Despite quality improvements, costly safety issues continue to dog automakers

The rising number of vehicles subject to recalls, experts say, is not because of lower safety standards but rather because of higher ones, along with greater vigilance on the part of manufacturers and regulators.

"Generally speaking, we feel that manufacturers are more likely to recall something now than they were in the past," Sargent said. "Nobody wants to be accused of ignoring quality problems, particularly safety-related problems."

Weighing on automakers are the memories of the Ford-Firestone crisis and the more recent Toyota unintended-acceleration case, a debacle that pummeled the automaker's reputation for quality and stuck it with $1.1 billion in repair costs, according to a 2010 company estimate.

Nissan, for example, has a "vital issues" panel that reviews customer complaints, warranty costs and defective parts to decide whether to pull the trigger on a recall. Anything that frightens a customer -- such as a steering problem, loss of throttle control or fuel leak -- goes straight to the panel no matter what, said Jim Blenkarn, senior manager of field quality investigations at Nissan North America.

"That could be on the strength of one report," he said.

For other problems, Nissan sets a tolerance of 0.05 percent, or 1 in 2,000 vehicles; any defect with a higher incidence rate goes up the chain of command for a closer review.

Sean Kane, president of Safety Research & Strategies Inc., a Massachusetts consulting firm, said there are other reasons why recalls are a persistent problem: Cars are more complex, he says, so there are more components that can fail. Automakers and regulators also have better data to analyze patterns that may point to a problem.

But Kane said the biggest driver in the number of recalls may be the Internet.

"Consumers have ways to complain that they didn't have before," said Kane, whose clients include trial lawyers for car owners. "We have access, electronically and instantly, to a global network that wasn't available in the early '90s. The manufacturer no longer controls the narrative entirely, and I think that's a major factor in why problems get addressed more often now."

Regulators, meanwhile, are trying to harness the power of the Internet to get more defective cars fixed. This summer, NHTSA issued a requirement that automakers make their recall notices more official-looking and, by next summer, set up a searchable online database for customers to see whether their vehicles have been recalled. The aim is to push the average consumer compliance rate closer to 100 percent, up from 70 percent now.

The rules of what triggers a recall also are changing. NHTSA made that clear this year when it asked Chrysler Group to recall Jeep Grand Cherokees -- some from as far back as 1993 -- and Jeep Liberty vehicles from the 2000s that regulators said were prone to catching fire when hit from behind.

Chrysler initially pushed back, saying the SUVs met federal safety standards when they were sold. But NHTSA argued that automakers need to be held to standards that evolve over time to meet higher consumer expectations, with data analysis playing a big role in determining whether a vehicle should be considered unsafe.

"It really is based on the notion of unreasonable risk. And that is an evolving notion," NHTSA Administrator David Strickland said in a July interview, shortly after Chrysler backed down and agreed to recall the vehicles. The agency, he said, must 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."

Strickland's thinking will be tested in the years ahead as automakers continue to make cars safer. The rapid introduction of advanced crash-prevention features in new cars could soon make older vehicles stand out as dangerous relics.

Then again, the added complexity of such advanced safety systems could spawn another big wave of recalls. With more of a vehicle's basic safety functions controlled by chips, cameras and sensors, the risks of a potential software glitch could grow.

"Looking back, I would always tell people that I never thought I'd see something as big as Firestone," Kane says. "And then there was Toyota. Now I'm convinced that we're going to see another one. These crises are inevitable."