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November 26, 2002

Dr. Jeffrey Runge
Administrator
National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA)
U.S. Department of Transportation
400 Seventh Street, SW
Washington, DC 20590

Dear Dr. Runge,

Public Citizen greatly appreciates NHTSA's request to provide further comments on the agency’s final rulemaking and its September 24, 2002 public meeting on early warning reporting procedures. We will also take this opportunity to comment on the agency's Internet published draft of the "EWR spreadsheet" requirements and workbooks. We continue to strongly support meaningful implementation of this rulemaking, as it is at the heart of the new grants of authority to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) under the Transportation, Recall Enhancement, Accountability and Documentation (TREAD) Act.

We applaud the agency's progress towards creating a workable early warning system. Our letter includes two primary categories of comments – the first addresses disclosure polices and the second outlines our suggestions for changes to the agency's blueprint for implementing the final rule.

Public Citizen is concerned that there is not been adequate coordination of the disclosure function of the rule, the agency’s pending rulemaking on 49 C.F.R. Part 512, and the practical arrangements which must be made to assure that defect information is made available to the public in a timely fashion. After the decision was made to remove the disclosure provisions from the Early Warning rule and initiate a separate rulemaking regarding disclosure, no one apparently took the responsibility for integrating the receipt of the information and its rapid disclosure. NHTSA must thoughtfully lay out the process by which the agency intends to release that information which will be routinely made public, as well as the process for very rapidly reviewing early warning submissions that are candidates for confidential treatment under the Freedom of Information Act's (FOIA's) disclosure exemptions. Shockingly, during the September 24^th public meeting at NHTSA on the early warning database, agency representatives appeared not to have thoroughly, or even preliminarily, considered how to integrate the process of public disclosure with regard to their technical implementation of the database.

This is an unacceptable way to respond to the clear intent of Congress in its passage of TREAD, which was designed to correct the information monopoly now maintained, and aggressively defended, by the manufacturers. The clear vision of the TREAD Act is that raising public awareness about safety defects and improving public oversight of manufacturer decisions on defects and recalls will produce vast rewards for both consumers and automakers. Under the early warning rule, industry which will have strong incentives to improve safety in view of this new information equality. NHTSA must develop disclosure practices related to the database that rapidly permit the maximum possible public access to early warning information.

Below, we provide specific suggestions and concerns relevant to NHTSA’s guidelines for manufacturer compliance with the early warning rule. Our major points are as follows:

1. NHTSA's blueprints for information collection and publication must include:
   1. Guidelines for expeditious publication of manufacturer data and public feedback in a publicly accessible format; and
   2. Guidelines for strategies to mitigate the problems of duplicative data, including a requirement that manufacturers report Vehicle Identification Numbers (VINs) and Tire Identification Numbers (TINs) so that NHTSA or the manufacturers will be able integrate NHTSA's consumer complaints with the early warning submissions.
2. In keeping with the length of time covered by the agency's recall statute, NHTSA should extend its record retention requirement for vehicle manufacturers to ten years, mirroring the current recall statute. The Ford/Firestone defect case, for just one example, was opened ten years after the Firestone tire was first offered for sale.
3. NHTSA should establish routine deadlines for manufacturers for submitting corrections or clarifying reports.
4. The death/injury database should be updated in the next quarterly report when injuries become fatalities.
5. Any reported claims that subsequently become lawsuits should be reported as lawsuits.
6. Manufacturers should provide baseline statistics for multinational production purposes.
7. The agency should develop guidelines clarifying the reporting requirements for subsidiaries such as rental car agencies.
8. Manufacturers should report information on all vehicles in a model, even if some of those vehicles are above the 10,000 Gross Vehicle Weight (GVW) limit.
9. NHTSA should not allow manufacturers to evade their reporting responsibility by requiring reporting of relevant oral communications between manufacturers and dealers, as manufacturers will ask dealers to phone in problems rather than putting them in writing.
10. Identical components used in different makes and models of vehicles should be tracked so that cross-make/model defects can be identified.

