The NHTSA Is A Local Grocery Store

There is One NHTSA Investigator for every 4,862,745 Cars Registered in the U.S.

In my college days, I worked at a grocery store that constantly cut hours and laid off employees. As logic would have it, our collective duties became rushed and occasionally overlooked, although management insisted the quality and quantity of our work should have remained the same in half the time. We were all pissed off and so were our customers, but we were stocking shelves, slicing meat, and baking bread, not determining whether or not your car is going to murder you.

That’s what the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is tasked with doing, yet only 51 people are on the Office of Defects Investigation staff, according to Bloomberg. Of those 51 employees, 28 directly investigate vehicle defects.

Just to make sure this is perfectly clear, there are 248 million cars registered in the U.S. and 51 people are responsible for investigating recurring problems in those cars.

With an annual budget of $10 million and what seems to be severe understaffing, there have still been 929 recalls in the past seven years. I can draw a couple conclusions from that statistic. First, manufacturers are doing a pretty terrible job making cars, and second, with less employees and resources in recent years, there probably have been overlooked defects due to a lack of time, money and resources.

No one has linked GM’s recent massive recall to the NHTSA’s understaffing and underfunding, but many safety experts don’t believe investigators have what they need to sufficiently respond, research and recall all faulty vehicles. An NHTSA spokesman said the GM recall wasn’t forced sooner because the manufacturer didn’t provide timely information about the problematic ignition switches, not because of a lack of resources. While I wouldn’t argue there needs to be some cooperation between automaker and agency, 12 deaths should be enough to connect the dots.

At my grocery store job, management overlooked the decrease in quality and quantity of our work as long as there were still products on the shelves for customers to buy. Obviously, no one was injured (except for me — my soul was extracted from my body) due to these cuts, but the NHTSA has an incrementally more important role than I did assembling sandwiches. With ignition switches failing and sunroofs spontaneously shattering, hopefully the NHTSA gets more resources in the coming years, because cars are going to continue attacking.

Now that you know your car is going to kill you and no one is going to care, enjoy your daily commute, and remember, drive safely.

You can read the entire article from Bloomberg here.