Released: November 21, 2006

The secret auto safety files

Source: Cindy Skrzycki, Washington Post (Free Registration)

For almost three years, the major automakers have shipped voluminous data to U.S. traffic-safety regulators: Eight million consumer complaints, 138 million warranty claims and 5 million field reports on product malfunctions. It’s part of an “early warning reporting’’ program Congress set up to prevent a repeat of the Firestone tire-failure scandal.

General Motors, Ford, Chrysler and some German and Japanese manufacturers have argued that this information should be kept strictly confidential. And officials at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration have agreed, despite protests and court challenges from public safety groups.

Late last month, the highway-safety administration proposed the latest in a string of rules over the confidentiality of those millions of documents. It did so on the orders of a federal judge, who accused the agency earlier this year of pulling a “switcheroo’’ by deleting from an earlier draft a presumption that the data would be available to the public.

The tug of war over disclosure is intense because millions of dollars—and many lives—may be at stake. In the Firestone debacle, the tire company said it would recall 10 million tires because of tread separations and other failures that were linked to at least 271 deaths.

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