The Hyundai Kia theft saga greeted the new year with a bang. Among other things: deaths in crashes involving stolen vehicles, an alleged kidnapping involving a theft attempt, a new municipal lawsuit, and another bright idea from Hyundai and Kia to protect vehicles which could not be fixed with a software upgrade – that will, no doubt be executed flawlessly. In other words, everything’s still totally bonkers. And yet, NHTSA, the nation’s esteemed regulator and enforcer of automotive safety, continues to observe from the sidelines.

In the first six weeks of 2024:

There have been at least seven deaths in crashes involving stolen Hyundai and Kia vehicles with teenage drivers at the wheel. According to a story in the Indianapolis Star, on Jan. 2, a teen driver slammed into another vehicle as he fled police in a stolen Kia Sedona. The driver of the other vehicle, 34-year-old Julio Cervantes Ramirez, died at the scene. Two days later, a stolen 2013 Hyundai Accent occupied by four teens crashed in Boston, killing a 14- and 15-year-old. Six days later, a third teen died from his injuries in that rollover crash. On January 14, another 14-year-old child died when the driver crashed a stolen Kia Sportage into a private residence; two other occupants were taken to the hospital. In mid-February, Michigan saw two more deaths in separate crashes involving stolen Kia vehicles.

A woman walking her dog on the streets of Northeast Washington D.C. had to scoop up her pet and take cover to avoid being hit by the driver of a stolen Hyundai Tucson barreling down the sidewalk. A couple in Columbus Ohio were charged with kidnapping after surprising a 13-year-old boy presumably trying to break into the woman’s Kia, allegedly forcing him at gunpoint into their apartment, and demanding cash from the boy’s family to fix the damaged ignition column. In a news report, Columbus City Attorney Zach Klein cautioned residents against administering their own rough justice, but expressed some sympathy for the defendants: “I do think it is evidence and a reflection of the frustration people have. They want to be able to maintain their livelihood and they know that may not happen if their car is stolen.’”

Newark, N.J. became the latest city to direct its ire at the manufacturers, suing Hyundai/Kia in U.S. District Court. Newark is trying to recoup more than $1 million the city spent in auto theft suppression overtime hours to address a car theft surge in the first ten months of 2023. The suit alleges that the amount is “more than the yearly auto theft suppression overtime costs of 2021 and 2022 combined.”  Like other municipalities, Newark saw a huge increase in auto thefts, with Hyundai and Kia models making up a disproportionate share of the vehicles reported stolen in the first 10 months of 2023. The lawsuit alleged a more than 1000 percent increase over 2022 theft reports, with nearly twenty percent of all of Newark’s registered Hyundais and Kias reported stolen in 2023, accounting for 58 percent of all vehicles stolen in Newark. 

The City of Austin joined the chorus of frustrated municipalities, passing a resolution urging NHTSA to compel a recall of Kia and Hyundai models without engine immobilizers. The basis for the resolution is auto theft figures showing that from November 2022 to November 2023 auto thefts increased by 63 percent; Hyundai and Kia vehicles accounted for more than a third of those thefts, even though fewer than 10 percent of vehicles registered in Austin are Hyundai or Kia vehicles. Said one councilman:

“Our hope is because we have multiple cities across multiple jurisdictions that our federal government will take notice and [the NHSTA] will see the importance of taking action to demand that Kia and Hyundai immediately recall their technology.”

One can dream. NHTSA is now, and has been, a rudderless agency, with blank spots on the organizational chart for Administrator and Chief Counsel. Increasingly, it’s hard to see how an overworked agency with no leadership at the top could take the sort of decisive action needed.

In a statement to KXAN in January, the Austin news station that sought a comment from the regulator, NHTSA assured the public that everything was under control:

This particular matter involves intentional criminal conduct under the purview of law enforcement authorities. However, since 2022, NHTSA has repeatedly met with Hyundai and Kia to discuss the causes contributing to the theft vulnerability, review the scope of differing software and hardware in the affected models, and receive regular updates on the companies’ action plans. NHTSA will continue to monitor this issue, spread awareness of further updates to local authorities, and lend its expertise in efforts to strengthen motor vehicle safety.

This statement ignores the entire history and intent of safety standard FMVSS 114 Theft Protection and Rollaway Prevention, which was promulgated in 1968 to address intentional criminal conduct under the purview of law enforcement authorities. NHTSA took up the issue because “casual” car thieves presented with easy targets were stealing vehicles and creating a safety hazard on public roadways.

Nonetheless, that’s more of a response from NHTSA than Safety Research & Strategies has gotten to its petition for rulemaking. Given NHTSA’s inability to enforce the requirements or address the intent of FMVSS 114 in the wake of the continuing waves of Hyundai/Kia thefts,   SRS made a formal request nine months ago that the agency amend the regulation. We noted that NHTSA has taken no compliance action at all claiming the theft protection safety standard was actually not enforceable as the problem continues to wreak havoc for owners, municipalities, law enforcement, and – in too many instances – causing carnage for pedestrians and other motorists who are being mowed over by kids fueled by exciting videos showing how they can play Grand Theft Auto in real life.

That’s because the federal anti-theft standard doesn’t mandate the use of engine immobilizers, instead, it gives automakers the choice to use effective technology – and the compliance test procedure for NHTSA’s contract labs doesn’t specify actions that include breaking or removing parts of the vehicle in an attempt to start it and gain forward mobility to determine compliance. Instead, the test procedure describes processes that simply specify removing the key (electronic or physical) from the vehicle, followed by an attempt to start the vehicle without it. But, NHTSA’s compliance procedure, which doesn’t lay out specific theft techniques for obvious reasons, does specifically state that the agency can authorize its contractors to depart from the procedures if they are consistent with the standard. The Purpose and Application section of NHTSA’s Laboratory Test Procedure for FMVSS 114 Theft Protection and Rollaway Prevention states:

The OVSC [Office of Vehicle Safety and Compliance] test procedures include requirements that are general in scope to provide flexibility for contracted laboratories to perform compliance testing and are not intended to limit or restrain a contractor from developing or utilizing any testing techniques or equipment which will assist in procuring the required compliance test data.

And

In addition, the laboratory test procedures may be modified by the OVSC at any time without notice, and the COTR [Contracting Officer’s Technical Representative] may direct or authorize contractors to deviate from these procedures, as long as the tests are performed in a manner consistent with the standard itself and within the scope of the contract.

Back to our Petition for Rulemaking: By regulation, NHTSA is supposed to notify the petitioner within 120 days of its decision to grant or deny the petition. But, other than an acknowledgement that NHTSA received the petition, we’ve heard nothing.

