The MacNeil/Lehrer Report; Auto Safety

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JIM LEHRER [voice-over]: It was Timothy Wirth versus Ray Peck on Capitol Hill today, and it is again tonight, as a congressman challenges an agency's commitment to auto safety.

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LEHRER: Good evening. The issue was highway safety rather than environmental safety, but some of the words sounded familiar, as the Reagan way of running another federal agency came under strong congressional attack today. The agency is the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, called NHTSA, which polices the safeness of automobiles, among other things. Democratic Congressman Timothy Wirth, chairman of a House subcommittee on consumer protection, said NHTSA was not doing its job. He accused administrator Ray Peck of being slow in investigating possible defects in cars, of concealing safety test results from the public, and of generally being more concerned for the well-being of the auto industry than of consumers. He specifically challenged Peck's handling of the case of General Motors' X-cars -- the Chevrolet Citation, Pontiac Phoenix, Oldsmobile Omega and Buick Skylark -- charging slowness in pursuing complaints about their brake problems endangered the safety of thousands of X-car drivers. The main target of his complaints, Ray Peck, was there in person in the hearing room to field them. He vigorously denied the general attacks, and called Wirth's charges about the X-car "unmitigated rubbish." Both Mr. Peck and Congressman Wirth are with us in person tonight to continue their spirited dialogue. Robert MacNeil is off; Charlayne Hunter-Gault is in New York.Charlayne?

CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT: Jim, the government got into the car safety business in 1966, a year that more than 50,000 people died in highway auto accidents. At that time Congress created the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, and made it responsible for enforcing safety standards and for removing defective and hazardous vehicles from the road. Since then, nearly 100 million vehicles have been recalled. The largest of those was the 1971 recall of 6.68 million 1965 to 1970 Chevrolet cars and GMC trucks for problems in the engine mounts. But there have been other large-scale recalls, including Ford's 1978 recall of 1.5 million Pintos and 30,000 Mercury Bobcats. Those involved gas tank problems. In spite of such numbers, however, critics don't believe the government is doing enough. Recalls have declined from an all-time high of 12.9 million in 1977 to 1.9 million last year, and that is part of the record that's being called into question now. Jim?

LEHRER: And the leading questioner as of today is Congressman Timothy Wirth, Democrat of Colorado, chairman of the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications, Consumer Protection and Finance. Congressman, do you believe Mr. Peck and his agency are not adequately protecting the consumer from unsafe cars?

Rep. TIMOTHY WIRTH: Oh, I don't think there is any question about the fact that the administration has been much more concerned about the health of the auto industry than they have been about fulfilling their responsibility under the law to make sure that unsafe cars are not on the American highways. Now, why does the government get into this? Because we've had over the years a number of very significant problems, and what recourse does an individual have? Prior to the passage of this legislation, which started in the mid-1960s -- prior to the passage it was up to a company or a dealer, if they wanted to get somebody to withdraw a car, there was absolutely no requirement whatsoever. And since then, as pointed out in your opening comments, literally millions of cars have been recalled for problems, and there is a very vital, broad consumer protection issue at stake here.

LEHRER: And you say that has changed under Mr. Peck and the Reagan administration?

Rep. WIRTH: Oh, it's changed very dramatically. We've seen it --

LEHRER: In what way?

Rep. WIRTH: Not only in the X-car situation, which is the issue that Mr. Peck and I were discussing today, but the automatic crash protection, seatbelt standards, the bumper-standard standards, the -- it used to be that there was a standard for a bumper that at five miles per hour could withstand a crash. Now it's less than walking speed, or 2 1/2 miles an hour, costing the consumer hundreds of dollars in an accident case. Consumer information has dropped off dramatically in terms of direct information to consumers and indirect information through press releases about problems. A whole series of things: battery explosions; the tire-rim explosion problem -- which everybody in the country has read about in the newspaper -- have dropped off of that; the number of investigations open. We had very stark numbers presented today at the hearing of the number of investigations opened by NHTSA since this administration came into office in 1981.

LEHRER: Do you see it as a difference in philosophy that Mr. Peck has brought to the administration, or do you see it as a difference in reading in what the congressional mandate was? What's your reading of what's going on?

Rep. WIRTH: Oh, the legal mandate is a very clear one, and I don't want to ascribe anything to Mr. Peck, who is a very pleasant, likable individual, but he's part of an administration -- and we see the same situation in the environmental protection area; we see it right across the board in the administration, a lack of concern about the mandate to 230 million Americans, and an increasing amount of concern for a handful of industries who this administration is concerned about protecting, rather than looking after the well-being of a lot of Americans.