    NHTSA should implement these suggestions to fill in some of the more problematic holes in its current blueprint for implementing the early warning requirements. Doing so will vastly increase the quality and usefulness of the early warning system, and realize more of the potential value of TREAD.

    In addition, we note that the agency will undoubtedly need a mechanism for docketing and sorting public comment on the database, and on the vehicle makes and models listed therein. Public feedback must be made available by the agency. We suggest that the agency build a feedback database organized by make, model and alleged defect in order to pro-actively address the comments that are sure to be submitted to NHTSA following publication of the early warning database.

    Disclosure guidelines must be developed to assure adequate public access to early warning information

    In passing the TREAD Act, Congress provided a mandate for NHTSA to prevent future injuries and deaths to American motorists by removing the cloak of silence that has historically surrounded manufacturer decisions concerning potential defects in automobiles and tires. For years, manufacturers have interpreted the law requiring notification to the Secretary if they "learn" of safety defects as not requiring any notification until they initiate a recall.

    We were therefore greatly surprised to discover that NHTSA, in its final rule, neglected to outline the agency's policy on disclosure of this new information to the public. Public Citizen, a long-time advocate of corporate responsibility and transparency, is concerned that the current silence in the final rule on disclosure issues may provide an opening for manufacturers to attempt to escape public accountability. Without specific published guidelines, it is now impossible to predict which types of information gathered by NHTSA under Congress's mandate will become public. TREAD was passed to end the silence surrounding defect information, not to reinvent the culture of cloaked secrecy.

    In the September 24^th meeting, NHTSA officials stated that they are waiting for policy changes developed by the agency's Chief Counsel's office to the agency’s regulations under Part 512, which governs disclosure of confidential business information, before manufacturers and the public interest community will be told specifics regarding the agency's early warning disclosure policy. Officials also indicated that the timing for policy changes by the Chief Council was uncertain. Any delay beyond early next year in outlining the details of this regulation while waiting for the Chief Counsel to alter the agency's overall policy is unwise and will impede the process of public disclosure. This will make it difficult, if not impossible, to design such disclosure rules into procedures that will govern the operation of the early warning database.

    We are also submitting comments to the agency’s rulemaking docket on Part 512, and have attached those at the end of this comment as an appendix.

    We would emphasize here that NHTSA must assure that manufacturers do not abuse the preliminary distinctions between types of information that may and may not be protected under FOIA. TREAD was passed to put an end to such chicanery. As NHTSA's Chief Counsel rules on the disclosure of a specific type of material, a docket should be established so that a precedent is created and the manufacturers are kept from submitting redundant and harassing applications for non-disclosure ad nauseam.

    1. NHTSA must amend the current blueprint for information collection by publishing guidelines for manufacturers that assure the best information-gathering possible

The vast potential of an early warning system as embodied in the passage of TREAD can only be realized if the architecture for the system is built upon a solid foundation. The September 24^th meeting showed that the agency has done a considerable amount of hard work thus far in preparing a technical blueprint for implementation of the early warning rule. Public Citizen applauds NHTSA's efforts, including the publication of a prototype early warning rule spreadsheet on its website. This prototype, made available on August 21, 2002, presents NHTSA's proposed data reporting format. The blueprint for a completely realized early warning system is still imperfect, however. We offer some suggestions in hopes of further streamlining the data gathering, warehousing, and analysis.

The Department of Transportation’s Office of Inspector General (DOT OIG), in its Review of the Office of Defects Investigation: National Highway Traffic Safety Administration stated that: "the success of the TREAD Act depends on the quality and usefulness of the new information system and ODI's ability to identify potential defects." Keeping these goals firmly in mind, implementation of the early warning reporting system should ensure that the best possible data is gathered to be analyzed by ODI, and that this information is made easily available to the public, who will provide feedback and inevitably enhance the agency’s knowledge and responsiveness to developing safety concerns.