Meanwhile, Hyundai and Kia’s ad hoc service campaigns continue, as do reports from owners that even after Hyundai and Kia software upgrades were done, their vehicles are still easy to steal quickly with little technical skill or special tools. The situation is unique to the U.S. It is not occurring in Canada or Europe, where immobilizers have been required since 2007 and 1998 respectively. So, elsewhere, the Korean automaker is fitting the same model vehicles with anti-theft engine immobilizers. But in the U.S., where its peers have long equipped their fleets with these effective features voluntarily, Hyundai-Kia decided it wasn’t necessary, because it could install any anti-theft measures it wanted. In America, Hyundai-Kia is an outlier – by choice – but wants its bad decisions to be viewed as if it’s all about everyone else’s actions.

In Omaha, a 2019 Hyundai Tucson was stolen the same way they are all stolen with a busted back window and a USB cord, despite receiving the software upgrade in August. According to a news report:

Chuck [Peters] purchased the Hyundai for his daughter and took it in after the August recall to install anti-theft software. The decals on the windows telling the world a starter inhibitor has been installed, the anti-theft technology would stop any attempt to steal the vehicle — but the car was stolen. The thieves left behind broken parts and an empty parking space. Police recovered the car, but when Chuck went to get some information from his daughter’s vehicle, he forgot to take the keys.

“What was really troubling for me was when we got the vehicle back, I had to go to the body shop to get some information for our insurance company. I was able to start the vehicle using the USB cable method as well, and that’s exactly what that update is supposed to fix,” he said.

In Louisville, 84-year-old Bobbie Sanders reported that her 2020 Kia Rio was stolen twice – once out the Kroger’s parking lot as she shopped, and a second time, just recently, out of her driveway. Each theft occurred after she took Rio to the dealer for a software upgrade in May and a second upgrade in October.

“We’ve done two upgrades with Kia and my mom still doesn’t have a car,” [her daughter Elizabeth] Madden said. “My mom’s out of all the monthly payments that she’s paid, the insurance that she’s paid, as well as the $1,000 loan she’s paying on that she had to pay to get her car out.”

In Milwaukee, Trisha Nguyen’s 2014 Kia Optima has been stolen three times – at least once after she had the software re-flash.

“I was initially told that the car could only start with a key ignition but that’s not the case because they broke the steering column again, and started it with a USB cord.” said Nguyen.  

In October, TMJ4 News spoke with a project manager for Kia’s Anti-Theft Program who explained how the upgrade is supposed to work.

‘This software update makes it so even if they try to plug that USB port and it’s not going to disable the ignition immobilizer, it’s going to keep that intact and it is going to sound the factory alarm,’ said Emily Falecki, Project Manager with Kia’s Anti-Theft Program.

On Friday, Falecki told TMJ4’s Ryan Jenkins by phone that part of this upgrade requires Kia owners to lock their cars with a key fob. If the vehicle isn’t locked with the key fob, the upgrade doesn’t work.”

And now, Hyundai and Kia have announced a new fix for vehicles that were ineligible for the software update: the installation of an “ignition cylinder protector with a locking bracket.” In a December 15 news release, Hyundai stated that protectors had been “independently tested and verified by a leading engineering and scientific consulting firm. It reinforces the ignition cylinder body and prevents its removal through the method of theft promoted across social media.” Kia followed with a similar announcement on December 29.

The repair procedure involves the installation of a metal shield that’s installed under the plastic steering column cover that’s easily broken and allows access to the ignition cylinder. To install the shield, the plastic steering cover is removed, then the key portion of the ignition cylinder is removed (along with the illuminated key ring if equipped). The ignition cylinder is then reinstalled after it’s coated with epoxy that permanently bonds it into the ignition assembly, and a metal protective shield is inserted over the ignition cylinder with more epoxy and further secured into place with screws that have break-away heads. Once this is complete, anti-theft decals are added to the vehicle side windows. (Vehicles with illuminated key rings will no longer have that lighting function restored.)

The Kia service procedure generally mirrors the Hyundai procedure described, but Kia specifies a different brand of epoxy (Loctite versus J-B Weld). And Kia requires the driver to sign a waiver noting that if the customer vehicle has a key illumination ring, it will be permanently removed, any future replacement of the ignition switch will require complete replacement of the ignition cylinder assembly, and that reinstallation of a new theft deterrent ignition cylinder protector that is compliant with the service program “will be at no cost to you.” The language “any reinstallation of a new Theft Deterrent Ignition Cylinder Protector will be at no cost to you” appears to indicate that in the event of a second installation there will be no cost to Kia America, because the rest of the waiver addresses the signer, (i.e., the customer) as “I.”

The repair process requires technicians to use epoxies that are extremely sticky and can be quite difficult to contain when the parts are put together, potentially causing excess epoxy to contaminate the electrical and mechanical components – an issue acknowledged by Hyundai and Kia in their technical bulletins. And all of this is happening when technicians are working under time constraints of labor allotments ranging from 15 to 40 minutes for the job, depending on the model.  

The completely permanent bonding and securement of the ignition component parts will require entire ignition switch assembly replacement in the future if the lock cylinder or other related components are damaged – either from theft, attempted theft, or other failures, including wear.

Hyundai plans to install the device in 646,000 vehicles, including the 2011-2017 Accent; 2013-2014 Elantra Coupe; and the 2011-2012 Elantra Touring, Genesis Coupe, Santa Fe and Veracruz vehicles. Kia’s service campaign included Soul, Rio, Forte, Sedona, and Sportage models from various production date ranges, so it is hard to tell exactly which model years are affected.

Hyundai’s press release indicated that starting on Dec. 20, it planned to reach out to owners about the new anti-theft service campaign via mail, email, phone, social media outreach, search engine marketing and display marketing. Both automakers directed owners to use VIN look-up tools at their dedicated websites to receive instructions on how to get the repair. We tested VINs for eligible Hyundai models this week, and Hyundai’s anti-theft customer page still provides no information. (But a call to Hyundai’s customer service with specific VINs verifies eligibility for the shield.) 

Across the country, large cities are posting high triple-digit increases in their theft rates, with thefts of inadequately protected Hyundai-Kia vehicles taking up a disproportionate share. For example, in August, Chicago sued Hyundai-Kia, alleging: “In 2022, more than 8,800 Kia and Hyundai vehicles were stolen in Chicago alone. This figure represented 41% of Chicago’s car thefts, even though Kia and Hyundai vehicles made up just 7% of the vehicles. Unfortunately, that trend has continued into 2023 and does not appear to be slowing.”

In December, the Highway Loss Data Institute (HLDI), which tracks insurance claims, released its third analysis in two years regarding theft claims of Hyundai-Kia vehicles without immobilizers. It showed a 1000-percent increase in such claims from the first half of 2020 to the first half of 2023. And the rise was far above its peers: in the first half of 2020, Hyundai Kia vehicles, like those of other manufacturers, were reported stolen at a rate of 1 per 1,000. In the first half of 2023, Hyundai-Kia theft reports had skyrocketed to 11.2 per 1,000, while the rate for other vehicles remained flat.

