The Slow Lane in Vehicle Safety

After five years of fending off government investigations into a rash of steering column fires, Ford Motor Co. in April 1996 announced the largest safety recall in automotive history, agreeing under pressure to replace the ignition switches in 8 million cars, trucks and vans.

Ford’s action came too late for Prakash Krishan, a 31-year-old mother of three.

In February 1996, Krishan burned to death along a road in Contra Costa County in a fire that allegedly started in the steering column of her ’91 Aerostar van.

The delay may also have figured in the death of James Parks Sr. Days before the recall, flames spread to his garage and house in McAllen, Texas, from a fire his family later contended began in the steering column of his 1988 Lincoln Town Car. The 75-year-old man, who grabbed a garden hose to fight the fire, suffered a heart attack soon after. On April 24, the day Ford announced the recall, Parks died.

Though Ford disputes that any defect caused the fires, the company last month agreed to pay settlements to the families of Krishan and Parks.

The delayed recall highlights a serious flaw in vehicle safety regulation, namely, the ability of auto makers to forestall costly recalls by withholding information from the government, allowing potentially unsafe vehicles to stay on the road.

Federal law requires auto manufacturers to promptly recall and repair vehicles for free when they learn of a safety defect. They also must respond forthrightly to queries by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which investigates vehicle defects and supervises recalls.

But if an auto maker holds back crucial facts, the agency may never learn them or may find out years later. And critics say that penalties for withholding information are too weak to deter companies from doing that.

Ford eventually paid a $425,000 settlement to NHTSA after being accused of violating federal law by concealing information about the ignition-switch problem and waiting years to begin the recall. It was only the second time in at least two decades that NHTSA had charged an auto maker with such violations.

A Times review of thousands of pages of agency records and court papers found other alleged failures to provide NHTSA with accurate or timely information, among them:

* Suzuki Samurai: While the agency was investigating the sport-utility vehicle’s tendency to roll over, Suzuki did not disclose records showing General Motors had declined in the 1980s to market the Samurai because of safety and litigation fears.

* Ford Bronco II: These popular SUVs, which have been involved in more than 900 fatal rollover crashes, were the subject of an NHTSA investigation in which Ford withheld some evidence of stability problems.

* GM Saturn: When NHTSA asked about defective seat recliners that sometimes caused front seats to flop backward, GM reported the incidents were rare and no threat to safety. Later, the company failed to disclose a fresh surge of public complaints.

Suits Provide Key Information

As in the ignition-switch case, NHTSA typically learns of such cases not through its sleuthing but through product liability lawsuits.

“They [auto makers] lie to the agency all the time,” said former NHTSA administrator Joan Claybrook, who ran the agency under President Carter and now heads Public Citizen, a consumer group in Washington. “Yet NHTSA has to rely on their honesty in order to do its job of enforcement.”

Kenneth N. Weinstein, NHTSA’s associate administrator for safety assurance, said he believes such episodes are “relatively rare.” But he acknowledged that “if we don’t know about it, how can we be sure?”

Industry officials deny that information is withheld and say they try to be forthright with the agency.

The companies “go out of their way to keep [NHTSA] satisfied and to make sure that they get all the information they ask for,” said Lewis Goldfarb, vice president and associate general counsel for DaimlerChrysler Corp.

Despite occasional misunderstandings about what information is required, “our goal has always been to provide NHTSA” everything it needs, and “we believe we have done that,” said Thomas Saybolt, assistant general counsel for Ford.

“Of course we do not lie, and of course . . . we do not withhold information,” said Bob Lange, engineering director for the General Motors safety center.

Lange said GM is such a huge and far-flung operation that it is possible some pertinent information gets overlooked. But “to suggest that there is some nefarious purpose or intent in hiding information . . . is totally irresponsible.”

The recall process functions like an honor system, demanding a high level of candor from companies that are under financial pressures to avoid costly recalls.

Auto makers have a near-monopoly on key safety data, such as failure rates for vehicle components and the frequency of accidents, warranty claims and owner complaints. The data are crucial in the early stages of NHTSA investigations, when the agency decides whether to drop or expand the inquiry, potentially triggering a major recall.

For the companies, major recalls can mean bad publicity, big expense and increased exposure to lawsuits. Even if a recall can’t be avoided, delay can benefit manufacturers. Since federal law only requires fixing vehicles less than 8 years old, delaying a recall can reduce the number of vehicles a company must repair.

Meanwhile, critics say penalties are too weak to deter auto makers from withholding information.

The National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act, adopted by Congress in 1966, set a maximum fine of $1,000 for “each failure or refusal to perform an act required.” Improperly withholding 10 documents could thus bring a maximum fine of $10,000.

“The penalties for lying to the agency are . . . just a joke,” said Clarence Ditlow, director of the Center for Auto Safety, an advocacy group based in Washington.

