Early Warning Reporting System Improvement Act of 2018

On August 2, 2018, Sen. Markey (D-Mass.) and Sen. Blumenthal (D-Conn.), Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee members, reintroduced the Early Warning Reporting System Improvement Act, which is intended to ensure auto manufacturers provide more information about incidents involving fatalities and serious injuries to the public.  According to the press release issued by the two Senators, Consumer Reports reported in June that NHTSA launched only 13 defect investigations in 2017, an all-time low.  The Senator’s legislation will require NHTSA to make the information it receives from auto manufacturers publicly available in a searchable, user-friendly format so that consumers and independent safety experts can evaluate potential safety defects themselves.

Specifically, the Early Warning Reporting System Improvement Act:

1. Requires automobile and equipment manufacturers to automatically submit the accident report or other document that first alerted them to a fatality or serious injury involving their vehicle or equipment to NHTSA’s Early Warning Reporting database. NHTSA is then required to automatically make those documents public unless they are exempted from public disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA);

2. Requires NHTSA to consider EWR information when it is investigating potential safety defects and when it is evaluating citizen petitions for automobile safety standards or enforcement actions;

3. Requires NHTSA to upgrade its online databases to improve searchability, integrate its different databases so they can all be searched at once, and ensure that all documents obtained or created by NHTSA related to a safety incident are both made publicly available and keyword searchable in its databases; and

4. Requires NHTSA to provide public, searchable notices of all inspection and investigation activities it undertakes.

For a copy of the bill, click here.