President Obama today visited the Daimler Trucks North America plant in Mt. Holly, N.C., where he announced a new $1 billion National Community Deployment Challenge to spur deployment of clean, advanced vehicles in communities around the country. This latest announcement supports the administration’s goal to ramp up the average fuel efficiency requirement to 54.5 mpg by 2025. In doing so, the administration estimates that national oil consumption would be reduced by 2.2 million barrels a day, compared to today’s rate. Further, it would significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions. More...

The Chevrolet Volt and General Motors have been under fire, since the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) announced that a crash-tested Volt caught fire weeks after an evaluation. NHTSA experienced fires in following subsequent tests. The agency formally opened an investigation on November 25, 2011, and closed it on January 20, 2012. Yet, General Motors CEO Dan Akerson was called to speak before the U.S. House Subcommittee on Regulatory Affairs, Stimulus Oversight and Government Spending today, defending the Volt.  (See how the Volt is made.)

Akerson drove to Washington, D.C., in a Volt, and once there, he had strong words for the committee as he defended the extended-range plug-in hybrid:

“We engineered Volt to give drivers a choice— to use energy produced in the United States rather than oil from places that may not always put America’s best interests first.

And, we engineered Volt to show the world what great vehicles we make at General Motors.

Unfortunately, there is one thing we did not engineer. Although we loaded the Volt with state-of-the-art safety features--we did not engineer the Volt to be a political punching bag.” More...

A long-awaited report on sudden unintended acceleration (SUA) from the National Academy of Sciences was released today, supporting the move by National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) to close its investigation into Toyota after a string of large-scale recalls. While Toyota came out from this final report looking strong, group that prepared the report, the National Research Council's Transportation Research Board, had strong words and recommendations for NHTSA.

The 157-page report titled “The Safety Promise and Challenge of Automotive Electronics: Insights from Unintended Acceleration” agreed with NHTSA declaring the unintended acceleration issues were related to misapplication of pedals, sticking pedals, and floor-mat entrapment. While Toyota can’t control which pedal drivers’ press, it did take extraordinary measures to address the risk of sticking pedals and floor mat entrapment. The latter risk was tackled through several means during recalls, from mat replacement and anchoring, to pedal modification to increase clearance. Some late-model cars were also fitted with smart-throttle software that allows the brake pedal to electronically override the accelerator. This is now standard on all new Lexus and Toyota models.

In NHTSA’s investigation, it sought outside assistance from NASA, whose rocket scientists spent 10 months analyzing more than 280,000 lines of software code for any potential flaws that could initiate an unintended acceleration incident. They also examined and tested mechanical components that could result in an unwanted throttle opening. In conjunction with NHTSA, NASA engineers bombarded vehicles with electromagnetic radiation to study whether such radiation could cause malfunctions resulting in unintended acceleration, and they explored real-world scenarios that could be potential causes. More...

Even though the U.S. government typically issues safety recall notices for a dozen or more vehicles every month, the recall procedure doesn’t get much attention. Recalls typically make the news only when they affect a high-profile vehicle model, a large number of vehicles are affected, or the safety defect that’s been discovered is especially troubling.

More than 390 million vehicles of various types have been recalled since the National Highway Traffic Administration (NHTSA) was established in 1966. Manufacturers themselves issue many of the safety recalls, voluntarily. Others are influenced by investigations that NHTSA itself conducts, or are directly ordered by that agency.

Car owners receive a notice from the manufacturer when a recall has been issued. Owners are invited to bring the car into the dealership for attention to the issue, and informed that there is no charge for recall-related service. If an owner fails to bring in the vehicle, however, a follow-up request isn’t necessarily issued. NHTSA is charged with monitoring the progress of a manufacturer’s issuance of recall notices and the actions taken by that company’s dealers.

In June, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released an auto safety report that expresses concerns about the procedure that’s followed after a recall has been issued. Noting “considerable room for improvement” the GAO called for NHTSA to modify its process, citing several trouble spots: More...

Just about every time a proposal to raise the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standard has appeared, spokespersons for the auto companies have leaped into action, trying to explain why that proposed standard would be impossible to meet. Such reactions have been a familiar scenario, ever since the first CAFE standard was enacted, in the 1970s.

Domestic manufacturers—known these days as the “Detroit 3"—have been the most adamant in their resistance to more stringent standards. Typically, they’ve insisted that raising the average fuel-economy requirement would be too costly (increasing car prices), would make the average car smaller (thus less safe), or was simply an impossible goal to achieve, technically.

Therefore, it’s been no surprise to see that proposals made by the Obama Administration in mid-2011 quickly drew fire from auto manufacturers, led by the domestic companies. Individual automakers, backed by the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, began to issue advertisements warning that the 56-mpg CAFE standard sought by the Obama Administration (by 2025) would not only lead to higher vehicle prices, but result in job losses.

Advocates for increased fuel economy, including Consumer Union and the Consumer Federation of America, responded that higher standards would “help consumers save money, cut pollution, and reduce the nation’s dependence on foreign oil.” Any rise in vehicle prices, they asserted, would be offset by cost-savings at the pump. Meanwhile, Ceres, a nonprofit public-interest coalition, issued an analysis insisting that with a high-mpg standard, more jobs would be created and automaker profits would grow. More...

The U.S. Department of Transportation and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency today unveiled all-new window stickers designed to enable car shoppers to more readily compare vehicles, especially the new wave of electrified models. This is the most significant update of the fuel economy labels in 30 years.
The new window stickers will take effect with 2013 models, though the agencies are encouraging automakers to begin implementing them sooner. More...