LEHRER: All right, let's talk about the X-car situation specifically. What is it that the agency, that NHTSA, in your opinion, did wrong in handling that?

Rep. WIRTH: Well, the analysis that NHTSA did was obviously very good. There was a problem of rear-brake locking in 1980, 1981 and 1982 X-cars. The question was, where did that problem come from? The brakes would lock, cars would skid, roll over. We had a good deal of testimony about that today, and the record is replete with incidences of this problem. The analysis, where does the problem come from? There were two areas to be looked at. NHTSA did a good examination of this in July of 1981, started in October of 1979. They did a good analysis of the problem and then did nothing in terms of getting that information out to consumers. They did a more complete analysis in the fall of 1981; no information went out to consumers. They report didn't even come to the top of the -- of NHTSA until the summer of 1982. And it wasn't until we announced that there was congressional interest in what was going on, until The New York Times got on top of it, and until there began to be a broader panoply of organized consumer complaints that NHTSA did anything. In the meantime, we know of at least 13 individuals that were killed, lots and lots of people who were greviously injured -- in a coma, paralyzed, and thousands of people who had accidents that could have been -- should not have happened, and happened only because of the delinquency of this administration.

LEHRER: The end result, or at least as -- there was finally a voluntary recall of some of these X-cars, correct?

Rep. WIRTH: Well, the NHTSA exchanged all of their information with General Motors in the summer of 1981 -- not with consumers in this country but with General Motors -- and General Motors then withdrew 47,000 cars, knowing from evidence that we had that it wasn't the problem that they were solving, it was another problem that was more grievous, didn't do anything about it. General Motors had all of that information, not consumers in the United States, and this pattern continued then for a year and a half to the point that, you know, the pressure was really on this winter, and then General Motors decided to pull back a lot of these X-cars in the last 30 days. Now, it should not have taken a year and a half, should not have taken 13 deaths, should not have taken all of the injuries and the incredible cost to American consumers. That could have all beencured by NHTSA acting expeditiously in the interest of consumers, not the auto industry.

LEHRER: Thank you. Charlayne?

HUNTER-GAULT: A reponse now from the man on the receiving end of Congressman Wirth's charges.He is Raymond Peck, as you heard, administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Mr. Peck, how do you respond to Mr. Wirth's charge that the administration is more concerned about the health of the auto industry than protecting consumers?

RAYMOND A. PECK: At the outset, I deny it completely, of course. And as I listen to the Congressman's engaging rhetoric just now I was reminded of exactly why it was that I used the phrase I used earlier in the hearing. I think it's helpful to go back and point out a couple of things. First, when this administration changed hands in NHTSA, we replaced absolutely no one in the professional staff of the agency. Everybody who does in fact work in the enforcement office are still there; they are the people who were in fact appointed by predecessor administrations. That step was taken by me for a very sound reason as far as I was concerned. When you're talking about safety and you're talking about defects, you are talking about life and death, and in a very real sense of the word, the law enforcement responsibility of the government of the United States. That should not change from administration to administration. It shouldn't change from administrator to administrator. Much of the points that Mr. Wirth has raised here this evening are years-old issues, which we just happened to inherit. A specific example of that would be bumpers. But the important question is not how long the issue has been before the agency or what in fact we are doing as far as the agency is concerned, because if the central thesis of Mr. Wirth were correct, and we were somehow either not vigorously enforcing the statute or not vigorously bringing to the public interest and to the public attention what we are doing, then I think very serious charges would be alleged. That is not what is happening. This particular case is probably -- the case of the GM X-body car -- probably the single most complicated case the agency has had in years.

HUNTER-GAULT: You think we could address it in a simple way?

Mr. PECK: Sure. We had one problem: certain cars were locking up. We tried to find out, as early as 1979, why rear brakes were locking. It's a very dangerous situation. Rear brakes lock first; the car spins. We discovered that there were at least two versions of at least two types of cars with different, what are called proportioning valves which allocate pressure between the front and the rear brakes, and are intended to prevent lockup, and brake linings. At the time the agency began its engineering analysis, we were uncertain as to which, if either, of these two were the more important factor. We were able to establish in the spring of 1981 that both were important factors. And so we went the next step, which is to open what's called a defect investigation. That defect investigation was opened even before we had the results of some very preliminary tests that were conducted at our facility in Ohio. It was based upon that defect investigation that -- and the Congressman neglected to mention this -- General Motors in fact did recall 47,000 cars in July of 1981. At that time the agency was not, in its own mind, satisfied that either the cause or the proper remedy had been identified. And so, instead of accepting that, we proceeded immediately to create a test series and immediately to review all of the complaints that we were getting in.