For delaying a recall, an auto maker could face a more imposing six-figure penalty because the $1,000 can be assessed against each vehicle that is not recalled. But the law sets a penalty ceiling, currently $925,000--a fraction of the tens of millions that a major recall can cost.

Critics contrast the numbers with the stiff penalties for selling cars with defective emission controls. Under the Clean Air Act, auto makers can be fined up to $25,000 per vehicle with no ceiling on the maximum amount.

Said Ditlow: “I’ve always been amazed” that a pollution violation is punished more severely than a “safety violation which could cost your life.”

Such concerns are misplaced, said Ford’s Saybolt, who contends that auto makers have a powerful incentive to be truthful.

Being trusted by consumers means “more than anything in the world,” Saybolt said. “No one wants to be in a position where they are viewed by their customers . . . as someone who is not being forthright with the government, because it implies you are not being forthright with them.”

Even so, NHTSA found that Ford’s statements in the ignition-switch probes “in some respects were not accurate or complete.”

The case involved a model of ignition switch that Ford installed in more than 20 million vehicles from 1983 to 1993. When the switches short out, plastic components in the steering column can smoke or catch fire. Citing documents obtained from Ford, plaintiffs’ lawyers say such failures caused as many as 6,500 steering column fires, a figure Ford says is way too high.

Beginning in 1991, NHTSA opened a series of probes into steering column fires but dropped the inquiries after Ford’s assertions that these were “isolated incidents” of unknown cause.

But company documents not provided to NHTSA gave a different impression. In 1992, a Ford memo blamed a series of fires in Crown Victorias owned by the Washington, D.C., police on “an electrical short at the ignition switch.” Another memo on fires in two other models declared: “The ‘burnt ignition switch’ has reared its ugly head again.”

Documents show that without telling NHTSA or the public, Ford quietly conducted a limited recall, replacing the ignition switches in more than 27,000 vehicles used by fleet operators, such as Federal Express and the Postal Service.

As late as 1995, Ford was still denying knowledge of any “causal factor or trend of alleged fires,” agency records show.

But fire complaints were mounting.

After Debra Goldgehn’s Ford pickup caught fire in her driveway one night in November 1995, the Marietta, Ga., woman staged an unusual act of protest, creating a Web site, www.flamingfords.com, with a photo of the burned pickup.

Complaints were mounting in Canada as well, and in November 1995, dozens of children were evacuated from an Edmonton day care center when fire spread to the building from an Aerostar minivan parked outside. Later that month, Ford agreed to recall about 250,000 Canadian vehicles, setting the stage for the recall in the U.S. a few months later.

Ford spokesman Jim Cain said recently that the company was pressured into the 1996 recall and had never determined that the switches were defective. Since that recall, he said, ignition switch failure has been erroneously blamed for fires with a variety of causes, triggering a wave of litigation. Among these, he said, were the Krishan and Parks fires. Ford last month settled out-of-court in both cases, without admitting liability.

The ignition switch case is unusual because NHTSA took action against Ford. But it was hardly the only case in which revealing documents were not provided.

The Suzuki Samurai is one of a breed of small sport-utility vehicles whose short wheelbase and high center of gravity have made them unusually susceptible to rollovers.

As of 1995, 213 people had been killed and more than 5,000 injured in Samurai rollover accidents, according to court testimony by an expert on behalf of Suzuki.

NHTSA began investigating the stability of the Samurai in 1988 after a request from a consumer group. The agency took no action, reasoning that most SUVs were rollover-prone, and the Samurai was comparable. As part of its review, NHTSA asked Suzuki for “all documents . . . which Suzuki believes are pertinent to the alleged defect.”

Suzuki did not furnish records showing that GM declined to market the Samurai, citing “perceived roll-over tendencies” and litigation fears.

In another memo, a Suzuki public relations consultant in 1985 called for development of “a crisis plan that will deal primarily with the ‘roll’ factor. . . . Because of the narrow wheelbase . . . the car is bound to turn over.”

Much later, as these and other documents began trickling forth in lawsuits over Samurai safety, Suzuki decided the time had come to ship some of them to NHTSA. In a cover letter to the agency in December 1993--five years after the rollover investigation--a Suzuki lawyer said the documents were being provided “to lay to rest any claim or suspicion that Suzuki has ‘withheld’ any information.”

NHTSA never took action against Suzuki.

A similar case involved an investigation of Ford Bronco II rollovers.

Ford sold more than 700,000 Bronco IIs from 1983 to 1990, retiring them in favor of the larger and more stable Explorer. By 1995, according to court records, Bronco IIs had been involved in 909 fatal “single event” rollover crashes, meaning that one or more people died on 909 occasions when Bronco IIs flipped over without hitting other vehicles.

NHTSA began an investigation of the Bronco II in 1988, asking Ford for “any and all tests and analyses” of stability and handling of the vehicles. The agency closed the investigation in 1990 without ordering any remedial action, reasoning as it had in the Samurai case that Bronco IIs were no more rollover-prone than rival SUVs.

