Former National Highway Traffic Safety Administrator Mark Rosekind referred to the final years of the Obama administration as the era of Big Recall, but safety groups are concerned that the age of muscular enforcement of federal rules for auto safety may come to an end under President Donald Trump.
Obama’s second term saw record fines for automakers: General Motors Co. was forced to pay a then-record $900 million fine over its handling of vehicles with a dangerous ignition-switch defect ultimately linked to 124 deaths and hundreds of injuries.
Volkswagen Group paid $2.8 billion in criminal fines and $1.5 billion in civil penalties for programming its diesel cars to trick federal testers into believing the engines released far less pollution into the air than they do.
Additionally, Japanese air bag manufacturer Takata Corp. was fined $200 million and agreed to pay $1 billion in criminal penalties over faulty air-bag inflators that could rupture in humid conditions. In the case of Volkswagen and Takata, criminal charges were filed against the companies.
John Simpson, privacy project director at the Santa Monica, California-based Consumer Watchdog group, said he fears the Trump administration will put the damper on the aggressive enforcement of federal statutes that allow regulators to levy hefty fines against automakers who are found to have safety violations.
The Takata air bag enforcement action under Mark Rosekind was an excellent example of NHTSA working on behalf of consumers, something that happens all too infrequently,Simpson said. The fact that President Trump hasn’t even bothered to name a NHTSA administration does not bode well for consumers. I fear NHTSA will be nothing more than a handmaiden for the auto industry during his time in office.
Rosekind, the former NHTSA, administrator declined to comment on the Trump administration’s plans for auto regulation. He said in a high-profile speech in his final year in office that big fines and large recalls that marked the tail end of the Obama administration were not automatically a sign of success for auto regulators.
The era of Big Recall is not a sign of progress for us, Rosekind said in a speech at a meeting of the Society of Automotive Engineers in January 2016. Record civil penalties are not a metric of success. If we’re levying a big fine, it means there has been a safety crisis.
Rosekind promised in the 2016 speech to change the culture at the highway safety administration and encourage automakers to be more forthcoming with reporting potential safety problems early during his final year in office.
Read more of the original article at The Detroit News.