Uncaptured by theft figures are what seem to be significant numbers of crashes, deaths, and injuries involving stolen Hyundais and Kias. While no official entity appears to be gathering this data, these incidents crop up in the news on an alarmingly regular basis.

But, don’t worry folks, NHTSA is totally on it.

On April 27, Safety Research & Strategies petitioned the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration for rulemaking to revise the compliance test for FMVSS 114, Theft Protection and Rollaway Prevention. The request was prompted by the rising crashes, deaths and injuries linked to Hyundai/Kia vehicles with inadequate theft protection, and by NHTSA’s reluctance to take any enforcement action.

The tsunami of thefts began in 2021, when car thieves in Milwaukee learned to take advantage of a vulnerability in MY 2010-2021 Hyundai and Kia vehicles with traditional metal keys. The numbers began to jump that July when a video posted to TikTok demonstrated how to exploit the lack of meaningful theft-prevention features in Hyundai/Kia vehicles by evading the rudimentary burglar alarm, removing the plastic steering column shroud to access the ignition cylinder and with household items and no technical skill, start the engine and drive off. The how-to video quickly went viral, with mainly teenaged thieves posting their exploits under the hashtag “Kia Boys.”

At the time, The Safety Record provided its readers with the regulatory history of FMVSS 114, from the standard’s origins and intent to the changes that were meant to address the evolution of automotive technology, but have rendered the standard so ineffective, that it no longer acts as a safeguard against theft or rollaway.  

Today, SRS amended its petition with updated crash and harm numbers, to stress the importance of revising the current compliance test from one that is nearly impossible to fail, to one that reasonably assesses whether the system in place deters casual thieves. The data also support the need for an effective recall, not simply a “customer satisfaction” campaign, because it’s increasingly clear these vehicles contain a defect that represents an unreasonable risk to motor vehicle safety.      

Citing the limitations of FMVSS 114, NHTSA has continued to resist calls from state and municipal government officials to force Hyundai and Kia to recall nearly 9 million 2011 to 2022 models with inadequate theft prevention features for failing to comply with the standard.

(Korean-based manufacturers Kia Corp. and Hyundai Motor Corp. are affiliates of Hyundai Motor Group. Both companies are involved in the joint design and development of vehicles sold globally under their respective brands. Hyundai Motor Co. owns 33.88 percent of Kia Corp., making it the largest investor in the company.)  

Hyundai and Kia have instead issued customer satisfaction campaigns that include updated software for some affected models and aftermarket steering wheel locks for others, in attempt to quell the theft epidemic that’s largely been driven by kids. The new software updates the theft alarm logic to extend the alarm sound from 30 seconds to one minute, and requires the key to be in the ignition switch to turn the vehicle on. With the new software, locking the doors with the key fob sets the factory alarm and activates an “ignition kill” feature which customers have to use the key fob to unlock their vehicles to deactivate. Hyundai/Kia also offered window stickers announcing the presence of anti-theft software. Owners of vehicles ineligible for the software fix got a reimbursement for a steering wheel lock.

Previously, in vehicles equipped with a burglar alarm, the system would only prevent an engine start if the burglar alarm was activated – a major design oversight. These updates disallow an engine start when bypassing the ignition lock cylinder, and rotating the ignition switch, but they only work when the burglar alarm is armed, meaning that the doors are locked using the key fob or the key in the driver’s door. However, if the alarm was never triggered (because entry was gained via the broken window – the way many of these thieves have operated), the vehicle could still be started, and the ignition kill feature would not be activated, even though the alarm was still armed.

Perhaps this is a reason why those “fixes” have not done nearly enough to halt the utter chaos caused by the combination of a TikTok video, showing budding car thieves just how quick and easy is it to steal a Hyundai or a Kia, with a minute and a USB cable, and two automakers who eschewed immobilizers. According to the Highway Loss Data Institute, while 96 percent of automakers had immobilizers as standard equipment in MY 2015 vehicles, only 26 percent of Hyundai/Kias were so equipped.

During the last two years, the vulnerabilities of Hyundai/Kia vehicles without immobilizers have caused an astonishing number of thefts, crashes, injuries and deaths, along with other violent crimes – carjackings, homicides, and burglaries (ramming a car into a storefront to break in), to name a few, committed in a stolen Hyundai or Kia. Some of these incidents involve drivers who are too young to get a driver’s license. For example, in July 2022, two 14-year-olds in Columbus, Ohio died, and a third was injured, when they crashed a stolen Sonata into a warehouse, ejecting two occupants and trapping a third inside the vehicle. A year later in Orlando, Florida, a 15-year-old driver ran a red light at high speed, striking an SUV and killing a 23-year-old man. The stolen Santa Fe had five passengers: ages 16, 15, 14, and 13 years.

“Unfortunately, this incident – with a very young, inexperienced driver crashing a stolen Hyundai/Kia vehicle, causing deaths and injuries – has become all too common,” says Attorney Frank Melton of the Florida firm Newsome Melton, who is preparing to file a case in the Orlando incident. “The automaker has a responsibility to ensure that kids who have no technical training and aren’t even eligible for drivers licenses can’t breach the vehicle’s anti-theft features in less than two minutes – and NHTSA should use its statutory enforcement tools to hold automakers to that obligation. In the absence of either, accountability will move to the courts, as the damage continues.”

In May, a 12-year-old and 13-year-old in Hamden, Connecticut were arrested after crashing two different stolen vehicles.

The total number of crashes, injuries and deaths, is, as yet, unknown. No single entity appears to be officially tracking them; news reports are the current source. On February 14, when NHTSA announced the launch of the campaign, it linked these thefts to at least 14 reported crashes and eight fatalities. That was already an undercount. By then, the media had written about 42 crashes, 27 injuries, and 21 deaths, from June 2021, when a 16-year-old boy from Milwaukee in a stolen Kia Sportage died after a police chase and head-on crash with an SUV, which left five occupants seriously injured, to February 12, 2023, when three 13-year-old boys were arrested after allegedly stealing a Kia and crashing into another car, killing a 71-year-old man.

Since then, the news media reported another 90 such crashes, resulting in 23 more deaths (including a six-month-old boy, a four-year-old boy, and a 14-year-old driver), 99 injuries, some of which were said to be serious injuries, and one house fire. In addition, these thefts have caused structure damage and other vehicle damage, including seven police cruisers, a fire engine and a school bus, caused by, often youthful, drivers of stolen Hyundai/Kia vehicles. In total, using new stories as the sole source, from June 2021 through October 12, we identified 132 crashes, 44 deaths and 126 injuries. Again, this is likely an incomplete accounting.

