The New U.S. Transportation Act And What You Need To Know
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Congress passed a $305 billion transportation bill in early December,
The FAST Act (Fixing America’s Surface Transportation Act), which incorporates many stand-alone bills.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration will deliver recall notices directly to affected car owners via email, will be updating the NHTSA website, and will also publish annual reviews of every manufacturer’s recalls over the past five years, broken out by part and by repair-completion rates. Franchised auto dealers now will be required to notify any owner whose vehicle has been brought in for service that it has an open recall.
Rental-car companies can no longer rent vehicles subject to recall. The law applies to any rental vehicle under 10,000 pounds GVWR owned by a company with at least 35 vehicles in its total fleet. The companies must take the cars offline within 24 hours of the first receipt of a recall notice (or 48 hours if the recall affects at least 5000 vehicles in their fleet).
The maximum civil penalty for manufacturers that violate the Motor Vehicle Safety Act has increased to $105 million from $35 million. Car owners will now have 15 years from the date of the initial recall notification to fix their vehicles at no charge (up from 10 years). NHTSA also may require manufacturers to install in-vehicle recall alerts—likely over a wireless data connection—but right now it’s only an experiment.
Event Data Recorders (EDRs) are automotive black boxes that have been used since the 1970s to analyze airbag deployments. They collect information from the vehicle’s computers and store the last few seconds before an actual crash. Otherwise, EDRs retain nothing (and never collect audio or video). Since 2014, EDRs have been mandatory in all new cars and manufacturers must collect the same type of data. But the information they collect goes well beyond airbag deployments, including seatbelt usage, vehicle speed, steering-wheel angle, and more—which has prompted privacy fears about insurance companies or police using the data against a driver.
In the past few years, more than a dozen states passed laws clarifying that the data strictly belongs to the car’s owner or lessee, and now the federal government has codified this wording nationwide. Law enforcement, including the DMV, can request EDR data without your consent only via a court order or ongoing investigation (or can use it for statistical purposes provided they strip all personal details). Insurance companies can’t see it unless they file suit against you, which in most cases would be very unlikely.
Within two years, tire companies will be required to meet certain minimum friction-coefficient targets as they contribute to fuel efficiency, via low-rolling-resistance tires. Minimum wet-traction standards will also be imposed (but not at the expense of fuel efficiency or high-performance tires rated Z and above, supposedly). Light-truck, winter, deep-tread, spare, and any tires less than 12 inches in diameter will be exempt.
Spurred by three major automotive scandals—the GM ignition-switch recall, Takata airbag inflators, and Volkswagen diesel-emissions cheating—the feds now will protect employees and contractors within the auto industry, including parts suppliers, if they snitch something worthy and original. If the info is good and used to penalize the offending company by more than $1 million, the whistleblower is entitled to between 10 and 30 percent of the total catch.
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