The following suggestions are intended to assist the agency in accomplishing these key objectives.

a. Manufacturer data and feedback from the public that is new and pertinent information must be made available to the public both expeditiously and accurately

We are very disturbed that NHTSA has yet to address precisely how information gathered through the early warning reports will be made public in terms of the practical arrangements at the agency level, particularly in view of the fact that this was one of the primary intentions of Congress in passing TREAD. At the September meeting, Public Citizen asked NHTSA about the approximate length of time between manufacturer submission and publication of the data. NHTSA officials did not have a clear answer. NHTSA must present a clear plan outlining how it will make information public in the most expeditious way possible. The public needs to know that the data are current and what the lag time will be between receipt and release of information.

The format must also be exceedingly clear. Two of NHTSA’s current public databases, the National Automotive Sampling System (NASS) and the Consumer Complaint database (which is a compilation of Vehicle Owner Questionnaires submitted by consumers to NHTSA) are very problematic when evaluated for public access and ease of use. The NASS, while tremendously informative, is difficult, if not impossible, to navigate and use without formal training in its particular rules and data parameters. Therefore, while this database is publicly available, it is not yet truly publicly accessible.

We presume that feedback from the public about the early warning data will – to the extent it concerns particular make/model alleged defects – be placed in the VOQ database and referenced in the early warning databse. Thus, it is more important then ever that the VOQ database be accurate, not duplicative, and readily accessible.

Public Citizen is very concerned about the inaccuracies in NHTSA's current VOQ database, and the potential for those types of inaccuracies to be replicated in the early warning database. In our comments to the agency's Notice of Proposed Rule Making (NPRM) on early warning, Public Citizen described the difficulties our researchers experienced in researching Ford/Firestone defects using the agency’s consumer complaint database. In the VOQ database, we found "many examples of inaccurately coded files, confusingly worded complaint categories, and an inadequate system of cross-references which failed in many cases to produce repeatable findings when using slightly altered keywords." Similarly, the DOT OIG report notes that "the defect database contains incorrectly recorded information and does not contain complete information regarding a potential defect."

Not only is the VOQ database riddled with errors, it also does not permit multiple field searches. A visitor to that site must know the year, make, and model of an automobile (in that order) to determine the number of consumer complaints pertaining to their problem. It is very time-consuming to search for complaints across models of different years or for similar components in different years, makes, and/or models. Public Citizen urges NHTSA to develop a consumer-friendly database for early warning information, so that citizens will be able to search it easily for evidence of problems affecting their own vehicle, as Congress intended. This will benefit the agency as well because it will collect helpful feedback from consumers.

Public Citizen is not alone in voicing concerns about the agency's current blueprint for implementation of the early warning system. During the September meeting, a representative from the Rubber Manufacturer's Association (RMA) asked NHTSA about a flaw in the design of the database that raises the specter of duplicative data.

The RMA representative asked whether or not manufacturers were supposed to separately submit field reports, warranty claims, consumer complaints, etc., if the various types of documents all referenced the same automobile and potential defect-related incident. Because the same incident may generate a consumer complaint, warranty claim, and death or injury, or example, Public Citizen and a few other manufacturer representatives also questioned whether the agency’s guidelines for submission would produce duplicative data fields across categories, skewing the statistics by littering the fields with duplicative notices of defects. In response to these concerns, NHTSA officials said only that all reports must be filed in each category, whether or not the reports refer to identical automobiles and defects.

Public Citizen recognizes the potential importance and necessity of collecting each of these types of claims separately and as a category in toto. However, to make the most sense out of this information, the field encoded in the various data categories must include data that may serve as a "bridge" between categories, such as a VIN or TIN, or the date of occurrence.

In NHTSA's final rule on the early warning reporting system, the agency requires manufacturers to submit a VIN or TIN only if the manufacture is reporting a death. In addition, NHTSA's published prototype of the early warning spreadsheets asks for submission of VIN or TIN only on the "Death/Injury" worksheet. The agency's failure to require this information as to other categories is a troubling and serious mistake. Using VINs or TINs to link identical cases is one of the simplest ways to alleviate problems with duplicative or redundant reporting both within and between categories while allowing multiple fields to stand on their own and continue to be available for analysis.

