Rearview-safety rules stuck

Kids’ lives at stake in vehicle visibility, but delays mount up

Judy Neiman holds a photo of her daughter, Sydnee, in front of her 2006 Cadillac Escalade three days before Christmas at her home in West Richland, Wash. Sydnee died in late 2011 after Neiman accidentally backed over her with the SUV.

Judy Neiman holds a photo of her daughter, Sydnee, in front of her 2006 Cadillac Escalade three days before Christmas at her home in West Richland, Wash. Sydnee died in late 2011 after Neiman accidentally backed over her with the SUV.

Sunday, December 30, 2012

— The memories come back to Judy Neiman: The SUV door slamming. A slight bump as she backed up in the bank parking lot. The emergency room doctor’s sobs as he said her 9-year-old daughter Sydnee, who previously had survived four open-heart surgeries, would not make it this time.

Her own cries of: How could I have missed seeing her?

The 53-year-old woman is now making a plea for more steps by the government and automakers toward improving the visibility behind passenger vehicles to help prevent such fatal backing accidents

The government estimates accidents while backing up kill some 228 people every year — 110 of them children age 10 and under — and injures another 17,000.

In 2008, Republican President George W. Bush signed a law that passed in Congress with strong bipartisan backing that called for new manufacturing requirements to help prevent parents and others from accidentally killing someone while in reverse.

“They have to do something because I’ve read about it happening to other people. I read about it and I said, ‘I would die if it happens to me,”’ Neiman of West Richland, Wash., says. “Then it did happen to me.”

But almost five years later, the standards have yet to be mandated because of delays by the U.S. Department of Transportation, which faced a Feb. 28, 2011, deadline to issue the new guidelines. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood has pushed back that deadline three times — promising in February that the rules would be issued by year’s end.

With still no action, safety advocates and anguished parents such as Neiman are asking: What’s taking so long to remedy a problem recognized by government regulators and automakers for decades now?

The proposed regulations call for expanding the field of view for cars, vans, SUVs and pickup trucks so that drivers can see directly behind their vehicles when in reverse — requiring, in most cases, rearview cameras and video displays as standard equipment.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, charged with completing the new standards, declined requests to discuss the delays.

Spokesman Karen Aldana said the agency would not comment while the rulemaking process was ongoing, but was on track to meet LaHood’s latest cutoff date. In a letter to lawmakers in February, LaHood said his agency needed more time for “research and data analysis” to “ensure that the final rule is appropriate and the underlying analysis is robust.”

Others insist that the issues are money and reluctance to put any additional financial burdens on an industry crippled by the economic crisis. Development of the new safety standards came even as the Obama administration was pumping billions of dollars into the industry as part of its bailout package.

“They don’t want to look at anything that will cost more money for the automobile industry,” said Packy Campbell, a former Republican state lawmaker from New Hampshire who lobbied for the law.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has estimated that making rear cameras standard on every car would add $58 to $88 to the price of vehicles already equipped with dashboard display screens and $159 to $203 for those without them.

The Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, a lobbying group that represents automakers, puts the total cost to the industry at about $2 billion a year. Last December, the group met with White House budget officials to propose a less expensive alternative: reserving cameras for vehicles with extra-large blind zones and outfitting the rest with curved, wide-angle exterior mirrors.

The alliance declined to comment, but earlier this year the group’s vice president, Gloria Bergquist, told The Associated Press that it urged the government to explore more options as a way to reduce the costs passed on to consumers.

Industry analysts also question whether cameras are needed on smaller, entrylevel class cars with better rearview visibility.

“It may just be a couple hundred dollars, but it can grow pretty significantly if you are talking about ... an inexpensive car that was not originally conceived to have all these electronics and was only going to have a simple car stereo,” said Roger Lanctot, an automotive technology specialist.

Before the delays, all new passenger vehicles were to carry cameras and video displays by September 2014. The industry is now seeking two more years after the final rules are published to reach full compliance.

Despite its resistance, the industry on its own has been installing rearview cameras, a feature first popularized two decades ago in Japan and standard on nearly 70 percent of new cars produced there this year. In the United States, 44 percent of 2012 models came with rear cameras standard, and 27 percent had them as options, according to the automotive research firm Edmunds.

Nine in 10 new cars had console screens available, according to market research firm iSuppli, which would put the price of adding a camera on the low end of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s estimates.

Backing crashes are hardly a new phenomenon.

Emergency-room doctors, the National Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the highway safety administration have produced dozens of papers on the problem since the 1980s.

Researchers at the University of California, Irvine, started looking into the issue in the 1990s after noticing toddlers showing up in hospital databases of injured child pedestrians. They found that many of those children had been killed or hurt by vehicles backing out of home driveways.

In 1993, the safety administration sponsored several studies that noted the disproportionate effect of backup accidents on child victims. One report explored sensors and cameras as possible solutions, noting the accidents “involve slow closing speeds and, thus, may be preventable.” Still another 1993 report estimated that 100 to 200 pedestrians are killed each year from backing crashes, most of them children.

Three years later, Dee Norton, a reporter at The Seattle Times, petitioned the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to require improved mirrors on smaller commercial trucks and vans after his 3-yearold grandson was killed by a diaper-delivery truck that backed over him.

The safety administration started looking into technology as a solution, but in one proposal — issued in November 2000 — it noted that sensors, cameras and monitors were still expensive and promised to later re-evaluate the feasibility of such emerging technologies.

Adding to the scrutiny were studies by Consumer Reports magazine. Its research found an overall trend of worsening rear visibility — due in part to designs favoring small windows and high trunk lines, said Tom Mutchler, the magazine’s automotive engineer.

With a growing body of research, better statistics and inaction by regulators, advocates turned to Congress for a solution.

In 2003, U.S. Rep. Peter King, R-New York, introduced the Cameron Gulbransen Kids and Cars Safety Act, named for a 2-year-old Long Island boy whose pediatrician father backed over him in their driveway. Five years later, it finally became law.

While no one doubts that cameras could help reduce deaths, they aren’t regarded as a perfect solution either.

One recent study by a researcher at Oregon State University found that only one in five drivers used a rearview camera when it was available, but 88 percent of those who did avoided striking a childsize decoy in research setups for drivers.

In its proposed rule, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimated that rearview video systems could substantially reduce fatal backing crashes — by at least 95 a year — and result in at least 7,000 fewer injuries.

Information for this report was contributed by Joan Lowy of The Associated Press.

Business, Pages 61 on 12/30/2012