The 2009 problem with Toyota sticky accelerator pedals seems a distant memory, as does the 8 million autos the company recalled and the nearly $33 million in civil penalties the company paid for dragging its feet on some of those recalls. But the National Highway Safety Traffic Administration (NHTSA) has not forgotten. It has issued a two-part proposed rule that establishes new requirements related to "unintended acceleration" (UA) for all new car manufacturers.
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One part consists of an expansion of Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard (FMVSS) 124, Accelerator Control Systems, to include new brake throttle override (BTO) equipment and test requirements. They would be applicable to vehicles with 10,000 lbs. gross vehicle weight rating (GVWR) or less and that have electronic throttle control (ETC). That new standard aims to prevent one kind of unintended acceleration, which is characterized by accelerator pedals that fail to return because they are stuck or trapped.
The second part of the proposed rule updates the throttle control disconnection test procedures in FMVSS 124. The NHTSA tried to do that in 2002, but got a lot of push back from auto manufacturers. The agency is taking a second shot at that now, with a revamped proposal, which may or may not pass muster with the industry.
The BTO requirements are new. The NHTSA says they should be no problem for car manufacturers to comply with, and cost little to boot, since based on compliance information that NHTSA receives from vehicle manufacturers annually, almost all model year 2012 light vehicles sold in the U.S. will have a BTO system.
Wade Newton, a spokesman for the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, says, "We don’t have a comment on the specifics of the rulemaking. We support BTO in principle; we are reviewing the specifics of NHTSA’s proposed rule and will file comments prior to the deadline." That deadline is June 15.
But driver response to the new proposed BTO standard has been unfavorable. "This will further cripple cars so that people who know how to drive will be further isolated from the experience," wrote Eric Denton, one person who provided comments early to the NHTSA. "Manual transmission cars will no longer respond to heel & toe down shifts, automatic cars will no longer be able to be keep on the turbo in the corners by careful application of throttle over brake. Somehow we survived for over a century without this."
The NHTSA's proposed BTO standard seems to comport with legislation (S. 1813) passed in February by the Democratic-controlled Senate. The bill, which passed the Senate by a vote of 72-11, is called the Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century or MAP-21. It is a massive federal highway funding bill, which has been in a House-Senate conference committee since early May. The Senate (but not the House) bill authorizes a number of new NHTSA safety standards, including one on "Vehicle Stopping Distance and Brake Override." That is Section 31402. It tells NHTSA to establish "performance requirements, based on the speed, size, and weight of the vehicle, that enable a driver to bring a passenger motor vehicle safely to a full stop by normal braking application even if the vehicle is simultaneously receiving accelerator input signals, including a full-throttle input signal."
The BTO standard the NHTSA is proposing includes both an equipment and performance requirement. The equipment requirement would specify that a BTO system may be designed so that it does not engage at speeds below 10 mph. The equipment requirement is necessary to ensure that a brake-throttle override capability is installed on each vehicle, and that a manufacturer's certification is not based only on brake system performance. Otherwise, it might be possible for a manufacturer whose vehicle meets the BTO performance test without engagement of a BTO system to avoid installing BTO altogether.