As the manufacturer representative from Ford Motor Company stated at the early warning meeting, the automakers have VIN/TIN information and routinely use it to "clean" their data and as a tool for organizing their own data sets internally. In fact, manufacturers’ internal data collection systems include checks for obviously erroneous VINs and TINs and a process for correcting the internal record so as to keep tracking consistent, according to the industry representatives who attended the agency’s meeting. VINs or TINs should be required to be reported for all categories so that the early warning database could link reports across format type (warranty claims, death/injury reports, consumer complaints, etc.). Since the manufacturers have and use this information in their internal records, it should be no problem to submit it with their reports.

There is an easy and obvious solution. Manufacturers should submit to NHTSA a data set for consumer complaints that is reflective of the true number of complaints, and NHTSA must require that the manufacturers shoulder this responsibility to clean the data. This means manufacturers could compare their own consumer complaints to NHTSA’s VOQ database by VIN/TIN number, or date of occurrence in the absence of the VIN//TIN, remove the duplicates, and net out the total number of complaints. A data set that is fundamentally irreconcilable with NHTSA’s VOQ database, which does include VINs, and that has not been reconciled with the manufacturer’s own records, is far less useful as a system for raising flags on potential defects. The integrity of data in the early warning database must be assured, and such assurances must be designed into the requirements as to the information to be submitted by manufacturers. Statutory authority for such a requirement may be found the in the early warning section itself; Congress explicitly gave NHTSA the authority to require that manufacturers do analysis of the information to be submitted.

Furthermore, the agency should require a "date of reported incident" file or some other field which could capture specific chronological information. This would enhance the connective potential within the database once VIN and TIN are required and provide a basic check upon the accuracy of the VINs and TINs submitted. It would also provide an opportunity to discover the link between pieces of data if a VIN or TIN is not provided.

Public Citizen is in agreement with some voices from industry regarding the need for these crucial changes. In its petition for reconsideration, the Rubber Manufacturers of America suggests that NHTSA include TIN numbers in their categories for reporting. They note that:

[T]he identification of tires to include only manufacturer, tire model, and tire size will actually be inclusive of multiple SKUs, multiple type codes, multiple speed and load ratings, and multiple tire constructions….Without the TIN, in other words, the data could only be completed by tire line and size and would have questionable accuracy and therefore limited benefit to NHTSA.

Without question, inclusion of TINs as a requirement will clarify information about the specific product under evaluation.

The information submitted to NHTSA will be far more accurate and useful if it includes TIN and/or VIN numbers. It is, in fact, fundamental to the creation of a workable database that NHTSA require manufacturers to include VIN or TIN numbers in all categories of reporting, rather than only in death or injury cases. The agency's guidelines for manufacturers and early warning submission spreadsheets must include this requirement.

We also suggest that the agency streamline and clearly organize the data collected, as explored below. Ideally, NHTSA will collect the broadest scope of information which can be easily processed to produce the most accurate results.

The omission by the agency of a requirement for submission of VINs, TINs and date of incident across all data categories is particularly troubling in light of the fact that NHTSA regularly sends the updated contents of its VOQ database to the manufacturers. Because this communication will certainly constitute "notice’ of a defect allegation under NHTSA’s early warning rules, the manufacturers must then re-submit that same information as part of their data submissions back to NHTSA, alongside complaints made only to the manufacturer. Because the early warning database will therefore entirely subsume the agency’s current consumer complaint/VOQ database, it is imperative that NHTSA require the manufacturers to clean this data before submitting it to the early warning database.

Our concerns were raised by an exchange at the September meeting, at which Public Citizen asked a question about whether manufacturers were receiving VOQs from NHTSA each month. Although NHTSA officials did not answer the question clearly, representatives of Ford Motor Company acknowledged that they do receive these complaints and integrate them into their databases, as stated above. Ford also currently integrates the VOQs given to them by NHTSA as consumer complaints into its internal database, eliminating duplicate reports by VIN number. NHTSA should require the submission of data that have been cleaned in this way by all manufacturers, and submission of VINs and TINs should be required to alleviate any possible difficulty with redundant submissions in the consumer complaint category of the database.

