Toothless Auto Safety Agency

First you bought the car with the passenger-side air bag to protect the other front-seat occupant--your child, perhaps--in the event of a head-on collision. Then you may have acquired air-bag fever and bought a car with side-impact bags. And you looked forward to the day when side impact head bags became the norm.

Not so fast. Because of a relatively small number of fatal accidents involving children in rear-facing child seats, it was no longer kosher to have your young child or a frail adult in the front seat. To be safe, you were supposed to put such occupants in the back. That was the subject of a major government safety campaign, and responsible adults did exactly that and figured the issue was settled.

Wrong, it is far from settled, and that fact ought to spur a discussion of the shortcomings of federal vehicle safety studies and the resulting advice. Even now the rules and regulations designed to protect Americans in their vehicles are severely flawed, and they include ludicrously low fines for vehicle manufacturers that withhold information that should lead to safety recalls.

Start with the children: Where do you buckle up your child? Most experts still agree that the rear seat is the safest place for infants and other small children. However, officially sanctioned vehicle safety advice often is based on the exception and not the norm. Air bags, for example, are credited with saving thousands of lives since car makers began installing them in 1987, but a relatively few front-seat child fatalities involving air bags sparked the recent scramble for less powerful inflation or for bags that could be switched off. This development also prompted the move to place children in the rear seats.

So why, then, did federal authorities fail to warn Americans that children in the back seat risk severe injury and even death from front seats that may suddenly snap backward in rear-end collisions?

The answer is that the federal agency in charge of auto safety, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), had been studying front-seat collapses for 10 years but only recently began to address them. Auto makers have known about the problem for 30 years.

This might not be the biggest of the safety administration’s problems. As Times reporter Myron Levin pointed out in a recent series, this is also the agency that investigates vehicle defects and tries to enforce recall standards on American auto makers. The truth is that the NHTSA is inherently toothless, able to impose only fines that have a fraction of the punch that automobile makers face for defective emission controls. Moreover, the auto manufacturers--although they deny this--have been able to withhold vehicle- defect information for years and avoid some costly recalls.

It’s time that Congress and the federal government take steps to ensure that Americans are given consistent and thorough information on everything from child safety to recalls for vehicle defects. At present, confusion reigns and frustrated motorists might choose to ignore good advice at their peril.