The theft rates have been through the roof – in many cities disproportionately higher in the Hyundai/Kias that lack immobilizers than in any other competitors’ models. In April, California Attorney General Rob Bonta and 16 of his counterparts across the nation sent a letter to Acting NHTSA Administrator Anne Carlson asking NHTSA to compel a recall of MY 2011-2022 Hyundai and Kia vehicles without immobilizers. The letter stated:

For example, in Los Angeles, thefts of Hyundais and Kias increased by approximately 85% in 2022, and made up almost three quarters of the entire increase in stolen cars of any make and model in the city. 7 Hyundais and Kias also constituted approximately 20% of stolen cars in Los Angeles in 2022, up from 13% in 2021. Similarly, in Berkeley, California, thefts of these cars have made up 38% of vehicle thefts since the end of 2022. California cities’ data is consistent with data from other states. For instance, in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota, thefts of Hyundais and Kias increased 836% and 611%, respectively, in 2022. In Columbus, Ohio, Hyundais and Kias constituted nearly 45% of stolen cars in 2022, in Milwaukee, 58%, and in Minneapolis, 33%.

Data from a July civil complaint filed by the 17 cities in seven states against Hyundai/Kia in a California federal court, contains a city-by-city account of the precipitous and continuing rise of thefts, crashes, injuries, death and crimes associated with Hyundai/Kia thefts. For example, Madison Wisconsin reported that between 2021 and 2022, thefts of Kia vehicles rose by 124 percent; in the summer of 2022, thefts of Kia and Hyundai automobiles increased by 270 percent, accounting for more than half of the auto thefts there.

Atty. General Bonta noted that the Hyundai Kia vehicles with inadequate theft protection violated the requirements of FMVSS 114:

Specifically, FMVSS Number 114, S5.1 requires vehicles to have “a starting system which, whenever the key is removed from the starting system prevents: (a) [t]he normal activation of the vehicle’s engine or motor; and (b) [e]ither steering, or forward self-mobility, of the vehicle, or both.”

The rampant theft of Hyundai and Kia vehicles makes clear that these vehicles’ starting systems do not prevent engine activation, steering, or forward self-mobility when the key is removed from the starting system. Indeed, because the vehicles have easily bypassed ignition switches, a screwdriver and USB cable are sufficient to start and drive off with the cars in a matter of seconds or minutes—no key required. Such starting systems do not meet FMVSS Number 114’s requirements. The lack of engine immobilizers in these vehicles, which could have provided a second line of defense against theft, has compounded and exacerbated this problem.

Additionally, these Hyundai and Kia vehicles’ vulnerability to theft constitutes a defect posing an unreasonable risk to safety, providing NHTSA with an independent basis to order a recall. Even young teenagers are able to access the ignition system and drive off in these vehicles

And, just as The Safety Record pointed out right after the fix was announced, Atty General Bonta noted that a customer satisfaction program allows the automakers to bypass the notice and accountability requirements of a formal recall. The Attorneys General complained that such a program would roll out too slowly and reach too few.

In a June letter, Cem Hatipoglu, NHTSA’s acting associate director for enforcement, responded to Bonta and the other AGs, saying that NHTSA wasn’t inclined to take any action other than monitoring the situation. He wrote:

At this time, NHTSA has not determined that this issue constitutes either a safety defect or noncompliance requiring a recall under the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act, 49 U.S.C. Chapter 301. The Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard identified in your letter, FMVSS No. 114, does not require an engine immobilizer. See 49 C.F.R. § 571.114. Also, the test procedure specified in that standard does not contemplate actions taken by criminal actors to break open or remove part of the steering column and take out the ignition lock to start a vehicle. [Emphasis added.]See id. § 571.114, S6. Here, the safety risk arises from unsafe use of a motor vehicle by an unauthorized person after taking significant destructive actions to parts of the vehicle.

Hatipoglu’s assertion that the compliance test doesn’t address hotwiring is technically true, but NHTSA absolutely did consider that very reality in promulgating the standard, and in a 2004 interpretation letter from then-NHTSA Chief Counsel Jacqueline Glassman noted that in a response to an unidentified automaker requesting guidance on its engine immobilizer and the requirements of FMVSS 114. Glassman agreed that the system the automaker described would be compliant with FMVSS 114 because if an attempt was made to circumvent the ignition lock, including through “hot-wiring,” the immobilizer prevented engine starting without the key.

The current compliance test basically allows the tester to sit in the vehicle without the physical key or key fob, and try to start it. Pretty impossible to fail. Immobilizers are optional, but automakers that install them must pass specific and more rigorous test requirements, based on the standard in Canada, where immobilizers are required.

According to 49 CFR Part 552.8 .8 Notification of agency action on the petition, NHTSA was supposed to get back to us by the end of August:

After considering the technical review conducted under § 552.6, and taking into account appropriate factors, which may include, among others, allocation of agency resources, agency priorities and the likelihood of success in litigation which might arise from the order, the Administrator will grant or deny the petition. NHTSA will notify the petitioner of the decision to grant or deny the petition within 120 days after its receipt of the petition.

As vehicles become more complex, the need for strong NHTSA leadership and adequate resources becomes more urgent. And yet, the agency has long been stymied by the lack of a confirmed administrator with enough tenure to provide it. From April 2017 to May 2022, NHTSA has been run by a series of short-term acting administrators. The last administrator, Steven Cliff, was nominated by President Biden in January 2021, but not confirmed by the U.S. Senate until May 2022. He left in August 2022 for the California Air Resources Board. Biden nominated the current Acting Administrator Ann Carlson on February 13, but was forced to withdraw it in May, after Republicans opposed her green initiatives, such as rigorous fuel efficiency requirements.

It is difficult for a public health agency, with a safety mission as critical as NHTSA’s, to fulfill it while rudderless. The ongoing Hyundai-Kia debacle is but one result.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the automotive industry have long agreed that the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard for seat back strength is inadequate. And, most safety advocates argue that FMVSS 207 has nothing to do with seat performance in real world crashes.

Today, many vehicle seats are built to far exceed the demands of FMVSS 207’s 1967 static pull compliance test on an unoccupied seat, which requires that it withstand a load equal to 20 times the weight of the seat with the load applied in a forward and rearward longitudinal direction. In 2016, David C. Viano, a former General Motors scientist, now a private engineering consultant and the industry’s go-to defense expert witness, documented a steady increase in conventional seat strength and resistance to seat rotation over the past 50 years. By the 2000s, seats were significantly stronger, even though questions about their real-world performance remain.

Yet, for half a century, the battle over FMVSS 207’s effectiveness was shaped thus: Did the standard allow seat backs to collapse in rear impacts, causing serious injury to the seated occupant and any rear-seated passenger in its path, as the safety community claimed? Or did the injury data show that seat-back collapse, euphemistically dubbed “yielding” seat backs actually protect the front-seat occupant from injury, as industry maintained?

Automakers argued that “yielding seats” limited injuries in low-speed rear impacts, and that stiffer seats would result in more severe injuries – an argument based on 1950s-era seat designs with short, flexible seatbacks and ineffective head restraints. However, in real-world, higher-speed rear impacts, weak seat backs don’t yield in a controlled manner. They simply break and collapse – a result readily observed in FMVSS 301 Fuel System Integrity rear impact tests with dummies in the driver’s seat.

