Reprinted from The Safety Record, Volume 8, Issue 2, July 2011

Revisiting an old and contentious issue with contemporary data, researchers from Garthe and Associates compared the real world effectiveness of seats with Integrated Restraints (IR) to standard seats, and found that standard seats without integrated restraints have increased failure and deformation rates, as well as higher MAIS injury risk compared to seats with Integrated Restraints. The authors pointed out that seats with IR have strengthened frames so they can support seat belt loads in frontal crashes, making them much stronger than standard seats. The researchers concluded that stronger seats deform less and result in less severe injuries in real world rear impact crashes. Read the rest of this entry »

Reprinted from The Safety Record, Volume 8, Issue 2, July 2011

National Highway Traffic Safety Administrator David Strickland opened the Enhanced Safety of Vehicles Conference several weeks ago on a skeptical note about Google Inc.’s fleet of automated Toyota Priuses.

“More people feel that the task of driving belongs to the driver,” Strickland said. “And do you really want to sort of hand over your safety to a machine?”

Every other year, the world’s auto manufacturers, component suppliers, engineers and designers gather at the ESV to present the latest innovations in safety-related technology, automotive data and research. So, it is no small irony that Strickland poses this question in their midst, because whether the public wants to or not, its safety is already in the hands of the machines. Read the rest of this entry »

Reprinted from The Safety Record, Volume 8, Issue 2, July 2011

FMVSS 213 Child Restraint Systems is an inadequate standard with a compliance test that bears no resemblance to what happens to children in a crash, according to a slew of child safety researchers at this year’s Enhanced Safety of Vehicles Conference. Some of the world’s top researchers, including those from child restraint manufacturers, seat belt manufacturers and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, called for a strengthened standard that requires in-vehicle testing and dynamic side impact test procedures for child restraint systems. Read the rest of this entry »

Cars That Drive Too Much

Where is the point of diminishing returns for advanced automotive technologies? The European City Mobil project investigated drivers’ reaction times in a critical-safety event and found that drivers in a highly automated vehicle had slower reaction times than those who retained full manual control of the vehicle. City Mobil conducted the human factors research to further its main goal of introducing advanced urban transport systems on a large scale. The researchers noted that the evolution of adaptive automotive technology is trending toward more automated functions, such as adaptive cruise control, lane departure warning systems and Intelligent Speed Adaptation. What happens to the driver’s skill level, situational awareness and ability to switch from passive to active driving in an emergency, when more operational aspects are controlled by the vehicle? Read the rest of this entry »

Reprinted from The Safety Record, Volume 8, Issue 1, March 2011

Fuel “spit back” through the filler neck has been a longstanding problem in several Chrysler, Dodge and Jeep models, caused by the Inlet Check Valve (ICV) mounted in the fuel tank. Despite some limited recalls and at least one extended lifetime warranty, this defect, which first surfaced in 2001, continues to plague a number of models. Tens of thousands of vehicles are outside of any campaign, forcing owners to pay for a repair that requires replacement of the entire tank assembly. Read the rest of this entry »

Reprinted from The Safety Record, Volume 8, Issue 1, March 2011

WASHINGTON, D.C. – As the government ran on the fumes of a continuing budget resolution, and as the House Republicans and the Senate Democrats continued wrangling, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission completed its soft launch of the new publicly accessible and searchable consumer product complaint database. Read the rest of this entry »

Reprinted from The Safety Record, Volume 8, Issue 1, March 2011

WASHINGTON, DC – Will the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration determine that seat heaters exceeding human burn tolerance are defective, as other public health agencies do, or will they continue to argue that not enough people have been burned? Read the rest of this entry »

Reprinted from The Safety Record, Volume 8, Issue 1, March 2011

WENDOVER, UTAH – Last November, as NASA’s Engineering and Safety Center was dotting the “i”s and crossing the “t”s of its “exacting” study of Toyota’s electronic throttle control, Paul VanAlfen was in a panic. The Utah man was frantically trying to disengage the cruise control as his 2008 Camry rocketed down an I-80 exit ramp. Read the rest of this entry »

Reprinted from The Safety Record, Volume 8, Issue 1, March 2011

Last month, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration closed an investigation into the problem of fuel spit-back affecting Jeep Wrangler vehicles from the 2007-2008 model years, concluding that no safety-related defect trend had been identified.

Fuel spit-back occurs when a vehicle’s inlet check valve malfunctions, allowing gasoline to gush back out of the filler neck when a driver re-fuels, dousing the ground – or the driver. It’s an environmental and human safety hazard, and one might presume that no trend meant that few owners had complained about the problem of gas spilling out of the tank. But NHTSA cited a different reason: too many people complained: Read the rest of this entry »

Reprinted from The Safety Record, Volume 7, Issue 3, November 2010

This summer, a British coroner made headlines when he determined that the death of a passenger in a rollover crash would have been averted if the vehicle’s tires hadn’t been 13 years old. Nazma Shaheen, a mother of two, died in May 2009, after a tire failure tripped a rollover, throwing her clear of the vehicle. Alan Crickmore, the coroner of Gloucestershire, Great Britain, was so moved by the preventable nature of her death that he wrote to the Secretary of State for Transport, urging that tires older than 10 years be banned. Read the rest of this entry »