HUNTER-GAULT: So, in effect, what you're saying is that you acted as quickly and as expeditiously as you could once you had the necessary information to move?

Mr. PECK: Yes, and I have to even qualify that, Charlayne, because of this fact. What we had in July of '81 was a sharp difference in the facts we had in front of us. If you were to look at the complaint rates on the vehicles involved, they gave us a definite pattern. Our own tests, conducted in July, came out inconsistent with that pattern, both in terms of the cause of the problem and which would be the best solution for it. To this day, there isn't an engineer in the agency that is absolutely confident that they know what the cause is, and to this day we have not accepted even the most recent recall by General Motors.

HUNTER-GAULT: So you don't accept the blame that Congressman Wirth laid on the agency that if it had moved more expeditiously, a lot of people's lives would have been saved; there wouldn't have been as many accidents. You just don't accept that responsibility?

Mr. PECK: No, because of the conflicts between what the Congressman said. He praised our analysis and blamed it for being too long in the coming. The problem is, you can't do a good analysis quickly. There are many areas of doubt even now, as we look at the technical issues that are involved in this proceeding. You can have a good analysis or you can have an early analysis, but you run the risk, if you move on an early analysis, of losing or of being wrong. And you run the risk, if you wait, of having Congressman Wirth blame you for not acting fast enough.

HUNTER-GAULT: And, in a word, in response to his charge that the agency itself has changed dramatically in terms of informing consumers about problems and so on, you just disagree with that totally?

Mr. PECK: The figures disagree with it totally. We simply have not changed our patterns of press releases, our patterns of notification to the public. Nothing about our statistics has changed in any meaningful way. If you had to look at a single factor that would be involved in why, in any given year, recalls go up and down, it would be the factor of how many cars you're selling. The more new cars you sell, the more recalls there are likely to be, because that's where you turn up most of them. As the market for new cars goes down, the number of recalls expressed in numbers of vehicles necessarily will also go down. If you plot sales, you plot production, you plot recalls, you plot new cases, you get an absolutely consistent pattern, Chairman Wirth to the contrary notwithstanding.

HUNTER-GAULT: All right, Mr. Peck. Jim?

LEHRER: Congressman, how do you plot the recall thing? How do you relate the reduction in recalls to Mr. Peck and his administration?

Rep. WIRTH: Well, first, I did praise the technical analysis done by the people at NHTSA. I was very clear about that, but it doesn't do any good to have the technical analysis done inside an administration if it sits in a file drawer and the political administration won't let that technical analysis out so that anybody in the outside world knows about it. For example --

LEHRER: But he says -- but he says it was incomplete. They weren't sure, and even engineers to this day are not --

Rep. WIRTH: Example. General Motors recalled, in August of 1981, recalled 47,000 X-cars. And they told the world, General Motors did, they had all of the data that NHTSA had. The public didn't have it. General Motors --

Mr. PECK: That's not true, Mr. Chairman.

Rep. WIRTH: You said this morning that they did have it.

Mr. PECK: No, you asked me a different question this morning.

Rep. WIRTH: General Motors recalled 47,000 cars and said it was the proportioning valve that was the cause of the problem. NHTSA knew -- and their documentation points out -- the proportioning valve might be part of the problem, but the real problem was the brake linings. NHTSA knew that and didn't say anything to anybody. General Motors had this recall; 47,000 consumers and many others who read about the recall in the newspapers thought the problem was solved. NHTSA knew it wasn't solved.

LEHRER: Mr. Peck, that's --

Rep. WIRTH: NHTSA went on to do the analysis in November -- just to finish that.

LEHRER: All right.

Rep. WIRTH: NHTSA went on to do the further technical analysis in November -- formal instrumentation tests -- which were completed in November of 1981, and nothing happened to those. They were completed in November, 1981, and were sat on and sat on and sat on.The whole analysis of the X-car took more than a year and a half, which technical analysis was finished and done within NHTSA. They didn't do anything with it.

LEHRER: Mr. Peck, that's a very serious charge.

