CPSC Staff Votes to Write Mandatory ROV Standards
Reprinted from The Safety Record, Volume 6, Issue 5, October 2009
WASHINGTON D.C. – They’re faster than a golf cart, more powerful than an All-Terrain Vehicle, and able to climb rough terrain. The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission has also concluded that Recreational Off-Road Vehicles (ROV) are potentially deadly, and prime candidates for regulation. Last week, the commission voted to accept an agency staff recommendation that the agency publish an Advance Notice of Rulemaking to begin the process of setting standards.
ROVs were introduced into the market in 2003. A cousin to the ATV, Recreational Off-Road Vehicles resemble souped-up mini-jeeps, with four low-pressure tires, a steering wheel, seating for a driver and one or more passengers, roll bars, seat belts and speeds greater than 30 mph. Like ATVs, they are designed for off-road use on rugged terrain. And like ATVs, their safety record is spotty. In the last six years, the CPSC has been able to document 181 reports of ROV-related injuries and deaths. From January 2003 to August 2009, the CPSC found 116 deaths and 152 injuries in ROV crashes. Of those incidents, a whopping 125 – 69 percent – involved overturning, without a triggering collision. The remaining incidents involved a collision with an object or another vehicle. The staff further discovered that in every rollover in which ejection could be determined, nearly all resulted in a full or partial ejection from the vehicle by falling out or somehow climbing or jumping out.
The agency said that those figures were most likely undercounts, because, it suspected, not all incidents had been reported to the CPSC or because incidents involving ROVs might be mischaracterized in reports as ATVs or light utility vehicles.
The Recreational Off-Highway Vehicle Association (ROHVA) expressed “disappointment” in the vote and said that appropriate standards could have been reached through industry consensus.
Last week, the CPSC announced that Bad Boy Enterprises of Natchez, Mississippi would recall 3,900 Classic Buggies, because they could “accelerate without warning.” In its announcement, the CPSC said that the company had received 32 reports of unexpected acceleration, with some resulting in injuries “such as a fractured toe, rotator cuff injury and sore muscles.” The Bad Boy Buggy Standard model, which sells for about $10,000, features side-by-side seating for two occupants, a roof, but no doors or windows. Bad Boy is offering consumers free repairs.
In late March, Yamaha Motor Corp. U.S.A., manufacturer of the popular Rhino ROV was forced to suspend sales of some models and recall 120,000 Rhino 450, 660, and 700 model off-highway recreational vehicles. The recall was prompted by a commission investigation of more than 50 incidents involving those models, resulting in 46 occupant deaths. More than two-thirds of the crashes were rollovers. Yamaha offered to install a spacer on the rear wheels and remove the rear anti-sway bar to improve vehicle stability and handling, and to add half doors and more passenger handholds to keep occupants’ arms and legs inside the vehicle during a rollover. Yamaha also offered the same repair program for 25,000 Rhino 700 models, “in order to ensure customer satisfaction,” a CPSC recall announcement said. This high-profile recall followed two other less publicized actions by Yamaha. In 2006, it distributed stickers warning riders to keep their limbs in the vehicle; in 2007, without characterizing the campaign as a recall or involving the CPSC, Yamaha offered customers free doors to contain them.
Despite the trail of mayhem, the vehicles have gained popularity, with a dozen purveyors – including major motor vehicle manufacturers and Chinese firms – accounting for sales that have risen from fewer than 45,000 units in 2003 to more than 416,000 units by 2008, the CPSC briefing package noted.
According to the ATV playbook, industry neutralizes the CPSC’s regulatory impulse by offering its own voluntary set of standards and proceeds to fight tooth and nail until a worn-down commission gives in. In the late 1980s and 1990s, the ATV industry was successful in staving off any mandatory standards for the dangerous vehicles until recently. But, what worked 20 years ago may not have the same traction under a new, strengthened commission as constituted by the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act.
Round one has gone to the CPSC staff, who met with ROV industry representatives in December 2008 to hear their plans for voluntary standards and to present the findings of the commission’s independent research into ROV defects. CPSC staff had identified the three design factors that have the greatest impact on occupant safety as the static stability factor (SSF); vehicle handling and occupant retention and protection. The CPSC found that the SSF values for the ROV models it tested ranged from 0.84 to 0.92 – much lower than that of the tippiest SUVs, which traverse paved surfaces and have many more occupant protections – roofs, windows, three-point belts and airbags.
“CPSC staff believes that a SSF range of 0.84 to 0.92 is inadequate (too low) for a vehicle that is specifically designed to traverse conditions, such as uneven terrain and slopes, that present an even greater rollover hazard to vehicles than level on-road conditions,” the briefing package noted.
The CPSC subjected the ROVs to the Society of Automotive Engineers’ handling test, SAE 1266 Steady-State Directional Control Test Procedures for Passenger Cars and Light Trucks, and found that too many models “exhibited severe oversteer.” This is in contrast to most passenger vehicles, which tend toward understeering to make them more directionally stable and predictable. Oversteering makes a vehicle less directionally stable, resulting in spin-out and rollover conditions. CPSC also subjected the ROVs to static and dynamic rollover simulations and found that occupants were better restrained when the seats were positioned lower in the vehicle and a shoulder guard is installed on both sides of the vehicle.
But, when CPSC staff met with representatives of the ROHVA, the two disagreed on how best to characterize lateral stability. The ROHVA outlined a voluntary standard that included a proposed minimum lateral stability requirement of a 20-degree tilt angle for a fully loaded vehicle. CPSC staff countered that using the SSF factor would be a more meaningful measure and suggested a minimum of 1.0. The ROHVA rejected that and said that it would develop an ANSI standard using a canvas method in which the standards are reached by consensus among those who produce and use the vehicles, instead of against an objective measure.
When the ROHVA submitted its proposed standard to the CPSC in June, the staff noted that the association had ignored the commission’s research regarding lateral stability and occupant protection.
“CPSC staff reviewed the draft standard and found no improvements to the proposals made by ROHVA at the December 2008 meeting in the areas of lateral stability and occupant protection. ROHVA still proposed a low tilt angle requirement to address lateral stability, defined stability coefficients for an unoccupied vehicle (an unrealistic use configuration), failed to address vehicle handling, and failed to address occupants coming out of a vehicle during a rollover event.”
The CPSC staff found that the seat belt provision is inadequate to address occupant retention, especially in a rollover scenario, because even with three-point belts the designs cannot keep occupants’ limbs, torso and head from coming out of the vehicle. The CPSC wanted to see a standard that addressed “the occupant seating location within the vehicle, physical side guards such as doors and shoulder guards, four-point seat belts, and technologies for increasing seat belt use, can improve occupant retention. CPSC staff believes performance requirements for occupant retention and protection should be developed to increase occupant restraint use and to ensure occupant protection within a vehicle in the event of a rollover or collision.”
The staff concluded that the ROHVA’s standards were too weak and recommended that the staff begin a rulemaking. In response to the vote, ROHVA complained that that CPSC ignored its request to provide any data, research or analysis to support its contention that stricter controls on static stability and occupant retention were needed.
“While awaiting a response from the CPSC to our request, ROHVA retained a nationally known independent expert on vehicle dynamics to evaluate the comments from CPSC staff in order to continue the ANSI process with the benefit of additional expertise. ROHVA expects to issue a revised draft standard, incorporating many participant suggestions, in the coming days,” the ROHVA said in a prepared statement. “We are confident that through continued discussion and information sharing, an appropriate standard that reflects the input from all parties can be developed through the ANSI process. We look forwarding to continuing to work with CPSC and other parties in these efforts.”