Safety Remain Big Issue as 2015 Draws to Close with Flurry of Recalls

The Detroit Bureau

From Ferrari to Subaru, the auto industry is ending 2015 with a flurry of safety-related recalls, more than 1 million in the last week alone.

Final figures for 2015 haven’t been released yet, but they’re expected to come in as a close second to the record 64 million vehicles recalled in the U.S. in 2014. And they cover a wide variety of issues and an even wider range of vehicles from faulty transmissions to fire hazards and exploding airbags.

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The huge number of recalls over the last two years is not a surprise to Joan Claybrook, a former head of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. “The companies are more likely to behave and do a recall when they know the law is going to be enforced.”

Since the beginning of the decade, when Toyota was faulted for delaying a series of recalls related to so-called unintended acceleration, federal regulators have been cracking down on safety problems. They’ve announced a number of large fines, including $70 million for Chrysler and another $40 million for BMW, in just the last 30 days.

And, under the new Federal Highway Act passed by Congress earlier in December, the NHTSA now has the authority to levy fines of up to $105 million for each violation, three times as much as before.

“The penalty for a failure to do a recall is going way up,” said Claybrook. “That may be encouraging manufacturers to get these things behind them.”

If a $105 million fine by NHTSA isn’t enough, the U.S. Justice Department has been adding its substantial weight to the enforcement effort. Toyota paid $1.2 billion as part of a settlement with prosecutors as a result of the unintended acceleration scandal. General Motors was fined $900 million as the result of a criminal investigation related to its long-delayed ignition switch recall.

GM also paid out nearly $600 million to settle claims filed with a special victims’ compensation fund set up on orders of CEO Mary Barra. More than 100 people are now believed to have died as a result of the flawed ignition switch.

As of last week, NHTSA said it now knows of nine people killed – eight in the U.S. – as a result of potentially faulty Takata ignition switches. That problem – which can see shrapnel sprayed into the passenger compartment when the bags inflate improperly during a crash – has led to the recall of about 20 million vehicles so far.

Read more of the original article in The Detroit Bureau

 

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