In its NPRM, NHTSA suggested an extension of the existing record retention requirement for vehicle manufacturers from five to ten years. Incredibly, the final rule back-pedaled, keeping the statutory recordkeeping at five years.

It is a shame that NHTSA has allowed this indefensible watering-down of the NPRM. Numerous tragic lawsuits, among other evidence, demonstrate the failings of this short-sighted approach, including the Ford/Firestone fiasco, in which documents dating from as early as 1989 came to light in 2000 and clearly showed that Ford engineers were aware of the Explorer’s handling problems in proving ground tests. These documents were viewed as critical evidence of Ford’s knowledge that the Explorer was an unsafe vehicle during the Congressional hearings leading up to the TREAD Act.

Moreover, it is incoherent to maintain a recordkeeping requirement that is shorter than the ten-year allowable period for a free remedy for vehicle defects, as extended from eight years under the TREAD Act, see 49 § 30120(g)(1). Surely, defect investigations undertaken by the agency would benefit greatly from the availability of decision-related documents from the date of the vehicle’s manufacture. As Congress extended the remedy period in view of the public’s experience during the decade-long Ford/Firestone cover-up, indicating the relevance of this extended period in light of the facts, NHTSA should, similarly, fulfill the mandates of the Safety and TREAD Acts and extend the manufacturer’s record retention requirements to ten years.

During the September 24^th meeting, Kenneth Weinstein, NHTSA's Associate Administrator for Safety Assurance, was asked about the length of time for manufacturers to submit corrections or clarifying information asked for by NHTSA after the initial submission of quarterly reports. Mr. Weinstein responded that NHTSA would take manufacturers on their "good faith" to return further information requested by NHTSA in a timely manner. This statement appeared to indicate that, if a manufacturer submits insufficient or incorrect data, they will be given an unspecified amount of time to respond.

This lax approach is clearly inappropriate, given the availability of criminal penalties for deliberate misstatements to the agency under federal law, 18 U.S.C. § 1001, and the agency's safe harbor for correction of those statements under the moribund criminal provisions in the TREAD Act. NHTSA must instead set strict deadlines for resubmission.

In fact, NHTSA’s rule does not allow the discretion that Mr. Weinstein suggests. In the final rule, NHTSA states that its supplemental reporting of system, component, VIN or TIN after an submission of information should be submitted "in the report covering the reporting period in which [it] is identified." In line with this requirement, the agency should also require that manufacturers submit corrections or clarifying reports to NHTSA in the first quarterly report following notice of the need for such correction or clarification.

The early warning final rule does not require manufacturers to update database submissions if an injury that is noted in one quarter becomes a death in a future quarter. Instead, NHTSA's Final Rule states that "…if a manufacturer has reported an incident to us involving an injury and the injured person later dies, we will not require a supplemental report. This last scenario was specifically identified by several commenters as possibly creating a significant burden."

Public Citizen does not agree that this information gathering creates a "significant burden." As the reporting requirement only applies if manufacturers are on notice of such a change, the burden is merely to pass along such information, already in its possession, to NHTSA. Moreover, manufacturers are typically very well informed in such a case. When individuals are seriously injured in crashes and there is an allegation that a defect or problem with the vehicle was at fault, manufacturers undertake in-depth investigations and analysis.

Manufacturers are thus generally well aware when an injury escalates into a fatality. They should be accountable for reporting all deaths associated with defects in their vehicles or due to their products, as to which they are on notice, not solely the ones that occur near in time to the crash. If a person dies after being injured in a crash – be it ten seconds or ten months – after the incident, and there is an allegation or is proof that the death was caused by a possible defect in the manufacturer's product, that death should be reported as such, and the number of recorded injuries adjusted. Surely, this is just another category of information as to which the manufacturers must be responsible for updating the agency if the data becomes obsolete or has changed.