Industry successfully forced this false frame – much like automakers did with their claim that serious rollover injury and death was not caused by weak, collapsing roofs but by occupants “diving” into them – around the issue, effectively stymieing any solution for decades. The concept of designing a seating system that protected occupants in both low and high-speed crashes was considered a pipe dream. 

But a recent paper published by NHTSA shows that weak seats lead to serious injuries, and there are effective countermeasures. In July, NHTSA released Front Seat Modeling in Rear Impact Crashes: Development of a Detailed Finite-Element Model for Seat Back Strength Requirements, which concluded that in rear impacts, seat back dynamic rotation should be reduced to less than 35° to prevent injury to the seat occupant and occupants seated directly behind it. NHTSA commissioned the study, conducted by EDAG, Inc., to re-examine the feasibility of increasing seat back strength by using computer finite-element (FE) modelling. EDAG’s goal was to validate the FE modelling of a current vehicle front seat design that could be used with existing anthropomorphic rear-impact test dummies to study seat performance in rear impact crashes.

EDAG researchers used the 2014 Honda Accord mid-size sedan, which they had developed for other projects, to represent typical front seats. Researchers then compared their Finite Element Analysis (FEA) computer simulations to two physical tests: a more rigorous version of the FMVSS 207 test and the dynamic FMVSS 301 Fuel System Integrity high speed rear impact crash test. For the FMVSS 207 rearward seat back pull test, the researchers loaded the seat back until it collapsed, on both a manual seat and a power seat. For the FMVSS 301 test (a 55 mph moving deformable barrier with 70 percent off-set into the rear of a vehicle), researchers substituted the barrier-to-vehicle impact with a rear impact sled test, using an acceleration pulse computed from the 2014 Honda Accord model, and placed a 50^th percentile male BioRID II dummy in the front and rear seats.

EDAG used the seat back strength and dynamic motion of the front seat to determine injury potential during rear impacts, finding “significant injuries on the rear seat occupant,” in the head and the knee, both of which interacted with the front seat back as it rotated rearward. For example, in the scenario in which an unbelted occupant dummy was seated behind the driver, with seat in the full down and full rear position, the front seat rotated about 40° and hit the rear seat occupant knee. “The seat back rotation observed from this study was considered high potential to cause injuries to the rear seat occupants of all types such as children and adults.”  

These results led the researchers to conclude that a 40° seat back rotation in the FMVSS 301 sled test should be considered a failure because of the injury-producing potential, ultimately recommending that dynamic rotation of the seat back be limited to 35°.

Then, 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. The FEA found that modifications to the seat back parts or recliner mechanism were ineffective, because “most of the seat back dynamic rotation was caused by weakness of the seat bottom frame parts and seat mechanism. EDAG found that a gauge increase to 3.0 mm from 1.8 mm and grade change to high strength steel on the seat bottom frames yielded the performance meeting the targets.”

This research, in part, buttresses the findings of many independent researchers, such as Dr. Kenneth J. Saczalski, Carl E. Nash, and the engineers at ARRCA, who have long argued that excessive seat rotation is a serious safety hazard to the seat occupant, and those positioned behind a collapsing front seat.

“There are some excellent points in this paper,” says Saczalski. “And I’m really surprised that NHTSA said that we need to limit the amount of rearward rotation. It was nice to see after all of this time, because the [seat back standard] doesn’t address the safety of the occupant, and we’ve published many papers showing this. You’ve got to make the seat stronger, and reliable under the various levels of use.”

To understand a vehicle seat’s safety performance, it must be adjusted and its performance assessed at the low and high position, and with dummies representing the heaviest occupants –the 95^th percentile male, he adds. Some seats are strong, but when challenged by crash forces with certain occupants, and with the seats in certain positions, the small linkages fail and the seat back collapses.  

Dr. Teo Forcht Dagi, a neurosurgeon and expert in brain and spine injury, notes that “the move to reconsider the seat-back standard reflects an increasing appreciation for the importance of complex dynamic factors in injury causation and prevention. Design for passenger safety must contend with the fact that the mechanisms of injury change under different circumstances, at different velocities, and under changing loads. Not only is it incumbent upon automotive designers to re-examine their assumptions as additional data become available, they must rethink their designs and their standards for adequate safety performance.”

Other support can be found in a 2009 real-world crash study by researchers from the Center for Injury Research and Prevention at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, who looked at the effect of front seat back strength on the injury risk to children seated in the rear in a rear-impact crash. CHOP examined cases from 2000-2006 of 1,035 restrained child occupants under 12 years old, seated in a second-row outboard position in rear crashes, and weighted the sample to represent 10,079 children. These data came from their Partners for Child Passenger Safety Study, a collaboration with State Farm Insurance. 

The researchers analyzed the data to quantify the overall injury risk in relation to the presence of a front seat occupant and reported front seat-back deformation. Researchers found 2.3 percent of the children sustained an AIS 2+ injury; 71 percent of those crashes had a front seat occupant and 8 percent of the cases reported front seat-back deformation. For those children with reported seat-back deformation occurring directly in front of them, there was a doubling of the injury risk. The researchers, who presented the results of this survey at the 52^nd AAAM Annual conference, provided the first population-based estimates of the injury risk of rear row-seated children in rear impact crash events.

At the time of its release, Kristy Arbogast, CHOP’s  Co-Scientific Director and Director of Engineering, said  “In the automotive safety community, the debate centers around mitigating injury for front seat occupants through design of the front seat, and little focus is placed on the role of seat back design on injuries to other occupants. Using two population-based samples, this study points to at least a two-fold increase in injury risk for children seated behind yielding seat backs in rear impact crashes, after adjusting for potential confounders such as crash severity.”

Similarly, Viano’s early research into seat back strength in the 1980s included tests showing how seat back rotation injured the front seat occupant. His paper, published in 1992, documented the results of his study of the influence of seat-back angle on occupant retention in a rear impact. The paper concluded that front seat occupant retention became difficult in rear impacts once the seat back angle rotated rearward more than 45 degrees from vertical and that, at 60 degrees, occupant retention was not possible – even if a seatbelt was worn.

Rear Seat Safety Diminished as Front Seat Safety Increased

This latest paper offers another strategy for increasing rear seat safety, which has long been ignored. NHTSA, as well as seat experts, automotive injury researchers and other agencies have all acknowledged this gap in occupant protection.

In January 2017, the National Transportation Safety Board, an independent non-regulatory agency which investigates crashes and makes policy recommendations, published the results of workshop on rear-seat safety it sponsored in 2016. The report noted:

 …with the focus on advancing the safety of front seat occupants through improvements in vehicle design, regulations, and crash testing, some recent studies have indicated that the protection offered to rear seat occupants is not advancing as quickly as protection for front seat occupants. Advances in front seat design and technologies have created an environment where, for some occupants, such as older children and older adults in certain crash situations, the front seat may be safer than the rear seat. This development is in contrast to the longstanding belief that the rear seat is always the safest position for these occupants.

