Opinion ID: 446520
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Protection of Vehicle Safety Equipment

Text: 30 The agency concluded that reduction of the 5/5 bumper standard would not have any significant effect on safety. 47 Fed.Reg. 56,643. 5 In arriving at this conclusion with regard to the protection afforded by bumper systems to automobile safety equipment, NHTSA relied upon the Tri-Level Study of the Causes of Traffic Accidents (Tri-Level Study), published in 1979 by the Indiana University Institute for Research in Public Safety. See Tri-Level Study of the Causes of Traffic Accidents: Executive Summary (May 1979) (Executive Summary), J.A. 2741-2809. [243 U.S.App.D.C. 126] That study, which performed on-site examinations of 2,258 accidents, estimated that only 0.44 to 0.48 percent of accidents, estimated that only 0.44 to 0.48 percent of accidents were certainly caused, and 0.93 to 1.67 percent were either certainly or probably caused, by malfunctioning safety equipment potentially within the zone of protection of a bumper system, vehicle lights and signals being the safety system most frequently implicated. FRIA at IV-12. 31 Petitioners claim that even these low figures constitute an enormous toll in lives and injuries when it is considered that 50,000 people a year have died in traffic accidents in recent years, and millions of others are injured. Brief for Petitioner CFAS at 18. The agency's reasoning on this issue shows petitioners to be wide of the mark. The 0.44 to 0.48 (or 0.93 to 1.67) percent figure is merely the point of departure, and not the conclusion, regarding the indirect relationship between bumpers and safety. The Tri-Level Study did not indicate what fraction of the malfunctioning safety equipment was caused by normal wear and tear (e.g., burned-out lightbulbs) rather than an earlier accident, but did indicate that older vehicles were disproportionately involved in accidents resulting from mechanical problems. FRIA at IV-13. Thus, with regard to light and signal failure, the major source of accidents attributable to systems that could conceivably be protected by bumpers, the agency quite reasonably concluded that natural wearing out of bulbs [is] ... the most typical cause[ ] of inoperation. Id. Even the remaining fraction, moreover, does not represent the safety differential between the two bumper systems. What matters for that comparison is the much smaller percentage of accidents caused by a damaged piece of equipment that would have been protected by the 5.0 mph system but not by the 2.5 mph system. Many of the equipment-damaging accidents involved in the Tri-Level Study may have occurred at higher speeds, where neither the 5.0 mph system nor the 2.5 mph system would have protected the safety components. And even in accidents occurring between the 2.5 mph and 5.0 mph range, it is not the case that the 2.5 mph bumper never protects the safety component and the 5.0 mph bumper always does so. Finally, not all accidents involving failed safety systems result in deaths or injuries. Indeed, the Tri-Level Study noted that 70 to 80 percent of the accidents in its on-site sample resulted only in property damage, a figure which corresponds closely to national figures for reported accidents. Executive Summary at A-2, J.A. 2802. Since, as the agency noted, the unreasonableness of risk from a safety standpoint depends, not simply on the number of accidents, but also on the contribution of such accident[s] to injuries and deaths, FRIA at IV-14, the significance of any difference between the accident-reduction potentials of the 2.5 mph and 5.0 mph bumper systems must be further discounted to a substantial degree. 32 We cannot contradict the agency's conclusion that the difference between the two systems resting upon the fraction of the 1 percent of accidents caused by all theoretically protectable safety defects, further discounted to an obviously massive but not precisely established extent by the above-described factors, was not measurable and did not constitute a significant safety consideration. 47 Fed.Reg. 21,827; 47 Fed.Reg. 56,643. The Safety Act does not require NHTSA to establish safety standards with an eye toward any conceivable safety hazard, no matter how insignificant; rather, the Act is directed at unreasonable risks. 15 U.S.C. § 1391(1). NHTSA could properly conclude that the level of risk here does not rise to such a level. Cf. Industrial Union Dep't, AFL-CIO v. American Petroleum Institute, 448 U.S. 607, 655, 100 S.Ct. 2844, 2870, 65 L.Ed.2d 1010 (1980) (Occupational Safety and Health Administration has an obligation to find that a significant risk is present before it can characterize a place of employment as 'unsafe' ) (emphasis added) (plurality opinion). 