Without this provision, NHTSA's database will be incomplete, and manufacturers will be unjustifiably freed from fully reporting the deaths that result from possible defects in their products. Unfortunately, the policy as now written will give manufacturers the incentive to rush to report injuries to avoid later reporting a death thereby playing misleading games with the early warning statistics. Requiring an update of death statistics will produce a fuller picture of the impact of a safety defect and is necessary to fully implement TREAD.

Although data in the Fatal Accident Reporting System (FARS) database records a death only if it occurs within 30 days of a crash, there is no reason that the agency’s guidelines for the early warning database must be the same. This is not a data integrity issue — on the contrary, in this case the wider scope of data collected by the early warning system could be used as an analytical gloss on the data assembled by FARS, and help to show the cases omitted by that system due to the limitations on its data parameters.

5. Lawsuits should be reported and any reported claims that subsequently become lawsuits should be reported as such.

TREAD mandates that the Secretary of Transportation promulgate a rule creating an early warning database to which manufacturers will submit information on all claims submitted to them. Lawsuits against manufacturers, therefore, should necessarily be included in the information manufacturers submit to NHTSA. Incredibly, NHTSA’s proposed early warning spreadsheets do not currently include columns under which legal claims will be noted. Furthermore, the agency’s final rule does not include a provision mandating that claims data be updated if events resulting in property claims or injury claims become the basis of a lawsuit.

The agency’s initial notice of public rulemaking (NPRM) included a proposal requiring manufacturers to submit copies of complaints filed by plaintiffs with a court. While we agree that the complaint itself need not be submitted, the core facts must be put in the database (i.e., complaint filed, date, parties and location filed). This provision was opposed by manufacturers and dropped from NHTSA’s final rule. It is not in keeping with the intent of Congress in its passage of TREAD, however, to abandon all requirements for reporting lawsuits related to claims against manufacturers. NHTSA should mandate that manufacturers specify which submitted claims are connected to lawsuits. Including numerical counts of legal claims in the early warning database will not be publicizing previously secret information – basic information about legal claims is already publicly available because they are filed in court.

The agency should also mandate that that manufacturers update their submissions as the status of their claims change (e.g., a specific property claim becomes grounds for a lawsuit against the company.) These changes should be submitted along with the other updates currently mandated by NTHSA.

Public Citizen suggests that the agency amend its currently proposed spreadsheets to include a category under which the manufacturer will be required to note whether or not the claim is connected to a lawsuit. This category could be treated, on the spreadsheet, in the same way that categories such as "Model Year," "VIN" or "Incident Date" are.

The agency's current proposal concerning the use of international death statistics is problematic. Unless baseline-manufacturing statistics for these markets are also reported, these deaths cannot be deemed statistically relevant, thus necessarily rendering the reporting of these deaths far less useful to ODI. NHTSA should require basic manufacturing statistics from those multinational companies that are also required to report on deaths abroad.

Ford submitted a series of questions to NHTSA just prior to the September 24^th meeting. One question asked: "May we consider Car Rental Agencies and Roadside Assistance the same as insurance company data and not reportable?" Kenneth Weinstein responded that rental car agencies should be considered a subsidiary for reporting requirements if it is owned by the manufacturer. He also explained that reporting should be done, in this case, as if it were a fleet report.

NHTSA's explanation of the final rule included this clarification:

…[W]e did not propose to require reporting by such entities [insurance providers, financing providers, or car rental companies]. However, if a vehicle manufacturer decided for any reason to move the location where it receives or stores relevant vehicle safety-related records, including its information management system, to such a subsidiary or affiliate, then the early warning rule would require a search of that subsidiary's or affiliate's records.

NHTSA should publish guidelines clarifying the reporting requirements for rental car agencies and other subsidiaries, such as financing subsidiaries such as GMAC.

8. Manufacturers should report all models even if some vehicles weigh above 10,000 GVWR

9. Oral communications from dealers and others in the field must be reported

Manufacturers are required, under the current early warning system, to submit to NHTSA copies of reports sent to the field. This new mandate was intended by Congress to address an issue arising during consideration of the TREAD Act. As the Ford/Firestone tragedy developed, it became evident that numerous communications between dealers and Ford had raised evidence pointing to the existence of a defect or set of defects throughout the early to mid-90s and beyond.

