A Regulator Takes Aim at Hazards of S.U.V.'s

December 22, 2002
By DANNY HAKIM

DETROIT

MR. JEFFREY RUNGE had seen many cases like Sarah
Longstreet's in the 20 years he served as an emergency room
physician in Charlotte, N.C. But this one was as tragic as
any he remembered: Ms. Longstreet, a 17-year-old on her way
to high school, was killed when a 1991 Ford Explorer
collided with her Mazda sedan head-on.

The accident occurred just two months before Dr. Runge's
departure to Washington to become the Bush administration's
top traffic safety official. And it reinforced what has
become one of his main missions: addressing the dangers
that S.U.V.'s and other trucks pose to occupants of
passenger cars.

"The theory that I'm going to protect myself and my family
even if it costs other people's lives has been the
operative incentive for the design of these vehicles, and
that's just wrong," said Dr. Runge, the administrator of
the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (known
by its abbreviation and pronounced NIT-sa), in a recent
interview.

"Not to sound like a politician, but that's not
compassionate conservatism."

Now Dr. Runge's agency is reviewing several safety issues
involving sport utility vehicles that could have
wide-ranging implications for motorists and automakers.
Detroit's Big Three, especially, derive a lopsided share of
their slim profits from these vehicles.

Intent as he is on attacking the dangers of S.U.V.'s, Dr.
Runge is still part of an administration that is not
enamored of regulation. Yet he says that if he cannot
address this nettlesome problem, his agency has little
purpose.

Some automakers have already taken steps to make S.U.V.'s
safer, for other drivers and for their own occupants. But
to Dr. Runge, there is much more to be done. As head of the
traffic safety agency, he has the authority to set vehicle
safety standards, though they are reviewed by the Office of
Management and Budget, whose administrator, John D. Graham,
rejected a tire safety proposal in February. Automakers
will undoubtedly continue to put up a determined fight if
they feel that their cash cows are threatened.

But Dr. Runge's mission is just part of an effort by
regulators and insurers to rethink auto safety in a country
increasingly dominated by light trucks, the government
designation for S.U.V.'s, pickups and minivans. Although
light trucks now outsell cars - and account for nearly 40
percent of vehicles on the road, versus 15 percent in 1976,
according to R. L. Polk & Company - auto safety standards
still reflect a car-dominated society. Government crash
tests, which began in the late 1970's, principally gauge
how well vehicles of all kinds fare in collisions with
cars.

Next month, a panel assembled by Dr. Runge will suggest
measures to address the threat of S.U.V.'s and pickups to
passenger cars.

Meanwhile, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, a
coalition of auto insurers, has started a series of
side-impact tests to see how cars and small S.U.V.'s stand
up when hit by bigger S.U.V.'s. The first results are
expected in April. But the insurers' group concedes that
without supplemental testing or standards imposed by the
government, their testing could actually lead manufacturers
to make small S.U.V.'s bigger and worsen the problem.

What, exactly, is the problem?

There are two related
issues, known in the industry as compatibility and
aggressivity. The first involves how different vehicles
match up in a collision, and the second involves one
vehicle's ability to inflict damage on others. S.U.V.'s
ride higher off the ground than passenger cars, and their
bumpers, engines, frame rails and hoods are higher. This
mismatch puts the occupants of cars at a disadvantage
because a colliding S.U.V. can skip over many protective
features, like the sill of the passenger door.

Big S.U.V.'s are built on stiff steel frames and are more
unforgiving than cars in collisions. The results can be
seen in statistics. When a light truck hits a car in the
side, an occupant of the car is 29 times more likely to die
than a person in the truck, Dr. Runge said. When a car hits
a light truck in the side, occupants have an even chance of
dying.

 
HE industry has started, slowly, to address these issues.
The Ford Motor Company, for instance, lowered the frame
rails and front bumper of its 2002 Explorer by about two
inches so it is closer in height to car bumpers, like that
of Ms. Longstreet's Mazda 626. "It improves the situation,"
said Jim Boland, Ford's manager for advanced safety and
regulations. "If you were to line up a Taurus bumper with
an Explorer bumper, you would see there is significant
overlap there. It would not be a guaranteed override."

Lowering a bumper does not necessarily lower the spot where
force is centralized - a far more important factor, Dr.
Runge said.

"They can plot where the maximum force is being delivered,"
he said, adding that some standard is needed to make cars
and light trucks match each other better.

Automakers have hardly been a friend of new regulation,
particularly when it might force them to rethink how they
make S.U.V.'s.