33 Petitioners charge that NHTSA's safety conclusions conflict with the only real world data comparing the effects on safety [243 U.S.App.D.C. 127] of the 5.0 mph and 2.5 mph bumpers. These consist of State Farm statistics, submitted to the agency as a comment during the rulemaking proceedings, analyzing its own claims experience from 1973 to 1980. 6 According to petitioners, the statistics demonstrate that cars equipped with 2.5 mph bumpers experience far more damage to safety-related parts than cars equipped with 5.0 mph bumpers. They reach that conclusion by comparing State Farm's claims experience for MY 1973 cars (equipped with rear bumpers meeting the Standard 215 2.5 mph requirement) with its claims experience for MY 1974 cars (equipped with the Standard 215 5.0 mph bumper systems). The comparison shows that the incidence of damage to safety items protected by rear bumper systems (gas tank, tail lamp, and trunk lid) was significantly and, for the most part, uniformly lower for the MY 1974 cars. For example, the relative incidence of damage to tail lamps, a safety item thought by NHTSA to be particularly important, is given in Table I. 34 Brief for Insurance Company Petitioners at 20 (footnotes omitted). 35 NHTSA rejected the State Farm data because the cars examined in the study were manufactured to comply with the Standard 215 requirements, which for MY 1974 did, but for MY 1973 did not, include the pendulum test responsible for standardizing bumper heights. The agency therefore concluded that it would be misleading to treat the MY 1973 bumper system as equivalent to the 2.5 mph, uniform height system that NHTSA was considering in 1981. FRIA at IV-9. Petitioners assert that this overestimates the importance of uniform bumper heights. They point out that in 1974, the year in which State Farm's data evidences a dramatic improvement in MY 1974 rear protection, most cars on the road which the MY 1974 vehicles encountered were not subject to the height-standardizing pendulum test. Thus, they claim that while the State Farm figures might slightly overstate the contribution of the higher test impact speed, they still demonstrate the contribution to be significant. 36 In this argument, we do well to be guided by the Supreme Court's most recent instruction that it is within the agency's discretion to pass upon the generalizability of ... field studies. State Farm, 103 S.Ct. at 2872. NHTSA did not conclude that there was no difference between the bumper systems in the protection they afford to safety systems. It merely concluded that State Farm's review ... falls short of demonstrating that [the difference] is noticeable. FRIA at IV-9. State Farm made no effort to correct for the effect of bumper height standardization or [243 U.S.App.D.C. 128] to demonstrate that, with or without such correction, the differences in claims experience were statistically significant. With regard to its comparison of MY 1973 and MY 1974 statistics in particular, there was no basis for assurance that the apparent differences were attributable to anything other than chance. 7 We will not reverse the agency's considered rejection of these data. They in any case relate, we should note, only to a single factor underlying the agency's conclusion of no significant safety effect (viz., the difference between the 5.0 mph standard and the 2.5 mph standard in the protection of safety equipment) and in no way affect other factors, notably the agency's estimation that safety equipment damaged in prior accidents is not a substantial cause of automobile accidents in the first place. 8 37 We do not know what to make of the dissent's complaint that the agency formulated no criteria for defining what an insignificant safety risk might be, Dissent at 1381. The assertion that this failure represents the essence of unreasoned and unsupported decisionmaking, id., is refuted by the passage from our own opinion quoted in the same portion of the dissent, wherein we say that [w]e use the term 'significant' to indicate that there must be a non-de minimus [sic ] number of failures. United States v. General Motors [243 U.S.App.D.C. 129] Corp., 518 F.2d 420, 438 n. 84 (D.C.Cir.1975). Surely substituting the Latin phrase de minimis for the English adjective insignificant does not constitute formulating a criterion; nor are we aware of any case that imposes such a requirement--whereby an agency would, presumably, announce a rule that more than 1,000 injuries is significant and less than 1,000 is not. To the contrary, the agencies' ability to identify and pronounce significant risk in case-by-case fashion is