In passing TREAD, Congress intended to fix the agency's blind spot in this area by enlarging the scope of the existing law concerning communications between manufacturers and dealers. Under the early warning final rule, however, manufacturers will only be required to submit written field reports and are exempt from having to document or submit information regarding oral communications that have the potential to carry information similar to field reports.

In contrast, manufacturers are required to submit records of both written and oral consumer complaints. The agency's final rule also notes "there are far fewer field reports than consumer complaints." The burden of recording oral communications, thus, has already been placed on manufacturers. Documenting oral communication that is substantially similar to field reports should therefore not be too challenging a task for manufacturers. Under current law at 49 U.S.C. §§ 30101 et seq., manufacturers must also provide to NHTSA a copy of "each communication to the manufacturer’s dealers or to owners or purchasers of a motor vehicle . . .about a defect or noncompliance . . .in a vehicle."

Strong evidence that manufacturers will abuse this rule is documented in a deposition conducted by C. Tab Turner of employee’s of Value-Rent-A-Car in Florida, concerning rollover problems the company was experiencing with its Ford Motor Company Aerostar minivans. The relevant portions of the transcript are below:

DIRECT EXAMINATION BY MR. TURNER:

11 Q. At some point, Mr. Cline, and just kind of moving right to
12 the issues that you're here to talk about, at some point in
13 time, while you were employed at Value Rent-A-Car, did you
14 personally become involved in conversations with Ford Motor
15 Company about the Aerostar minivan?
16 A. Yes, I did.
8 Q. Let me see how I can ask this so -- did you personally
9 have the correspondence, the communication with the person from
10 Ford Motor Company about the communications from Mr. Salagaj?
11 A. Yes, sir, I did.
12 Q. What did they tell him?
13 A. They asked us not to put any more of this correspondence
14 in writing, to only speak to them face-to-face about these
15 problems.

In Public Citizen's comments to the NPRM, we asked NHTSA to close this loophole allowing oral communications between the manufacturer and the dealer to fall through the reporting cracks. NHTSA should craft the regulations regarding oral communications in awareness of the demonstrated history of manufacturer action of barest compliance with the words, rather than the spirit, of reporting rules. Permitting oral communication to go unreported will allow manufacturers to elude the agency’s oversight by merely calling in reports they would otherwise write and be required to submit. Information about oral communication must be collected, closing this dangerous loophole.

Some automobile components are used across various makes and models of vehicles. Therefore, it is possible that a single component could be defective in numerous makes and/or models of vehicles. In its comments, Public Citizen has continually stressed the importance of reporting specific component information specifically for this reason. Under the current system, it is possible that a defective component could be recalled for one model of a vehicle and not for another because there is no system that tracks cross-model components, thereby thwarting the purpose of the new early warning authority.

The database housing the information submitted to NHTSA must have the capacity to track identical components across makes and models, so that defective components can be identified across make and model. Component information will be recorded, as per NHTSA's prototype early warning worksheet, in the "deaths/injuries" category. The agency should extend this requirement by collecting component information in the other reporting categories that are manufacturer-originated as well, such as warranty claims, property damage claims, etc. NHTSA should also make it possible for component-related information to be linked across make and model within the database. Where known to the manufacturer, they should be required to identify components as well as the systems at issue.

Conclusion

The agency’s extensive efforts towards meeting the intent of the Congress in enacting the TREAD Act are reflected in its final rule, its September 24^th meeting, and the draft early warning spreadsheets published on the Internet. In a few key areas, as outlined above, the agency's specific blueprint for reporting must be refined to enable the development of a truly comprehensive and accurate catalog of safety defects.

By publishing more specific guidelines for compliance with the final rule on early warning reporting, by intelligently and expeditiously moving forward to complete the agency’s public early warning database system, and by integrating processes for speedy public disclosure of information into that system, NHTSA will fulfill the true intent of Congress in its passage of TREAD Act and greatly enhance the universe of information available to consumers to prevent unnecessary deaths and injuries.

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