Tag Archives: NHTSA trailer manufacturers

What’s the intent of Early Warning Reporting & what’s it done to end underride?

Truck Safety, , , ,

I sent this email out to people at NHTSA and Congressional Offices on Monday morning, June 12:

Last week, I re-read an interesting book by Michael Lemov called Car Safety Wars. One thing that caught my interest was an account of the 2000 TREAD Act in which an Early Warning Report (EWR) system was mandated by Congress.

The thought of NHTSA requiring manufacturers of motor vehicles and motor vehicle equipment to report when fatalities occur involving their products is intriguing. It makes me wonder if Commercial Motor Vehicles are included in this mandate. Does anyone know the answer to this question?
If they aren’t, how can we make sure that they are? What would have to be done to accomplish this? A mandate by Congress? Some kind of an amendment to a rule by DOT? A petition requesting them to do so?

Wouldn’t it help to improve data collection on underride tragedies if manufacturers themselves were required to report to NHTSA when fatalities occurred in collisions involving their commercial motor vehicle products — especially if it specified what was the cause of death (and not simply what caused the crash)? Wouldn’t this give valuable information to manufacturers on the need to re-evaluate the safety and efficacy of their products?

Then I went back online to dig further into this situation. This is what I discovered:

I found that Commercial Motor Vehicles are included in the TREAD Act. Therefore, I would like to know:

  1. How this information is used currently
  2. How we could better use it
  3. What could be done to make it more useful

The Transportation Recall Enhancement, Accountability and Documentation (TREAD) Act was enacted in the fall of 2000. Its intention is to increase consumer safety through mandates assigned to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA).

Two major components of the TREAD Act are 1) the requirement of manufacturers to report to NHTSA when they conduct a safety recall or other safety-related campaign, and 2) the need to report information related to defects, especially in cases of injury or death related to the use of products (also referred to as “early warning reporting”(EWR)).

There are many definitions, exceptions and interpretations found in the final rule for this regulation. Requirements for manufacturers may differ depending on what type and how much of a product they produce in a calendar year. The following is a breakdown of what may be required of a trailer manufacturer.

All manufacturers must submit quarterly reports with regard to any incident involving a death. So again, no matter the number of products your company makes, if there is a death alleged due to a failure of or during use of the product, it must be reported. 

If you are a manufacturer of 5,000 or more trailers annually, you must also submit quarterly reports with regard to the following categories:
1. Production information
2. Death and injury claims
3. Property damage
4. Consumer complaints
5. Warranty claims
6. Field reports
I then asked NHTSA to generate a report for me and this is what I received:

I will have to check to find out if the report is actually what I was anticipating but, as far as I can tell, this report does not include data on the thousands of truck/car crash fatalities which occur each year (on average about 4,000). Where are rest of those people?

Bottomline: The information is not being collected and reported and responded to in the manner which was the intent of the law (The TREAD Act of 2000). That, in my mind, is a problem. Had the manufacturers and NHTSA done what was required, quite possibly our daughters and thousands of others, who were in truck/car crashes after that bill was passed, would not have suffered DEATH BY UNDERRIDE. This Early Warning Reporting (EWR) system should have been able to solve the underride problem and save them.

They shouldn’t be dead.