Mr. PECK: If true, it would indeed be serious. Let me tell you what really happened.In July we were able, with what we call quick-and-dirty tests, after we had opened the case, to establish that there was a problem. We were not able to establish what solution, if any, would solve the problem. As soon as General Motors decided --

LEHRER: Excuse me, but if you established the fact there was a problem, wouldn't that be enough to -- his point was that the public should have been told that there was a very serious problem.

Mr. PECK: And they were. What happened was we established that there was a problem; we opened the defect investigation case; it was in fact the 10th and the 11th defect investigation cases against the X-car. We opened the case, General Motors decided voluntarily to recall a portion of the universe that had in fact been subject to our investigation. Now, the problem with what happened at that point is we were not able to establish that General Motors fix, although it was addressed to only one of two possible problem candidates, would not fix both, because the proportioning valve that in fact does take the amount of pressure off the rear brakes that is represented by the overly aggressive brake lining --

LEHRER: So you just --

Mr. PECK: -- would solve the issue.

LEHRER: So you just say he's dead wrong when he says that you all knew that the proportioning valve wasn't going to solve the problem?

Mr. PECK: That's exactly correct. We don't know that to this day, that it wouldn't. And our statistics showed that when an earlier change in other models of otherwise identical vehicles had been subject to this change, the problem did go down.

LEHRER: I have a hunch that we're not going to resolve that X-car thing tonight. But what about throughout -- as Congressman --

Rep. WIRTH: There was just a misstatement there. Your studies, Ray, if I might point out, suggest that with the proportioning valve issue taken care of, there was a slight diminution in brake locking. When you went to the full brake-lining change, the brake-locking question went almost to zero --

Mr. PECK: But that's only --

Rep. WIRTH: -- and that's what your own data showed, as we read into the record today.

Mr. PECK: You're ignoring --

Rep. WIRTH: Your own analysis.

Mr. PECK: You'reignoring the data that was in front of the agency. We can't go only on tests alone. General Motors or any other auto manufacturer would hang us out on a line to dry if we tried to go on tests --

LEHRER: Let me --

Mr. PECK: Our complaint ratio, which is what I said before, was inconsistent with those test results. So we had a real --

LEHRER: You mean, people saying my brakes are locking -- complaining --

Mr. PECK: By 15 to one, the universe of cars General Motors were proposing to correct were the problem areas.

LEHRER: Let me go to a more general point, that has gone all the way through what Congressman Wirth has said. A couple of them, but this specifically, that you're not letting the public in on the information at the right time.You're not warning them of these things. Is that true, and if so, why?

Mr. PECK: Not in the sense in which the Congressman has mentioned it. We're prepared to pur out a press release in July. General Motors did put out a press release; General Motors' press release addressed 250,000 cars, not merely the 47,000 covered by this recall. So, in terms of whether the public was aware of problems with the X-cars, General Motors put out a release, as they always do, and as they have been consistently praised for doing, and moreover, that notice itself was broader than the recall. It referred to a quarter of a million cars. Now, before that point, we're a law enforcement agency. You don't see the FBI putting out transcripts of grand jury hearings. You don't see the Internal Revenue Service putting out transcripts of audits. While we are preparing this data -- and it is very complicated and technical data -- it is highly confidential. The November testing actually started in late September; it was not over until the first week of January. And the date of November is only the date in which most of the test runs in fact occurred. We got the final report from the contractor in late June of 1982; we published it immediately, and it was the basis for the action that was taken now.

LEHRER: What's wrong with that, Congressman?

Rep. WIRTH: It didn't happen that way. There was no data that went out from NHTSA, as -- Mr. Peck earlier in the program said that the public had been told. The public was not told by NHTSA. The public got a press release from General Motors saying, "We're withdrawing these automobiles because of a proportioning valve problem," and they knew -- NHTSA knew at that time that was not the problem. Now, to put out a press release to say that we think there may be a problem is one of the ways in which you get a lot of information about this sort of thing, and the way that NHTSA has operated in the past. And the chicken and egg argument that the administration makes is that, "We didn't put out any public information, therefore we got no complaints." I mean, you can keep going around that circle forever. One of their responsibilities is to let the public know that there are -- that their engineers are unearthing a series of problems. And their record is full of these kinds of problems with the X-cars, which they didn't let the American consumers know about.

LEHRER: All right, let's go to Charlayne.

HUNTER-GAULT: I just want to pick up on another point that Congressman Wirth raised, Mr. Peck, that the number of investigations in NHTSA has declined since this administration took over.

