How the nation's auto safety regulators fell asleep at the wheel

Three months ago, General Motors released a scathing internal report about its failures to spot a potentially lethal defect in millions of its vehicles, blaming a culture of denial, inertia and incompetence. Today, a U.S. House committee released its scathing report on the failures of the nation's auto safety agency to spot potentially lethal defects in millions of vehicles — also blaming a culture of denial, inertia and incompetence.

Whether the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration will be willing to confront its failures in the Chevy Cobalt ignition defects linked to more than 13 deaths will be the focus of a Senate hearing today. But NHTSA's own defects in turning consumer complaints into recalls of dangerous vehicles have been known and discussed for more than a decade, without much sign of repair.

There's no better example of how badly NHTSA failed to understand the problems in the Cobalt case — where the cars could shut off without warning, disarming the air bags — than the example citied by the Republican staff of the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee of a October 2006 crash in Wisconsin that killed two teen-agers. Using nothing more than a government-issued laptop, Wisconsin State Patrol Trooper Keith Young examined data from the car, a dealer bulletin GM had issued warning of ignitions shutting off and reported in February 2007 that because the key had been bumped into the "accessory" position, the Cobalt's air bags had failed to deploy.

GM's own report found that Young's report wasn't looked at or understood until earlier this year. The House committee found that NHTSA read and comprehended Young's analysis — yet failed to launch a formal investigation that could have sparked a recall as early as 2007 and saved untold lives.

NHTSA "lacked the focus and rigor expected of a federal safety regulator," the committee said. "The agency’s repeated failure to identify, let alone explore, the potential defect theory related to the ignition switch...is inexcusable."

To date, NHTSA Deputy Administrator David Friedman — who was appointed in May 2013 — has contended that it was GM's failures to share information, rather than any intrinsic flaw at NHTSA, which led to the Cobalt and other defects being overlooked. In an interview with Reuters on Monday, Friedman said NHTSA has a new program of "unprecedented oversight" with GM and other automakers.

"We're setting a system up where the minute they sneeze about a safety issue, we're able to be aware of it and make sure we understand how they're dealing with it," he said.