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A design flaw in the Chevrolet Cobalt and other small cars has led to deaths and injuries for at least a decade, but the analysts at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration never opened an investigation. All through that period, a few blocks away at a sister agency within the Transportation Department, safety experts were using a program that made extensive use of vehicle data to spot defects and dangerous trends.
None of those vehicles were on the roads, though. They were airliners, and the agency was the Federal Aviation Administration. Now, experts are wondering if some of its techniques can be adapted for highway use, and the black boxes in cars can be put to use as the ones in planes have.
“The more data we have, and the more people thinking about it, the more of these problems we’re going to catch,†said David E. Cole, chairman emeritus of the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor, Mich. Unraveling a problem like the Cobalt’s, with a faulty ignition switch that tended to turn off the engine and disable the air bags, is hard, Mr. Cole said, so “we’ve got to do a full press on whatever we have that can help us to get to that story more quickly.â€
Photo
A black box in a car. Experts said better black boxes might have identified the cause of the Chevrolet Cobalt’s problems sooner. Credit Heather Ainsworth for The New York Times
The crash recorders in cars are not nearly as sophisticated as the ones in planes, and they do not store any data unless there is an impact. But looked at as a group, they could give important insights, safety specialists say. The government and automakers already maintain several large databases aimed at identifying problematic vehicles, including warranty claims and consumer complaints, and the black box data could complement those, experts say.
But often, the black boxes are not examined at all.
David M. Hallman, a crash investigator based in Maple Grove, Minn., said that “even if it’s a serious or a fatal, a lot of times the box doesn’t get read.â€
Nearly all new cars have black boxes, known as event data recorders, and the government has standardized some of the technical details of their operation. Soon they will be required in new cars.
But with their main role to establish fault or guilt in a crash, they also have raised privacy questions. Some states have rushed to set up rules, which are now a hodgepodge.
They have strong safety potential, experts say. Adrian K. Lund, president of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, the industry group that crash-tests new cars, said that “event data recorders could definitely help.â€
“If these things had been standard and they were being utilized a lot, we probably would have been able to prove this a little faster,†Mr. Lund said, although he and others cautioned that the Cobalt flaw played a role in only a small number of fatal crashes, so spotting a pattern was not a certainty.
Planes are easier. Big airliners are equipped with a device that copies the information that goes into the flight data recorder, in a format that allows easy download after ordinary flights. Analysts aggregate information from thousands of flights and look for indications of latent problems, like extreme maneuvers, even if they did not cause death or injury.
In cars, the black box captures much less data and none for ordinary trips.
But if there is a crash, some will give an indication of whether the engine was running at the time — the tip-off in Cobalts. The catch is that even in cases of death or injury, the boxes are generally not downloaded, unless there is a need to establish who was at fault. And even then, the data is usually not aggregated in a way that makes an analysis possible across multiple models of car.
State Farm, for example, the insurance company that first spotted the link between faulty Firestone tires that were causing Ford Explorers to flip over, analyzes so few black boxes that it does not even bother to count them, a spokeswoman said.
The result is that a technique used by the aviation industry to help drive the rate of death and injury to near zero is not available to help reduce motor vehicle fatalities, which run about 34,000 a year. Reducing them even by 1 percent would be a significant change.
But the deaths linked to the faulty ignition switch in the Cobalts and other small cars — General Motors, the maker of Chevrolet, acknowledges 13 — are a source of outrage, liability and heartbreak, because G.M. and regulators had been alerted to the problem years ago.
“Surface transportation has long been one of the least technologically advanced fields,†said Joshua L. Schank, the president and chief executive of the Eno Center for Transportation, a nonprofit safety group. And while other areas of transportation use sophisticated data analysis, “No one’s sharing information and techniques across the modes of the Department of Transportation,†Mr. Schank said. “With safety, there’s so much data that’s knowable, to know where crashes are occurring, and why crashes are occurring, and attack them systematically, but we’re not doing that.â€
It would cost money, but not much, experts say. Insurance companies and police departments already send investigators to crash scenes with equipment like digital cameras and laptops; large-scale analysis would require more hardware and software.
In contrast, injury crashes cost the American economy $244.7 billion in 2009, according to the National Safety Council, including medical expenses, lost wages and damages to vehicles. That does not count the deaths.
Aircraft data is analyzed partly because there is strong public pressure to prevent plane crashes, but that is not so much a factor in highway safety, experts say, even if the number of motor vehicle victims was 11,000 times the number of airline passengers killed last year. The year before that, it was infinite; no airline passengers died.
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