Excess of Vehicle Recalls Leads DOT to Create New 5-Star Rating System

It’s been a troubling year for many of the big motor vehicle manufacturing companies. The bigger picture has more troubling for the millions of consumers who owned those companies’ vehicles… which ended up being recalled due to dangerous defects.

Beginning way back in 1966, the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act gave the Department of Transportation’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHSTA) the authority to establish vehicle safety standards and recall vehicles that do not meet them. By 2006, when the “Motor Vehicles Safety Defects and Recalls: What Every Vehicle Owner Should Know” brochure was published by NHTSA and safercar.gov, nearly 400 million vehicles had been recalled. (That averages out to almost 10 million vehicles recalled each year during that 40 year period!)

Keep in mind, those numbers reflect recalls of all kinds of vehicles, not just passenger cars and trucks. Regardless, consider what could have been: 400 million vehicle accidents on the freeways and recreational areas across our nation. The injuries! The fatalities! The wreckage!

The kinds of vehicle defects that are recall-worthy (meaning they would cause accidents) are many. In a nutshell, the Safety Act which is now called The United States Code for Motor Vehicle Safety (Title 49, Chapter 301) is looking for our vehicles to do their job in such a way that “protects the public against unreasonable risk of accidents occurring because of the design, construction, or performance of a motor vehicle and against unreasonable risk of death or injury in an accident.”

Sounds like a reasonable expectation. Yet, after so much media coverage this past year on what seemed to be an extraordinarily high number of extremely dangerous and accident-causing vehicle defects, NHTSA decided to upgrade their standards and introduce stricter safety review processes. Consumers will now be able to use the new 5-Star Safety Ratings when making purchase decisions on all 2011 and future model automobiles. New vehicles will have easy to understand ratings on how they fared in frontal crashes, side crashes and rollover crashes, more thorough information about what kinds of safety features are at work in the vehicle, and provide the results of crash tests with female-sized passenger test dummies. Previously, crash tests studied only male-sized test dummies.

Take a look at the super simple new menu and click on your 2011 dream car to see how it measures up at http://www.safercar.gov/Vehicle+Shoppers/5-Star+Safety+Ratings/2011+Vehicles. Then compare the rating improvements by looking up your jalopy under the old menu.

Send your rave reviews of the new 5-Star reviews to U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood.

Unfortunately, for those who buy used vehicles, ratings for vehicles manufactured for 2010 and earlier won’t be translated into the new 5-Star terminology.