NHTSA vows aggressive stance on recalls

WASHINGTON -- Despite the government's truce with Chrysler Group over the safety of aged Jeep vehicles, the nation's top auto safety regulator says his agency will keep taking an expansive view of what justifies a safety recall.

To avoid recalls, automakers must stay "within the zone of reasonable risk," David Strickland, head of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, told Automotive News last week.

That means not only adhering to federal safety standards at the time vehicles are built but also keeping up with the state of the art in design and technology among competitors.

Strickland's remarks shed light on a key point of contention in the brief standoff between NHTSA and Chrysler last month after the agency ordered a recall of 1993-2004 Jeep Grand Cherokees and 2002-07 Liberty SUVs -- 2.7 million vehicles in all.

Strickland, who became NHTSA administrator in 2010 amid the Toyota sudden-acceleration crisis, said the process for identifying and investigating defects hasn't changed. But he reaffirmed the agency's intent to scrutinize vehicle data continually for patterns that might point to risks that merit a recall.

"It really is based on the notion of unreasonable risk. And that is an evolving notion," Strickland said. The agency, he added, is obligated to reassess a potential risk "if state of the art moves all the peers in one direction, and it appears that there is another part of the fleet that has not made those same moves or improvements."

The fluid standard, in a rapidly innovating auto industry, may be one explanation for the sharp rise in vehicle recalls in recent years. Automakers initiated 664 recalls in 2012, up from 506 in 2002 and 207 in 1992, and of the 664 recalls last year, 507 were initiated without input from NHTSA.

NHTSA's request for a Chrysler recall was unusual in that it dealt with a fundamental design issue rather than a defective part or a failure to meet a safety standard.

The vehicles in question had a fuel tank mounted behind the rear axle, a design that was acceptable by federal standards. Other car companies, though, had abandoned that design after data showed such vehicles had a higher risk of catching fire when struck from the rear.

During an investigation, NHTSA surveyed 74 vehicles from the 2002 and 2003 model years, spanning cars, SUVs, pickup trucks, minivans and full-sized vans, and found that just four of them had fuel tanks placed behind the rear axle.

Chrysler initially rebuffed NHTSA, arguing that the agency had no grounds to order a recall of vehicles that complied with prevailing safety standards. "NHTSA seems to be holding Chrysler Group to a new standard for fuel tank integrity that does not exist now and did not exist when the Jeep vehicles were manufactured," the company said on June 4 after the request for a recall was announced.

Weeks later, though, the company backed down, agreeing to outfit the affected vehicles with a trailer hitch to protect the fuel tank better and saying the company "does not compromise on the safety" of customers.

That decision followed a meeting involving Strickland, then-Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood and Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne to review the case. The goal, Strickland said, was to have a "very open and transparent conversation with Chrysler about what we saw, about what they saw -- and we needed to go through the data very carefully."

Strickland said the agency's approach to the Chrysler case did not reflect any new interpretation of the federal law that gives NHTSA the authority to ensure the safety of cars on the road. Rather, he acknowledged, the reasonable-risk standard represented a tactical solution to the slow pace of change in federal safety standards.

"It's very hard to change or upgrade a federal motor vehicle safety standard," he said. "Sometimes it can be decades. Sometimes it can be 20 or 30 years." Applying the reasonable-risk standard, he added, helps "to backstop the inability to reach back and upgrade standards -- because of cost and time and all sorts of other factors."

NHTSA now is studying whether Chrysler's trailer-hitch remedy provides enough protection to bring the SUVs in line with similar vehicles from that time period.

"If Chrysler's remedy brings the performance of their vehicles to within that zone of reasonableness, along with the peer population," Strickland said, "that's the place where NHTSA wants them to be."