Mr. PECK: It's not true because what you have to look at is the whole body of what we are doing. The process of investigating a problem begins with an inquiry. That's the first documented formal correspondence. If the inquiry establishes that there is no problem, even though we may be getting complaints on it, then that's the end of the case. The inquiry then moves to something called the engineering analysis stage. Engineering analysis stage is a comprehensive review of everything we know about the problem and the complaints, including interviews with many of the people who have come in with the complaints. If in fact that stage satisfies the agency that there is a problem, we open a defect investigation case. Those first two categories are in fact administrative procedures that the agency has developed over time in order to identify problems earlier than the statute would otherwise require. If you look at that sum total of activities; that is, the inquiries, the engineering analysis -- all of those enforcement actions that we are taking, we are absolutely on a par with everything else. In some years more of them will progress to recalls; in some years there will be more voluntary recalls than others; in some years we just won't have as many complaints. You know, one of the underlying problems with Congressman Wirth's approach is it would appear that his goal is to recall every car. Now, the goal of the statute and the goal of the agency as I understand it is to make cars so safe that we have no recalls because no recalls are necessary. There is not a complaint to the agency that is not investigated. And anybody who has made a complaint to the agency will know that.

HUNTER-GAULT: Congressman Wirth?

Rep. WIRTH: Well, there's no question about the fact that we would hope to have safer automobiles, Charlayne. And one of the ways in which we maintain accountability in the auto industry is to have somebody making sure that there is that accountability for safety. And that's the responsibility of NHTSA. And one of the ways in which we do that is to make sure that the public knows -- the public is driving these millions of automobiles. And the public is the one that has the experience, has the brake locks and knows when they're terribly endangered, as our witnesses pointed out today; knows about the maiming and the deaths that occur. And unless the public knows that there is a repository in a place they can go, how many of your viewers tonight have ever heard of NHTSA? Probably not a great number.The idea is to get enough public information out there to maintain that kind of accountability.

HUNTER-GAULT: But on the charge that you made about investigations of complaints, Mr. Peck says that they're maintaining --

Rep. WIRTH: Oh, the numbers, Charlayne, we've put in the record this morning, had charts related to that, and I should have brought them tonight, just to show the curves, the number of engineering analyses is down by a factor of more than four, running right through. The aggressive nature of NHTSA has dropped off with the swearing in of the Reagan administration in January, 1981.

Mr. PECK: A remarkable feat since none of the people who were doing the work dropped off with the swearing in of a new administration. I ought to get back to something that you raised just a moment ago, Charlayne, that is I think central to the whole question. When there was recent publicity about the X-car, we got virtually overnight 900 complaints. In this particular case, the issue that's involved is whether brakes lock up. That means a skid. I would be willing to bet we have 90% of every lawyer in the country representing a plaintiff who is involved with an X-car of any year which went into a skid in those files. That doesn't help us. What we need to know are what patterns of complaint unbiased by that kind of interest -- which the National Transportation Safety Board itself has criticized as a bad indicator of concern --

HUNTER-GAULT: So are you saying that the publicity generates a lot of unnecessary or perhaps --

Mr. PECK: Yes, but I'm not suggesting that that's an excuse for not doing it. What I'm saying is these are very important balancing questions. Let me give you one example of the dilemma we're in.

HUNTER-GAULT: Very briefly, Mr. Peck.We're about to run out of time.

Mr. PECK: On November the 17th, we held a consumer forum. The Center for Auto Safety, active consumer interest group in this area, asked what the status of 10 different investigations was. This was one of them.Over the ovjection of my staff I said, "I want everybody to know what our groundwork is; I want to know what our timetables are." The answer was given, "We're going to make a decision on this; we'll be ready to around the first of the year." Two weeks later the first reporters started coming into my office, and now Mr. Wirth is claiming that it is because of that press interest that we in fact acted. If you look at the record of this case, we could not have changed the date of the outcome by two days in either direction. And yet, when we try to open ourselves to consumer groups, that is the response we get. That's not fair.

LEHRER: Speaking of outcome, that's where we are. Mr. Chairman, Mr. Congressman, thank you both very much. Good night, Charlayne.

HUNTER-GAULT: Good night, Jim.

LEHRER: And we'll see you tomorrow night. I'm Jim Lehrer. Thank you and good night. Transcript produced by Journal Graphics, Inc., New York, N.Y.