The workshop brought together 50 scientists, researchers, engineers, and representatives of industry to discuss short-term and long-term solutions and challenges to the many factors contributing to the trend of rear-seat injury and death, including rear seat design and low adult seat-belt usage rates in the rear.

Ten years earlier, at a May 2006 government-industry meeting sponsored by SAE, NHTSA staffer Sashi Kuppa presented an analysis of frontal (non-rollover) crashes from the FARS, NASS and State Data System databases showing that the rear seats—often touted as the safest positions in a vehicle—offer inadequate protection to their occupants. Kuppa examined rear outboard positions in 1991 and later vehicles (equipped with lap/shoulder belts) and concluded that for rear seat occupants the belt was often the source of injury. Kuppa also found that for newer cars front seats were safer for restrained adults—especially adults who were 50 years old and above—as advanced restraints were added. Other crash data analyses presented by the agency similarly concluded that rear seat belts were the major cause of injuries to rear seat occupants in frontal crashes. The results of this study showed that rear-seating positions are not receiving the same attention by manufacturers as front seats, which have had increasing scrutiny and improved regulation.  

Petition after Petition, Still No Rulemaking

Will this study move the needle on long overdue rulemaking to improve rear seat safety? The history of regulatory inaction isn’t encouraging.

Researchers have been asking NHTSA to strengthen rear seat requirements for 45 years. In 1974, Nash of the Public Interest Research Group petitioned NHTSA to upgrade FMVSS 207 by adding a dynamic rear-end impact test requirement to the standard. And, in 1998, NHTSA officially acknowledged on its website that the 207 standard was inadequate:

There have been several valid criticisms of the current Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard No. 207 which addresses seating systems. Generally it is acknowledged that the current standard requires inadequate seat strength to insure that the seat does not fail when a car is subject to a severe rear impact.

Yet, it ignored or denied subsequent requests for a more effective regulation. In 1989, Saczalski petitioned NHTSA to amend FMVSS 207 to address the problem of inadequate seat strength and seatback failure, noting that “during rear impact the seat backs are loaded by the inertia of the occupants upper body and the current seat back requirements result in collapse of the seat back which allows the occupant to slide out from under the lap belt thus rendering the restraint system ineffective.”

Saczalski requested that NHTSA specify that the testing load be both 20 times the weight of the seat back and 20 times the weight of the occupant, and that the seat back torque criteria be increased to 56,000 inch-pounds. 

 A year later, occupant restraint expert Alan Cantor, of the consulting firm ARCCA, Inc., petitioned the agency to amend FMVSS 207 to prohibit occupant “ramping” up the seat back during seat deformation. These petitions prodded NHTSA to so some research. In 1992, it launched a Seat Back Strength project to gather information, acknowledging the current standard was inadequate to ensure that the seat does not fail when a car is subject to a severe rear impact. Despite periodic announcements that improved seat strength and head restraints was an agency priority, among its priorities, it has proposed no new rulemaking.

In August 2004, Cantor filed another rulemaking petition with attorney Larry E. Coben, this time for amendments to FMVSS No. 208 Occupant Protection requesting the inclusion of rear seat belted dummies in the dynamic crash testing requirements and the adoption of European ECE Regulation 17 which requires unrestrained cargo behind rear seats in frontal crashes.   

Coben and Cantor recommended that the agency select dummies of various sizes and adopting FMVSS No. 208 injury criteria for the head, neck, chest, and femurs. They also recommended adopting a new method of assessing abdominal injury risk. Coben and Cantor argued that applying the same injury criteria to rear seat as front seat dummies in frontal crashes was warranted, and would not cause any undue expense.

In early December 2006, the agency rejected the petition as “premature,” because it was actively engaged in a research program examining rear seat occupant protection, that included analytical and sled tests, and simulations with different-sized test dummies in the rear seats to determine advanced restraint system feasibility and improved restraint geometry.  

In 2015, after nearly a decade of NHTSA apathy, Cantor and four of his colleagues at ARCCA Inc., re-petitioned NHTSA to amend FMVSS 207:

Since 1989, hardly a day passes that we are not faced with an issue related to seat failure in a rear-end crash and the resultant serious injury that such a failure causes. As automotive seating and restraint experts here at ARCCA, we have been involved in hundreds of seat back failure litigation cases, the vast majority of which have settled prior to trial. As part of our work on these cases, we have had the opportunity to review seat strength data from various auto makers, and we have been involved in the conduct of a  variety of both static and dynamic tests on the failing seats as well as on seats that can withstand the types of forces typically seen in today’s passenger vehicles that are involved in rear-end crashes. In addition, we have seen both the published and non-published research and data from many others, including most vehicle manufacturers. What is clear from all of this is that automotive seats are more than just “chairs” to allow people to comfortably drive cars or for passengers to be transported in luxury: seats are also safety devices that provide restraint and, in a rear-end crash, the seatback should afford the same kind of protection to the user that a seat belt provides in a frontal impact. 

The petition pointed out that the current test – using a static load in an empty seat – ignored the laws of physics: occupants of different weights or mass will result in different loading of the seatback under the same rear-end crash conditions. ARCCA recommended that NHTSA establish a FMVSS 207 dynamic test – using the FMVSS 301 crash test as a guide – and a New Car Assessment Program (NCAP – NHTSA’s five-star rating system that manufacturers use to tout the safety of their vehicles and that consumers use in making buying decisions) rear-impact test. Or, more simply, restore paragraph S4.1 (b) of FMVSS 209, which required the lap belt portion of the seat belt to remain on the pelvis under all crash conditions.  

In 2016, The Center for Auto Safety petitioned the agency to modify its “child seating recommendations by adding the following or similar warning language and that such language be required in Owner’s Manuals under 49 CFR § 571.208 S4.5.1(f): If Possible, Children Should Be Placed In Rear Seating Positions Behind Unoccupied Front Seats. In Rear-End Crashes, the Backs of Occupied Front Seats Are Prone To Collapse Under the Weight of Their Occupants. If This Occurs, the Seat Backs and Their Occupants Can Strike Children in Rear Seats and Cause Severe or Fatal Injuries.”

These petitions are likely to meet the fate of their predecessors, dying quietly in obscurity.

Improving Rear Seat Safety through NCAP

The one action NHTSA has been willing to consider is to add a rear impact test to the NCAP, and let the universe of scarce stars scare the manufacturers into either improving their seat designs, or risking their markets. April 2013, the agency published a request for comments on possible changes to the New Car Assessment Program, and noted the need to improve rear seat safety.

