Eleven months ago, federal safety regulators invited four Chrysler Corp. officials to Washington for a private screening of a videotape. It showed a crash test of a Chrysler mini-van in which two dummies, one the size of a small child, flew out of the van’s rear door and bounced off the road. The mini-van’s rear latches, officials of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration told Chrysler, are potentially defective and should be repaired.
What followed that meeting was a circuitous and still unresolved tale of how a company, regulators, lawyers, safety advocates and the media shaped the thinking about the rear latch– whether it was dangerous and whether it should be fixed and how. Chrysler and NHTSA disagreed about whether the latch posed a danger to riders. The media and plaintiffs’ lawyers piled on. The compromise struck has left mini-van owners in a quandary about whether their vehicles are unsafe.
“The whole thing is still vague,” says Maria Mann, a Detroit mother who uses her 1989 Plymouth Voyager mini-van to chauffeur her daughter’s Brownie troop. “It bothers me that they seem to be leaving it up to the owners to figure out how serious the problem is.”
Mini-van owners may get some help figuring it out with the NHTSA release of the videotape it shared with Chrysler last November. Broadcast media are clamoring for the tape.
Consumers’ confusion about their latches is partly the result of the unusual deal NHTSA cut with Chrysler. Instead of instituting a recall, the regulators and Chrysler agreed that the company could do a “service action”: Chrysler would replace the latches on the mini-vans without acknowledging that they were defective or that passengers could be killed or injured in ejections. In recalls, those kinds of statements are required by federal law.
NHTSA officials say the deal was an enlightened experiment in regulation, the success or failure of which could influence how the government seeks auto repairs. A successful campaign, in which 60 to 70 percent of the mini-vans are fixed, could become a model for resolving safety disputes without lengthy legal battles between government and industry, regulators say.
But critics contend the deal shows a government agency too willing to compromise. “If the agency thinks the latches are unsafe, it’s got an obligation to say so,” says Ralph Hoar, an Arlington, Va., consultant who does research for lawyers who sue auto companies.
The regulators wanted to avoid a repeat of their controversial investigation of General Motors Corp. pickup trucks, which they dropped in return for $51 million in donations to safety programs.
Chrysler, which maintains that its mini-vans are safe, in September started notifying owners of 1984-’95 mini-vans that they can get latches replaced; about 700,000 owners will be contacted by year-end, leaving more than 3.5 million for 1996.
The stakes are huge for the automaker. The mini-van is Chrysler’s best-selling product, and its core customers are families, for whom safety is a priority. “We have every incentive to make
this (service campaign) a success,” says Lewis H. Goldfarb, assistant general counsel for Chrysler.
The threats of bad publicity and product-liability litigation weighed heavily on the four Chrysler representatives who visited NHTSA last year. NHTSA engineers, after a year-long investigation, believed the latches had a metallurgical weakness that made them prone to fail in crashes. Disclosing evidence was an unusual step, but NHTSA hoped to persuade Chrysler to fix the mini-vans without the public conflict that marked the GM truck case.
Goldfarb and three Chrysler executives, along with six NHTSA officials, watched a videotape of crash tests NHTSA had conducted on four Chrysler mini-vans and two rivasls. In two of the Chrysler tests, the rear doors opened and test dummies flew out. None of the other vans opened.
The presentation did not convince the Chrysler officials that their mini-vans were unsafe, but they had a problem. The videos could be turned against the company in the courts, where the latches were the subject of at least 18 product-liability suits. And they could be devastating in the court of public opinion.
Then Chrysler learned that NHTSA planned to formally request a recall.
Chrysler attacked NHTSA’s crash tests as rigged and offered its own tests, in which the rear doors on competitors’ vehicles opened. The automaker also submitted statistics from NHTSA’s database showing that ejections occurred more frequently in other vehicles. After weeks of wrangling, NHTSA decided not to send the letter, but let Chrysler know the investigation would not be closed without some action.
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Hoar, the consultant to the plaintiffs’ lawyers, helped break the stalemate by feeding the media a virtual play-by-play of the mini-van investigation, including documents, videotapes and his commentary. One was a video of five Chrysler-made crash tests, without dummies, showing the rear doors flying open. Chrysler protested that the crashes weren’t designed to test latch strength, and that, in each case, the vehicle had been altered. In one crash, for example, the latch was not engaged. But the discrepancies rarely were noted in news reports.
Chrysler was similarly unsuccessful at countering other negative publicity. “The pitch of these stories was reaching such a point that the truth was lost,” Goldfarb says. To make matters worse, NHTSA threatened to make its crash-test videos public just as the prime-time news program “20/20” was preparing a detailed story. On March 27, Chrysler agreed to the service campaign.
The company said it would begin replacing latches within 30 days. But because of another problem with the latch, the company had to design and build parts for a new latch. Company officials now say they miscalculated how long that would take.
Chrysler has spent $4.4 million advertising its effort. In its ads and public statements, the automaker, according to its deal with NHTSA, talks as much about how safe the mini-vans are as about whether people need new latches. However, the company’s recent letters to owners say it is “essential” that latches be replaced.
NHTSA won’t publicly describe the mini-vans as a hazard. In a release, administrator Ricardo Martinez praised Chrysler Chairman Robert J. Eaton for exercising “safety leadership.” Agency officials have spoken of a safety “issue” and “concern,” but not “defect” or “unsafe.”
Nevertheless, deputy administrator Philip Recht, says the agency is confident that a high rate of latches will be replaced.
The agency may get some help from Hoar. He plans to distribute copies of the crash-test vidoe to his lawyer clients and the media “so that owners can decide for themselves whether these mini-vans are unsafe.”
Goldfarb hopes viewers will notice that the crash dummies in the tests are not belted. Moreover, he argues, “What happened a year ago is irrelevant. We are taking care of our customers.”