By Joe Benton
ConsumerAffairs.com
June 8, 2005
Federal regulators are reluctant to toughen existing vehicle roof strength standards, according to a published report. Safety advocates have been pushing for stronger roof-strength tests that more closely resemble events during a rollover.
The Detroit News reports that in April the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) sent a proposed revision to the White House, where the regulations are under review by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).
OMB is expected to finish the review of the NHTSA roof-strength proposal by July 28. OMB will not comment on the regulation until the review is complete, but NHTSA officials indicated during a recent international safety conference that they were unlikely to pursue aany major changes to the agency's longtime test.
The roof-strength test is the main requirement automakers must meet to lessen the likelihood of injury in a rollover crash. Currently a vehicle's roof must be able to bear 1.5 times the vehicle's unloaded weight to pass.
NHTSA has indicated that only a tiny fraction of the more than 10,000 rollover deaths in the United States each year would be prevented by stronger roofs. NHTSA is hoping to save additional lives by combining its revised roof-strength requirements with new regulations to make safety belts more effective in keeping passengers in seats during a rollover.
NHTSA is also researching the effectiveness of side air bags in preventing ejections, another leading cause of deaths in rollover crashes.
Consumer and safety advocates are concerned that the agency is and missing an opportunity to significantly reduce the number of rollover deaths. They have asked that NHTSA implement a rollover crash test similar to the tests the agency conducts for frontal crashes. Those tests helped spur the development of air bags.
Automakers have argued that roof strength is a minor factor in rollover injuries. A series of studies funded by the auto industry over the past two decades suggest rollover injuries are due to occupants' flying out of their seats into the roof in the split seconds before a roof collapses during a crash.
NHTSA has ruled out full-scale crash tests because the rollover tests do not meet a legal standard known as repeatability. The repeatability standard demands that tests result in the same kind of damage every time they are conducted.