In recent years, improvements that have been made to the front seat crash environment have significantly decreased the risk of injuries and fatalities for front seat occupants involved in frontal crashes. While exposure and injury rates for rear seat occupants overall are still relatively low, there is an emerging need to further understand the rear seat environment in recent model year vehicles, particularly in consideration of lighter and more compact vehicle designs. Comments are requested on the availability of any data that illustrate whether safety benefits can be realized through encouraging additional safety improvements and/or technologies including rear seat belt reminders targeted at protecting the rear seat environment.

The agency held out the possibility of dynamically testing rear seats and seat belts in the NCAP frontal crash tests, with a 5th percentile adult female Hybrid III dummy in the rear seat behind the ATD in the driver’s seat. The notice attracted nearly 60 commenters, many of whom generally supported the idea of enhancing safety for rear seat occupants and for additional NCAP tests with the 5^th percentile ADT in the rear, but disagreed over the test parameters.

The agency, however, did not move forward with rear seat dynamic tests. Instead, it announced in January 2015, it planned to include NCAP ratings pertaining to automatic emergency braking systems.

In May 2016, the trade press, from Automotive News to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety’s Status Report, reported that NHTSA planned to add a new oblique frontal crash test, simulating two mid-sized vehicles crashing at 56 mph, with a 50-percent overlap to measure how well vehicles protect people in an angled frontal crash. The test, using a stationary vehicle and a moving barrier, would feature a THOR 50th percentile male dummy in the driver seat and the modified Hybrid III 5th percentile female dummy in the right rear. The agency planned to implement this new test in time for the 2019 model year. And the impetus for this change was not to protect children, who have heretofore been frequent rear seat passengers, and vulnerable to injuries and deaths, but to protect adult passengers using ride-hailing services, such as Uber and Lyft.

This apparently did not happen, because in 2018, the agency published a notice of yet another  public meeting to gather input from stakeholders to discuss New Car Assessment Program. The October 2018 meeting, in part, “focused on crashworthiness strategies” for NCAP, including “rear seat occupant protection.” Last month, The Safety Record Blog, with no real confidence that the agency would be able to manage a “Yes” or “No” answer, asked if NHTSA ever made good on its 2016 promise. After nine days of e-mail exchanges, a NHTSA spokesman sent us a link to a press release announcing that NHTSA would publish another notice sometime in 2020, unveiling its proposed changes to the NCAP. Would these changes include a rear seat dummy in a frontal oblique crash test? Final word from the public information specialist: “The agency will determine the upgrades for the NCAP test after its careful review of the comments and feedback submitted to the 2020 Federal Register notice.” Well, that clears everything up.  

Despite this sad, long history of agency inaction, Saczalski is happy to see the agency publish a paper acknowledging the problem of weak seat backs and using Finite Element Analysis, a valuable engineering design tool, to build a better seat.

“This the paper is very good with FEA, you can find the most appropriate design, go to prototype part and run the tests. Then you know how to tweak the system. But this process has been so slow and the children who have died over all these years because of it – it’s a significant number.”

In July, the California Utilities Commission granted Waymo (formerly the Google self-driving car project) the state’s first permit to test its driverless vehicles without safety drivers on public roadways. And, by the end of this year, the company planned to launch a driverless taxi service in Phoenix. Ford has promised the public a “fully autonomous vehicle in commercial operation” by 2021. Tesla, which has led the bumpy path on semi-autonomous vehicles, has forecasted the introduction of as many as a million Tesla “robo taxis” on the road by the end of this year.

The generally accepted wisdom that driverless cars are the future and the future is now, has presaged an influx of investor dollars and ambitious plans to level up the fleet of vehicles with no driver controls. The optimism has been as unfettered as the regulatory landscape – which is to say that this Wild West has no sheriff.

In 2016, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration announced that its approach to this technological transition would be the light hand of guidance, and issued a list of vague conceptual statements. Last October, the Department of Transportation released its third iteration, Preparing for the Future of Transportation: Automated Vehicles 3.0. This brightly-colored, substance-free piece of public relations affirms NHTSA’s Orwellian view that although it has the authority to regulate automated driving systems, it shouldn’t. Check out some examples of NHTSA Newspeak in AV 3.0:

“The right approach to achieving safety improvements begins with a focus on removing unnecessary barriers and issuing voluntary guidance, rather than regulations that could stifle innovation.” (Fewer regulations equal more safety.)

“ADS developers are encouraged to use these safety elements to publish safety self-assessments to describe to the public how they are identifying and addressing potential safety issues.” (Industry-promulgated transparency is truth.)

“Delaying or unduly hampering automated vehicle testing until all specific risks have been identified and eliminated means delaying the realization of global reductions in risk.” (You must put yourself at risk to reduce risk.)

Indeed, the document is remarkable for its lack of attention to the most basic mandatory protections for the motoring public.

This summer, the agency sought comments for a rulemaking to exempt driverless vehicles that lack traditional human-machine interfaces, such as steering wheels or brakes from the crash avoidance (100 series) of Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards which regulate those components. Specifically, NHTSA was seeking public comment on the near- and long-term challenges of testing and verifying the compliance of automated driving systems (ADS).

The Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking grew out of requests by Google and GM to reconcile safety standards written for traditional motor vehicles with driverless vehicles (DV). On February 4, 2016, NHTSA responded to several Google’s concerns about how it could certify a vehicle that does not include manual controls, such as a steering wheel, accelerator pedal, or brake pedal. The response also provided tables listing those standards that NHTSA could interpret Google’s ADS as the “driver” or “operator,” and a table listing those standards that NHTSA could interpret the human occupant seated in the left front designated seating position as the ‘‘driver.’’ The agency interpreted the term “driver” as applying to the ADS.

In January 2018, GM filed a petition seeking an exemption so it could run 2,500 Zero Emissions Automated Vehicles on some undisclosed roads, and still meet FMVSSs, despite having no driver or driver controls. GM categorized the FMVSSs as those designed to interface with a human driver, such as manual controls; those that provide human drivers with information, such a telltales and indicator lamps; and features to protect human occupants, such as air bags, and argued that “its ADS–DVs without traditional manual controls require only the third category of requirements.”

Based on the issues Google and GM raised, the agency noted in the ANPRM that it was considering four different regulatory approaches: keep an FMVSS if the control was necessary for the safety of all vehicles, even if it means redundancies on DVs; axe it if the requirement is no longer necessary for any vehicle; keep some FMVSSs required for traditional vehicles only; and write separate  different control or equipment requirements for ADS–DVs. NHTSA also asked a series of questions related to the pros and cons of these approaches and about compliance testing.

The docket attracted nearly 100 commenters, including the usual suspects – industry groups, such as the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers and Global Automakers, individual manufacturers, such as Ford and GM; and safety advocates, such as the Center for Auto Safety. At the same time, a bi-partisan, bi-cameral Congressional group has been seeking input from various stakeholders in advance of writing autonomous vehicle legislation.