made clear by the totality of the Supreme Court's analysis which the dissent chooses to quote in misleading part: 38 [T]he requirement that a significant risk be identified is not a mathematical straitjacket. It is the Agency's responsibility to determine, in the first instance, what it considers to be a significant risk. Some risks are plainly acceptable and others are plainly unacceptable. If, for example, the odds are one in a billion that a person will die from cancer by taking a drink of chlorinated water, the risk clearly could not be considered significant. On the other hand, if the odds are one in a thousand that regular inhalation of gasoline vapors that are 2% benzene will be fatal, a reasonable person might well consider the risk significant and take appropriate steps to decrease or eliminate it. Although the Agency has no duty to calculate the exact probability of harm, it does have an obligation to find that a significant risk is present before it can characterize a place of employment as unsafe. 39 Industrial Union Dep't, AFL-CIO v. American Petroleum Institute, 448 U.S. 607, 655, 100 S.Ct. 2844, 2870-2871, 65 L.Ed.2d 1010 (1980) (footnote omitted). As we said in General Motors, immediately following the de minimis remark which the dissent elevates to a criterion: The question whether a 'significant' number of failures have [sic ] taken place must be answered in terms of the facts and circumstances of each particular case. 518 F.2d at 438 n. 84. 40 In any case, even if NHTSA had established the sort of numerical criterion of significance the dissent evidently demands, it would have been of no assistance in resolution of the present issue, since it was impossible to quantify the present risk for purposes of comparison with any such criterion. As the FRIA made entirely clear, no reliable data were available from which hard numbers or even percentages could be derived, either with regard to the differential in protection of safety systems afforded by 5.0 mph and 2.5 mph bumpers, FRIA at IV-7 to IV-9, or with regard to the number of accidents attributable to safety system malfunctions caused by prior accidents, id. at IV-13. Perhaps data regarding the former could somehow have been developed from extensive crash-test experiments with 2.5 mph-bumper cars--which would have required, for American cars that constitute the bulk of the United States market, specially produced bumpers, and would also have required some means of accounting for the fact that not all safety systems, and in particular lights, are identically situated and protected on all car models. But it is utterly impossible to imagine how the second category of nonexistent data could have been developed, i.e., the number of accidents caused not merely by faulty safety systems but by safety systems damaged in an earlier accident--and in an earlier accident at particular speeds where the variable protectiveness of the two bumpers would make a difference. 9 As acknowledged by State [243 U.S.App.D.C. 130] Farm's Vice President of Research, the relationship between safety and damage to safety-related vehicle components 41 is probably the most difficult possible thing to study and I agree with one of the former speakers that you would have to put some judgment on here .... I'm not optimistic we'll be able to provide a definitive answer, but fortunately I think that burden rests with you more than us. 42 Department of Transportation, NHTSA, Public Hearing on Bumper Standard Number 581 at 77 (Oct. 22, 1981) (Statement of Wayne W. Sorenson), J.A. 1282. 43 The agency did put some judgment on, and State Farm's Vice President was wrong only in his assumption regarding the burden of proof. The burden was on the agency, to be sure, to justify the change from the status quo, see State Farm, 103 S.Ct. at 2866. But that justification need not consist of affirmative demonstration that the status quo is wrong; it may also consist of demonstration, on the basis of careful study, that there is no cause to believe that the status quo is right, so that the existing rule has no rational basis to support it. The agency did precisely that here, stating that the 5.0-mph safety criteria of Part 581 have been determined to be unsupported, 47 Fed.Reg. 21,830. That finding was sufficient to support the agency's action, and was itself amply supported by the record. The position in effect espoused by the dissent--that obviously small but precisely unknowable risks of injury must be presumed to be significant once they have been treated as such by the agency--is a formula for rendering an erroneously adopted standard, itself unsupported by any scientific analysis, essentially irremediable.