(iStock photo)
Without saying why, federal traffic safety officials have quietly altered crash data, revealing that more than three times as many people die in wrecks linked to tire failures than previously acknowledged.
For several years, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration stated that the annual death toll from tire-related crashes was 200. Then last year NHTSA abruptly ramped up the estimate, stating on its website that 719 people had died in 2015 in such crashes.
The change went virtually unnoticed and even now might pass for a minor record-keeping error. The reason it matters is that the agency used the unrealistically low estimate to justify a decision not to seek stronger tire safety standards.
Safety advocates have long urged NHTSA to adopt a tire-aging rule that would require manufacturers to provide expiration dates so consumers would know when to replace tires. Their reasoning is that a tire may have enough tread to appear safe but still be dangerously old and at risk of failure.
In March 2014, NHTSA announced that it would not propose an aging rule, in part because recently adopted safety standards already had achieved a remarkable 50 percent reduction in tire-related crash deaths, to an average of 195 per year. Therefore, according to the agency’s report, additional rules were unnecessary.
But later that year, an independent statistician named Randy Whitfield presented a study to the National Transportation Safety Board citing serious flaws in NHTSA’s analysis.
According to Whitfield, NHTSA had relied on a small sample of crashes in a database called the National Automotive Sampling System. By using a far more complete data set known as the Fatality Analysis Reporting System, or FARS, Whitfield demonstrated to the Board that NHTSA had actually undercounted the number of tire-related deaths by roughly two-thirds.
“It’s a stunningly bad method,” Whitfield said in an interview with FairWarning, referring to NHTSA’s analysis.
The National Transportation Safety Board echoed Whitfield’s concerns in its own report to NHTSA in October 2015. The Board said NHTSA had failed to explain its methodology or consider potential confounding factors like the impact of the economic recession on driving patterns.
“As a result, it is difficult to attribute any reduction in tire-related traffic injuries and fatalities to the changes in federal regulations,” the paper stated.
The safety board recommended that NHTSA do further research on the impact of its upgraded tire standards and review the risks associated with tire aging.
It’s a stunningly bad method.”
- –Statistician Randy Whitfield, on how federal regulators calculated crash deaths linked to tire failures.
In an email responding to the safety board in 2016, former NHTSA administrator Mark Rosekind said the agency would review the crash data and evaluate any new safety concerns.
Since then, the agency has said nothing about pursuing tougher safety standards. But without uttering a peep, it changed its annual estimate of tire-related crash deaths to more than 700 in July or August, 2017, a review of archived NHTSA website pages shows.
The change went unnoticed until a couple of months ago, when it was spotted by Sean Kane, president of Safety Research & Strategies, Inc.. Kane, who often does research for plaintiff attorneys, had commissioned Whitfield’s analysis of tire-related deaths back in 2014. In late September, he fired off a letter September to NHTSA’s acting administrator, Heidi King.
“NHTSA must review past rulemaking decisions for tire safety that were based on data and methods that are known to be unsuited to a statistical study of this topic,” Kane wrote. He said the agency has not responded to his letter.
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In an email to FairWarning, NHTSA confirmed that it re-calculated tire deaths using FARS data, but would not explain the decision or whether it planned to review its past rulemaking decisions.
One group that was pleased with NHTSA’s flawed 2014 analysis was the Tire Industry Association, a tire makers’ trade group. In a press release that year, Kevin Rohlwing, a vice president for the group, said NHTSA had cited the same data “that we’ve been using to show there is no correlation between the chronological age of a tire and safety.”
The group did not respond to requests for comment about NHTSA’s change in data.
When NHTSA officials updated their fatality number to more than 700, they apparently overlooked the fact that the original figure of 200 annual deaths remained on a different page of the website.
On Oct. 24, FairWarning asked NHTSA about the separate entry of 200 deaths. The following day that figure was gone, replaced by the number of tire-related deaths for 2017: 738.
First, this article appears to be beating-up NHTSA for heeding constructive criticism and switching to a superior data set. Shouldn’t the article instead be congratulating NHTSA for being responsive to criticism?
Second, it is important to note that tires do have “date manufactured” codes molded into the sidewall markings. I do understand that what has been proposed is an expiration date. For something that has as big an environmental footprint as an automobile tire, is that wise? I don’t think that a ham-handed expiration date sounds like a good solution. If my bag of lettuce goes bad before the best-by date, I can see to pretty well make that judgement call for myself. If the bag of lettuce is a couple of days past the best-by date, I can likewise decide whether I want to give it a go or not. With a tire, I don’t think the average car owner has the knowledge or experience to make similar judgments. The result will be slavish adherence to the dates (or completely ignoring them). Errors in both directions have major consequences. A tire that has aged faster than expected (or has been damaged) might be trusted despite of signs to the contrary. Conversely, perfectly fine tires that just happen to have reached a “zero risk” influenced expiration date may be discarded and wasted.
Redoing the assessment with the “better” fatality values would certainly seem to be in order.
Aged tires probably only make up a fraction of the total “tire related” fatal crashes. Of those, only a fraction would be addressed by any reasonable, proposed expiration-date scheme. What those fractions are was likely estimated in the 2014 report, even if their total fatalities number was not from the best possible data set. My bet would be that most tire related crashes are due to worn-out tires (i.e. tires that should have been replaced in response to obvious signs of wear). I would further bet that second place goes to tires that had somehow been damaged in use (e.g. pothole or curb strikes). Third place likely goes to tire inflation, but it might instead be second place (I’m guessing third because of the growing number of cars with inflation monitoring systems). I suspect that manufacturing defects and age are fighting it out down at the bottom. To throw out a guess, 4% defect and 4% age only. 4% of 738 would be ~30 deaths. Of those, likely less than half would be prevented by an expiration-date scheme. Likely only 1/4. So, I hypothesize that we are talking about a tire expiration date program that, at best, might save 7 lives each year. But there might also be 2 to 10 extra deaths due to people trusting tires, that would not have otherwise been trusted, because they hadn’t yet “expired.” The additional costs would likely be many, many wasted tires and the associated monetary and environmental costs.
By all means, this should be looked at with the best possible data. That said, I suspect that the reasonable answer will be the same: a tire expiration date scheme doesn’t make sense.
Finally, I will add something that the article doesn’t mention. NHTSA makes the case that auto and tire manufacturers and retailers are already recommending that tires over ~6 years old be treated as “too old.” This being the case, my bet is that the numbers of lives to be saved by a regulatory tire expiration scheme is even lower than the above guesstimates.
Bravo! Thanks to:
* Fair Warning.
* Randy Whitfield.
* Sean Kane.
NHTSA under both Democrats and Republicans has become a captive agency.
See https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/29/opinion/weak-oversight-deadly-cars.html