The Associated Press (AP) reports that the federal agency tasked with monitoring vehicle safety has taken longer than it should to respond to formal requests to investigate possible problems. It reached this conclusion after reviewing 15 petitions filed with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) since 2010. The review found that NHTSA 12 times missed the statutory four-month deadline for granting or denying a request.
According to the AP, cars owners can ask NHTSA to act by filing a complaint, which is usually based on a single incident or submitting a formal request for an investigation of possible vehicle safety problems.
“Everything is just really slow,” the executive director of the North Carolina Consumers Council, told the AP. “You have to ask, is everything going as efficiently as it can?” The council filed a petition in 2012 asking NHTSA to look into Nissan truck transmission failures.
More recent criticism concerns NHTSA’ handling of General Motors’ delayed recall of cars with defective ignition switches. NHTSA acknowledged to the AP that it has missed deadlines, but denied that it was dragging its feet, claiming that it needs more than the law allows for examining petitions. “Most [petitions] do not provide sufficient data for NHTSA to evaluate the issues raised without further data collection and analysis,” NHSTA stated.
A New York Times article discusses NHTSA and the GM safety defects.
