NHTSA Prepares to Take the Rear View
Reprinted from The Safety Record, Volume 6, Issue 2, March/April 2009
WASHINGTON, D.C. – After years of resisting, the National Highway Traffic Administration has published an Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking to amend the rearview mirror standard to actually include a performance standard for the rear view. The agency also solicited public comment on the state of current research and countermeasures that might assist it amending Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard 111 to eliminate blind zones.
The March rulemaking did not outline a possible performance standard, but presented the research NHTSA had done to date. The agency sought answers to 52 questions in seven different areas, including the scope of the problem, technologies for improving rear visibility, effectiveness, driver behavior, options for measuring rear visibility and countermeasure performance.
The Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking is the culmination of years of advocacy from groups such as KIDS AND CARS, which has been collecting news accounts and raising public awareness about the problem of backovers since 1998. In 2007, the organization’s lobbying led to the passage of the Cameron Gulbransen Kids Transportation Safety Act, also known as the K.T. Safety Act. The bill was named after 2-year-old Cameron Gulbransen, who was killed when his father, a pediatrician from Long Island, accidentally backed over him, because the blind zone behind his SUV made the toddler impossible to see.
The legislation required NHTSA to initiate a rulemaking within a year for a rearward visibility standard that would expand the required field of view to enable drivers to detect areas behind the motor vehicle. The standard could prescribe different requirements for different types of motor vehicles, which could be met by the addition of mirrors, sensors, cameras, or any other technology to expand the driver’s field of view. The bill required NHTSA to complete the rulemaking within three years of the date of enactment.
The law forced the agency to address a significant design flaw – especially in SUVs – which results in 3,000 incapacitating injuries and nearly 300 fatalities annually in backover incidents. (The agency noted that a disproportionate number of victims of backovers are children under 5 years old and adults 70 or older.) Previously, NHTSA declined to collect data on the problem, because most of these pedestrian-vehicle conflicts occurred in driveways and parking lots, rather than on public roads.
“We’re happy that NHTSA has met all the deadlines in the act and we really look forward to a regulation that will increase the visibility when you are backing up your vehicle,” says Janette Fennell, founder and president of KIDS AND CARS.
The sheer volume of questions is a good sign that the agency wants to take an in-depth look at all available information before crafting a standard, she added. But, Fennell said, buried in the text were some worrying signs. In the accompanying cost-benefit analyses, the agency considered different application scenarios, including applying it only to light trucks, based on data showing that pick-up trucks and SUVS were over represented in the injury and fatality data.
“I was surprised to see some sidestepping,” Fennell said. “We shouldn’t pick and choose. Whatever rear visibility standard is written, we need to ensure it covers all passenger vehicles.”
Backovers occur in incidents involving sedan-type vehicles more than 50 percent of the time, she said. Fennell was also disappointed that the agency research failed to consider the full range of economic benefits bestowed by a wider rear view.
“They totally ignored the cost savings from preventing bumper damage after you reduce the number of bushes, fences and poles people back into. That needs to be part of the calculation.”
The current standard, established in 1976, covers requirements for the use, field of view, and mounting of motor vehicle rearview mirrors for rear visibility and applies to passenger cars, multipurpose passenger vehicles, trucks, buses, school buses and motorcycles. What constitutes a performance standard for the view is based on Japanese regulation, Article 44, which merely requires that there be rearview mirrors that enable drivers to check the traffic around the left-hand lane edge and behind the vehicle from the driver’s seat. The regulation requires that the driver be able to ‘‘visually confirm the presence of a cylindrical object 1 m high and 0.3 m in diameter (equivalent to a 6-year-old child) adjacent to the front or the left-hand side of the vehicle (or the right-hand side in the case of a left-hand drive vehicle), either directly or indirectly via mirrors, screens, or similar devices.’’
As part of the Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, the agency presented some its research to date, which reached the startling conclusion that there is an association between the blind zone measured in a wide area and backing risk in crashes and that the larger the blind area, the higher the risk of a backing crash.
The agency has also evaluated some of the current rearview technology, often marketed as parking aids. The most expensive was the rearview camera, which was estimated to cost consumers between $159 and $203 per vehicle, or as low as $88 if the vehicle already has a display. NHTSA estimated the cost of equipping a 16.6 million vehicle fleet with camera systems is estimated at $2.3 to $3.0 billion. The net cost per equivalent life saved for camera systems, under different application scenarios, and at 3 and 7 percent discount rates, ranged from $13.8 to $72.2 million