These students are a critical component of safety today and tomorrow.
Viano is certainly not alone in his criticisms of the agency. The DOT Office of the Inspector General, the General Accounting Office, and safety advocates, including Safety Research & Strategies, have taken NHTSA to task on a wide variety of issues. In 2017, Jerry Mashaw, Yale Law School, and his partner David Harfst, a senior research scholar there and retired partner of Covington & Burling, published an evaluation of NHTSA’s history as a rulemaking body in the Yale Journal of Regulation. (Mashaw and Harfst are also authors of the 1990 book, “The Struggle for Auto Safety.”) The pair have been studying the agency since the late 1980s and have documented the agency’s evolution under pressure from legal and political forces from a strong rulemaking body to industry collaborators to survive. They concluded that since 2000, NHTSA’s rulemaking efforts have not focused on requirements for new technologies, but rather “largely required diffusion of technologies already in widespread use – technologies that may well have reached near universal deployment in the absence of the agency’s efforts…Industry had little reason to contest rules requiring technologies it was already implementing, and courts were unlikely to invalidate such measures in any event.” They further stated:
Meanwhile, innovation is advancing at a torrid pace, as the automotive, advanced electronics, and software sectors converge. These changes in NHTSA’s operational context have reinforced the agency’s rulemaking reticence and promoted a preference for statements of ‘policy,’ that the agency asserts are non-binding yet potentially enforceable by means of recalls.
There’s a consensus that NHTSA has ample room for improvement.
But safety advocates and other researchers disagree that the solution to NHTSA’s ills is to defund it.
The THOR dummy, which Viano dismisses as a government boondoggle, is indeed expensive and imperfect, but it has been providing a positive contribution to auto safety. Currently being evaluated by NHTSA and the EuroNCAP for certified use in frontal impact tests, THOR represents 11 years of research. In 2023, NHTSA published a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking to include the THOR 50th percentile adult male for use in frontal crash tests and plans to issue a separate NPRM to amend FMVSS 208 – Occupant crash protection, to specify the THOR–50M as an optional alternative for use in 208 frontal crash compliance tests. It is expensive, but it also offers improved biofidelity for women, better sensing for male and female physiology, and improved restraint interaction. There are issues with the validity of chest loading and rib fracture prediction, and they are still improving restraint interaction with the chest and pelvis, but overall, it provides a much more realistic biomechanical picture than the Hybrid III. Should we simply discard it, terminate the rulemaking, and waste our investment in building an anthropomorphic test device that better evaluates female injuries and human physiology? These are the complexities Viano simply ignores.
While we’re sure that this – whatever this is – will appeal to the idealogues currently driving their buzzsaws through the federal government with abandon, it should not be taken seriously by anyone who has an interest in automotive safety.
As Hardy writes:
The United States should be leading the world in safety and safety standards. While no organization can claim perfection for itself or its processes, unwarranted contraction of NHTSA would be misguided. It would be contrary to the guiding principles observed by the safety community. It would fly in the face of ethical practice and due diligence, putting individuals at risk and increasing the overall cost to society.
The bottom line: We are safer with NHTSA than without it.