Safety Research & Strategies, with its long history of safety advocacy, has submitted comments to both groups covering three topics: the lack of functional safety standards for critical vehicle controls; the lack of updated standards on the human-machine interface (HMI) of vehicle controls; and the lack of accessible data and interpretation tools to adequately monitor and identify vehicle systems for potential malfunctions. 

You can read them here: SRS Comments to NHTSA Docket 2019-0036 and SRS Comments to the U.S. House Committee on Energy and Commerce and the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee        

We argue that the problems that more vehicle autonomy will bring can already be seen in the current vehicle electronic failures and automakers’ poor human-machine interface designs. For example, the advent of keyless ignition vehicles with push button Start/Stop is resulted in unintended consequences: carbon monoxide poisoning, rollaway crashes and easy thefts – hazard scenarios that were previously eliminated under the FMVSS 114 Theft Protection and Rollaway Prevention requirements applicable to traditional metal keys.

The lack of a functional safety standard for electronic controls results in scenarios in which a critical system intended to save lives can actually create a new hazard that can take lives. For example, in May, Fiat-Chrysler recalled 4.8 million 2014 to 2018 Chrysler, Dodge and Jeep models because of an electrical short circuit that prevents the driver from manually shutting off the cruise control or disengaging it with the brakes, resulting in the vehicle maintaining its current speed or even accelerating.

The current opacity of vehicles’ internal diagnostic and operational data is another huge problem, because it hinders outside entities’, such as NHTSA or consumers, ability to independently examine, document and identify potential vehicle-related failures.  

As a vehicle takes over most of the operational functions, the amount of data it must gather, assess, and store, and the speed at which it must process this information will increase exponentially. Currently, autonomous test vehicles “typically generate between 5TB and 20TB of data per day, per vehicle.” Even in current Level 2 vehicles (defined by NHTSA as “partial automation” the vehicle has combined automated functions like acceleration and steering but the driver must remain engaged in the driving task and monitor the environment at all times.”  – think Tesla’s Autosteer feature.) the amount of data that is transmitted between modules, which is stored to widely varying degrees amongst vehicles, is extraordinary, and the tools available to the public, law enforcement and diagnosticians are generally limited to OBD II diagnostic scans and Event Data Recorders.

This has already led to motorists’ being charged civilly and criminally for at-fault crashes without the ability to properly defend themselves. Despite the plethora of data circulating in a vehicle, it may not be recorded unless a preset active fault is flagged. Further, the publicly available tools used to examine the vehicle and driver behavior, which include scan tools to extract the data from the Event Data Recorder, are able to access only a fraction of what may be needed or available to the manufacturer.

For sure, NHTSA’s hands-free approach to steering the revolution has its fans. Global Automakers argued that a safety standard, such as FMVSS 103 (Windshield Defrosting and Defogging Systems), could be dropped because it “is intended to address forward visibility for the human driver, as measured from a specified eye point at the “driver’s” designated seating position. In this case, the availability of defroster/defogger systems becomes more of a customer satisfaction issue in these vehicles, which should be left to manufacturer discretion to address.” Yeah, everyone wants to ride in a vehicle where you can’t see out of the front windows. And if the ADS’s steering system fails and the vehicle is headed for a tree, who wants to see that?

But many more commenters to the NHTSA docket pointed out that the agency’s desire to forge ahead left wide gaps in implementation. There has been little to no discussions about so many aspects of this complex evolution – among them, the interconnectedness of autonomous vehicles and the roadways they traverse, raised by the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO), and state drivers’ licensure laws, raised by the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators (AAMVA).

They also offered pointed criticisms of the current safety assurance process of test drives. Former Lockheed Martin systems engineer Michael DeKort, who, in 2008 won IEEE’s Carl Barus Award for Outstanding Service in the Public Interest for his efforts to expose safety and security problems with the U.S. Coast Guard Deepwater Project, chimed in to “strongly urge NHTSA to look past the hype and to the aerospace, DoD and the FAA regarding proper development and testing due diligence of not only the autonomous vehicle system but the use and qualification of proper simulation. This as a tenable and safe alternative to the untenable and reckless process of public shadow and safety driving being used now by most driverless vehicle makers.”

It is impossible to drive the one trillion miles or spend over $300B to stumble and restumble on all the scenarios necessary to complete the effort. In addition, the process harms people for no reason. This occurs two ways. The first is through handover or fall back. A process that cannot be made safe for most complex scenarios, by any monitoring and notification system, because they cannot provide the time to regain proper situational awareness and do the right thing the right way, especially in time critical scenarios. The other dangerous area is training the systems to handle accident scenarios. In order do that AV makers will have to run thousands of accident scenarios thousands of times. that will cause thousands of injuries and deaths. The solution is to replace 99.9% of that public  shadow and safety driving with aerospace/DoD/FAA simulation technology and systems/safety engineering practices. (Not the gaming architecture-based systems most are using now. That technology has critical real-time, model fidelity and loading/scaling issues. These will cause improperly trained systems, false confidence and real-world   tragedies.)

Strange bedfellows Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety and the National Automobile Dealers Association challenged NHTSA’s premise that regulations are barriers, and that driverless cars shouldn’t be subject to certain safety standards because they reference actions by human drivers. From NADA:

Proposed changes to various FMVSS to accommodate ADS-DVs should preserve the safety purpose of those FMVSS. For example, while an ADS-DV with fully automated steering may not need a steering wheel to safely navigate the roads, the ADS-DV should be able to maintain at least the same level of steering performance as an experienced and  well-trained human driver operating a vehicle with a steering wheel.

Science-for-hire behemoth Exponent made a similar point: “To ensure demonstrable equivalence between any new certification approach to current performance requirements, there must be a scientific or engineering linkage to assure vehicle level performance characteristics equivalent to existing FMVSS requirements for conventional vehicles driven by a human.”

Beyond the docket, embedded systems experts have raised concerns about the rapid adoption of autonomous technology outside of any required safety protocol. For example, where is the discussion of fail-safes? When autonomous technology goes awry, will the human occupants have an intervention mechanism? Dr. Philip Koopman, co-founder and CTO of Edge Case Research, an autonomous systems safety consulting company, and a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, regularly discusses the issues and conflicts presented by vehicle autonomy, including the unrealistic expectations of human drivers in driverless cars. From his blog Safe Autonomy:

High-end driver assistance systems might be asking the impossible of human drivers.  Simply warning the driver that (s)he is responsible for vehicle safety doesn't change the well-known fact that humans struggle to supervise high-end autonomy effectively, and   that humans are prone to abusing highly automated systems.

One doesn’t have to move far beyond the happy promises of industry and its primary cheerleader, NHTSA, to see that their confidence in a carefree transition to driverless vehicles is not based on really anything. Maybe that’s why public confidence in automotive technology is low. A 2019 Ipsos/Reuters poll found that “half of U.S. adults think automated vehicles are more dangerous than traditional vehicles operated by people, while nearly two-thirds said they would not buy a fully autonomous vehicle.”