Ford had not provided NHTSA with stability test data gathered a few months before the vehicles went into production. These tests at one point were suspended, Ford later admitted, because of the high risk of injury to test drivers.

Nor did NHTSA--or Ford’s courtroom opponents--get to see 53 documents concerning Bronco II stability that were rounded up by Ford lawyers and “inadvertently discarded,” as Ford put it.

In a blistering ruling in 1996, an Indiana judge declared that Ford’s destruction of the documents was at best a “sanitization” and “at worst . . . an outright fraud.” Ford is appealing the judge’s ruling in the product liability lawsuit.

Ford’s actions were later revealed to NHTSA through documents provided by product liability lawyers. Among them was deposition testimony by Robert H. Munson, Ford’s automotive safety director, who explained in 1994 why Ford failed to provide stability data to NHTSA:

“Well, to begin with, NHTSA doesn’t have the wherewithal to decide what information is relevant,” Munson said. “We don’t feel . . . the agency has the right personnel to understand what happens when you develop a vehicle.”

After NHTSA sought clarification, Ford gave another reason: Because the handling tests involved Bronco II prototypes, the firm assumed NHTSA would regard them as irrelevant.

Jim Mundo, a former Ford engineer and automotive design consultant, said in an interview that when he worked for Ford in the 1970s and ‘80s, engineers routinely modified vehicles in superficial ways so they could be deemed “prototypes” and any adverse data withheld. The change could be as minor as removing a fender or tail lamp “or just about any crazy thing you can think of,” said Mundo, who has testified for plaintiffs in product liability cases. A Ford spokesman declined comment.

NHTSA ended up rebuking Ford in a May 1998 letter but otherwise took no action in the Bronco II case. From now on, the agency wrote, Ford should construe NHTSA’s queries “according to their ‘plain meaning.’ ”

By last January, Ford had settled 673 claims and lawsuits involving Bronco II rollovers, company documents showed.

It’s a “dreadful commentary . . . that the most effective regulatory agency . . . is the courts,” said W. Randall Barnhart, a Denver lawyer involved in Bronco II litigation. “I’m on a soapbox about this because I’ve represented so many people who have had terrible injuries.”

In the Saturn case, NHTSA began looking into reports that defective seat recliners could cause drivers to lose control when seats flopped backward or could throw front seat passengers to the back in rear-end collisions.

NHTSA closed the investigation in 1994, saying GM data showed “a declining trend” of reported recliner failures. Agency records and court documents show the company, in fact, received a surge of new complaints within weeks of NHTSA’s closing the investigation.

But during the next several years, GM did not inform NHTSA of the new reports. And the company waited until March of this year to order the recall of 136,000 ’94 and ’95 Saturns.

GM’s Greg Martin declined comment on the lapse of time, saying only that GM “got together with NHTSA and took a close look at it and decided to issue a recall.”

NHTSA officials could only remember two cases of the agency’s sanctioning auto makers for supplying misleading information. Because the cases also involved alleged foot-dragging in conducting recalls, potential penalties were large enough to warrant action.

One case involved a Toyota recall of thousands of Land Cruisers to fix a defect that caused fuel leaks. Toyota eliminated the defect in new models, but NHTSA alleged that the car maker pretended the cause of the problem was a mystery in hopes of avoiding costly repairs to older models. Toyota agreed to settle the case in 1994 for $250,000, without admitting guilt.

The only other settlement came in the ignition switch case, which began last year when lawyers for State Farm Insurance, which sued Ford over payouts for steering column fires, gave NHTSA a trove of incriminating documents.

The agency shows signs of being more aggressive. Last year, for example, it sent letters to the Big Three auto makers demanding more prompt and complete responses in defect investigations.

And for a year the agency has been conducting a major investigation of Chrysler. The case follows prior NHTSA investigations of fuel system leaks in certain 1993 to 1997 models that eventually led Chrysler to announce the recall of 680,000 vehicles. Chrysler agreed to the recall in August 1998, but last December NHTSA said it was investigating whether Chrysler had withheld information and improperly delayed the recall. Chrysler said it had done nothing wrong.

“This is a new tactic they [NHTSA] are using,” wrote a Chrysler official in an e-mail last January that has become part of the investigative record. “We’ve never received a letter like this before.”

About This Series

Today: Delaying tactics by auto makers and a toothless regulatory agency weaken the nation’s vehicle recall system, allowing potentially unsafe vehicles to remain on the road.

Monday: Even when potentially unsafe vehicles are recalled for repair, nearly a third are never taken in to be fixed.

On the Web: The complete series can be read online at https://www.latimes.com.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration maintains a Web site where consumers can type in the make, model and year of their vehicle to see if a recall has been issued. Go to https://www.nhtsa.dot.gov/ and click on “Recalls.”