U.S. Safety Hotline Calls for More Complaints

The federal government this week announced a safety investigation into a report that the steering wheels on model year 2000 Dodge Durango sport-utility vehicles can come off in the driver’s hands, a probe that originated with a call to the federal auto safety hotline.

At a telephone phone bank deep inside the Department of Transportation building in Washington, the government has deployed about 20 men and women to take calls regarding possible safety defects and to provide safety information to consumers.

Safety advocates laud the hotline, which gets about 700,000 calls every year, but some say the telephone reporting system falls far short of its potential and could play an even more vital role in keeping autos safe.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, a part of the Transportation Department, has operated the hotline since the early 1970s. Its importance to auto safety cannot be minimized, since it is the principal source of information used to launch defect investigations, says Kathy DeMeter, director of NHTSA’s Office of Defects Investigation.

Indeed, the Durango investigation was launched with a single consumer call to the hotline. That’s atypical, however. The safety administration starts only about 100 preliminary investigations each year, and only about 30 of those advance to an engineering analysis. With a limited budget, DeMeter says, the agency must carefully pick its spots and attempts to select issues that appear to pose the most serious safety concerns.

Thus, the agency has chosen to respond quickly to that single report that the new Durango could have a critical flaw in its steering system, whereas it shelves many other complaints about such issues as windshield wiper blades. But typically, the agency opens investigations based on multiple complaints about the same problem.

Of course, auto makers get many more complaints and calls than does the federal government, but the companies routinely refuse to share that information with the safety administration. So far, Congress has chosen not to compel disclosure of such complaints.

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Meanwhile, outside safety experts say the safety administration is not doing enough to encourage Americans to report vehicle defects to the government hotline. In recent years, only about 22,000 of the 700,000 callers to the safety hotline filed defect complaints.

The vast majority call for information about what recalls may have been issued on their cars and trucks, to obtain vehicle test-crash results or to get help in installing child seats, among other things.

But the agency is stepping up its efforts to encourage individuals to file complaints when they encounter vehicle safety problems. As a result of its work with states and nonprofit groups to raise awareness of the hotline, the agency expects to log 50,000 complaints this year, a 100% jump over the last three years.

But that progress comes after a long history in which critics say the agency has taken a timid approach and sometimes provided mediocre service.

“I don’t think they pay enough attention to it,” said Clarence Ditlow, director of the Center for Auto Safety in Washington. “One of the issues with it is simply one of resources. The biggest thing we get complaints about is that people can’t get through to the hotline. That’s an issue of volume of calls and staffing. Say there is a big safety issue, then they get flooded and nobody can get through.”

Ditlow also says the safety administration requires too much evidence to launch investigations, notwithstanding its fast response to the Durango issue.

“Do they act on complaints? Sometimes,” Ditlow said. “How many complaints do they need? The stock answer is that one complaint can trigger a recall, but sometimes dozens of complaints aren’t enough.”

Rosemary Shahan, head of Consumers for Auto Safety and Reliability in Sacramento, has been fighting the safety administration for years over what she says is its lax follow-up to complaints and its halfhearted efforts to encourage consumers to file defect complaints.

It was Shahan who petitioned the agency in 1987 to simply include the hotline telephone number in every new vehicle’s owner’s manual. Auto makers pressured the agency not to include the number, saying it would confuse consumers. At one point, a high-ranking official, who now works for the auto industry, lost the petition.

“It took them 16 months to act on it,” Shahan said. “Even now, the telephone number is not usually listed in the owner’s manual index. One auto maker buries it in a section about tires.”

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Of course, the safety administration could do a lot more with a bigger staff, but Congress has been cutting its budget. The Office of Defects Investigation is working on a $2.7-million budget, down from $3.06 million last year, DeMeter said. And, she said, the hotline budget has been trimmed to $1.2 million from $1.4 million.

Congress didn’t grumble too much when Kenneth Starr spent more than $47 million to investigate Whitewater and the Monica Lewinsky matter--more than 15 times greater than the annual budget for the Office of Defects Investigation.

Of course, only 40,000 Americans die every year on the highways. Does Congress think Americans care 15 times more about political scandals in the White House than highway safety?

Ralph Vartabedian cannot answer mail personally but responds in this column to automotive questions of general interest. Please do not telephone. Write to Your Wheels, Business Section, Los Angeles Times, Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles, CA 90053. E-mail: ralph.vartabedian@latimes.com.