The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA, often pronounced "nit-suh") is an agency of the Executive Branch of the U.S. Government, part of the Department of Transportation. It describes its mission as “Save lives, prevent injuries, reduce vehicle-related crashes.”.
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The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA, often pronounced "nit-suh") is an agency of the Executive Branch of the U.S. Government, part of the Department of Transportation. It describes its mission as “Save lives, prevent injuries, reduce vehicle-related crashes.”.
As part of its activities, NHTSA is charged with writing and enforcing safety, theft-resistance, and fuel economy standards for motor vehicles, the latter under the rubric of the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) system. NHTSA also licenses vehicle manufacturers and importers, allows or blocks the import of vehicles and safety-regulated vehicle parts, administers the VIN system, develops the anthropomorphic dummies used in safety testing, as well as the test protocols themselves, and provides vehicle insurance cost information. The agency has asserted preemptive regulatory authority over Greenhouse gas emissions, but this has been disputed by such state regulatory agencies as the California Air Resources Board.
Another of NHTSA's major activities is the creation and maintenance of the data files maintained by the National Center for Statistics and Analysis. In particular, the Fatality Analysis Reporting System, or FARS, has become a resource for traffic safety research not only in the US, but throughout the worldWho: date=March 2008. Research contributions using FARS by researchers from many countries appear in many non-US technical publicationsFact: date=March 2008, and provide a significant database and knowledge bank on the subject. Even with this database, conclusive analysis of crash causes often remains difficult and controversial, with experts debating the veracity and statistical validity of results.Fact: date=March 2008
History
In 1940, the United States implemented automobile design legislation, concerning sealed beam headlamps, which had recently been invented and were an important safety advance at that time. This regulation, virtually unchanged for the next 40 years, set a pattern of using auto safety design legislation to freeze innovation at a point in time.
In 1958, the UN established the World Forum for Harmonization of Vehicle Regulations, which began to promulgate what would eventually become UN's Economic Commission for Europe or ECE Regulations on vehicle design, construction, and safety performance. The United States declined to join the forum or adopt its (or any other) vehicle safety regulations at that time. However, vehicles meeting the ECE safety standards were legal to import into the United States.
In 1965 and 1966, public pressure grew in the US to increase the safety of cars, culminating with the publishing of Unsafe at Any Speed, by Ralph Nader, an activist lawyer, and the National Academy of Sciences' "Accidental Death and Disability - The Neglected Disease of Modern Society".
