Do NHTSA's agent assurance investigations burrow added than is revealed?

Do NHTSA's agent assurance investigations burrow added than is revealed? 

An aberrant allotment of advertisement from USA TODAY's Jayne O'Donnell raises this adverse question.

Did you apperceive that the National Highway Traffic & Safety Administration (NHTSA) sometimes conducts abstruse investigations into austere injuries and deaths and that the allegation of their probes are alone accessible to the media and to you if a Freedom of Advice Act appeal is submitted?

That's not all... sometimes the auto manufacturers can appeal that the advice they abide to NHTSA can be kept arcane too, O'Donnell reports. Does that complete like honest and accessible acknowledgment and 'transparency' to you? 

O'Donnell credibility to a 2012 adventure that demonstrates the problem. In that year Herman Ray Evans was dead back the footstep afar on his 2001 Ford Explorer's annoy and the agent formed over into the average and he was ejected. Evans was in aloof one of 15 baleful tire-related crashes aftermost year in Ford Explorers and Mercury Mountaineers.

From 2002 through 2009 there were 375 agnate deaths in mostly earlier archetypal Explorers and Mountaineers, about four times the cardinal that led to the Ford/Firestone blend in 2000. And still, neither NHTSA nor Ford recalled the vehicles.

According to O'Donnell, Ford said it advised the issues with NHTSA and begin the Explorer had no different annoy issues. And she says breezy investigations like this one, which NHTSA conceals from accessible view, are acceptable added common. "That has ramifications for car buyers," O'Donnell wrote, "who may not apprentice the cartage they own or are because affairs accept agilely aloft assurance apropos at NHTSA and amid automakers."

NHTSA maintains that it needs to be able to conduct basic analytic assignment abroad from the blaze of accessible analysis to detertmine back an analysis will be opened.

But critics like Sean Kane of Assurance Research and Strategies, says: "Where's the methodology? What are the threshholds? No one knows... It's a atramentous art over there."

"If they can adumbrate these kinds of investigations, there's added clandestineness and it's beneath acceptable they're activity to be accountable," Kane said.

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