"Compatibility is an issue the industry has been focusing
on for several years now," said Robert S. Strassburger,
vice president for safety at the Alliance of Automobile
Manufacturers, an industry lobbying group. "Everybody has
activities and countermeasures that they are incorporating
into their vehicles. The general philosophy is making sure
you're enhancing self-protection. The question from NHTSA's
point of view is if there is a need to go beyond
self-protection and look at what countermeasures can be
taken with respect to the striking vehicles."

Regarding the kind of compatibility standard envisioned by
Dr. Runge, Mr. Strassburger added: "We understand that's
what NHTSA is looking at. As an industry, I don't know if
we are ready to say if that's an appropriate way to
proceed."

The traffic safety agency is also seeking ways to make
S.U.V.'s and other light trucks safer for their own
occupants. It is reviewing existing testing on rollovers
and the crashworthiness of roofs.

S.U.V.'s roll over three times as often as cars, because
they ride higher off the ground and have a higher center of
gravity, counteracting the benefit of being bigger. The
safety agency is trying to come up with a more demanding
test for rollovers.

Many safety advocates say the government needs to be much
more aggressive in updating its crash tests and its minimum
performance standards. "These behemoth vehicles have to be
redesigned," said Joan Claybrook, president of Public
Citizen, a consumer advocacy group, and the former head of
the traffic safety agency in the Carter administration.
"You need to redesign them to improve fuel economy, reduce
aggressivity, make them less likely to roll over and make
them more crashworthy when they do.`

To simulate the impact of an S.U.V., the insurers'
side-impact test will use a moving barrier that is a full
foot higher and 250 pounds heavier than in a similar test
performed by the government.

"We've been talking to manufacturers about this program and
sharing our developmental test results for close to two
years," said Brian O'Neill, the president of the Insurance
Institute for Highway Safety.

"It's fair to say virtually all manufacturers have run
tests that are similar to our side-impact tests," Mr.
O'Neill said, though he added that engineers at two
manufacturers told him they could not get the money to make
changes until the insurers forced the issue with testing.

But Mr. O'Neill added that insurers' tests could not be as
comprehensive a solution as the government could offer.
Taken alone, he said, they could have some negative impact
because they examine only how individual vehicles stand up
to collisions with bigger vehicles. Manufacturers could
make their vehicles perform better on the insurers' tests
by building them heavier. But heavier vehicles, in turn,
could be more harmful to smaller, lighter ones.

"We're looking at it in a different context" from the
government, Mr. O'Neill said. "Any time you start pushing
self-protection improvements, there is a question whether
it makes it worse for people in other vehicles. If you add
500 pounds in one vehicle, what does it do to another?"

 
HAT gap in the insurers' test is a crucial area for
government action, Ms. Claybrook says. She wants the
government to force automakers to design their S.U.V.'s
less like tanks and to make them absorb more energy in
collisions.

"The S.U.V.'s on the road today," she said, "are needlessly
heavy and very aggressive."

What happened to Sarah Longstreet was a textbook case of
the S.U.V.'s danger to cars. Ms. Longstreet was a petite
redhead who organized Bible clubs and baby-sat. She often
teasingly fined her friends for not wearing seat belts,
though she was too nice to collect.

On the morning of April 12, 2001, Ms. Longstreet was
driving a 1996 Mazda 626 to East Mecklenburg High School,
traveling west on a four-lane road. According to the
initial report from the Charlotte-Mecklenburg police, an
eastbound Ford Explorer, swerving to avoid another car,
clipped a school bus and veered into the car driven by Ms.
Longstreet, who was traveling to school with three friends.


"This was a clear case of override, where the S.U.V. rode
over the hood of the car and killed her instantly," said
Dr. Runge, who did not have a chance to treat Ms.
Longstreet but does remember her three friends in the
hospital asking: "Where is she? Where is she?"

"This case," he added, "crystallized why I was here."

No
charges were filed, and Ms. Longstreet's parents decided
not to press a civil case. "We felt like the Lord allowed
this accident to occur," Marjorie Longstreet, Sarah's
mother, said. "We felt that those people involved in the
accident were not breaking the law. They were not drunk or
on drugs. From what I can understand it was pure
carelessness. We all make mistakes on the road."

Dr. Runge, though, said he felt that at least one important
part of the accident was preventable, and that he could do
something to make such accidents less likely in the future.


"This was an angel who got plucked off the face of the
earth," he said. "But to me, this is not an act of God;
this is a preventable incident. If the geometry of the
S.U.V. had been different, she with her belt and her air
bag could have walked away from it."

"If it's not preventable," he added, "why have a NHTSA?" 



http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/22/business/yourmoney/22SAFE.html?ex=1041630612&ei=1&en=f559454a764c6bd9