Will Brake Problems Slow Down Ford's F-150 Pickup?

On Mar. 4, the U. S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) announced that it was launching an investigation into brake failures of Ford's popular F-150 pickup trucks.  The agency claims that nearly half a million 2013 and 2014 models could have brakes that suddenly fail completely.  While no fatalities have yet been associated with the failures, the NHTSA has received 20 complaints of this problem in the last seven months, including four incidents that resulted in non-injury crashes.  Ford has responded that it will cooperate fully with the investigation.

In the automotive industry, the F-150 is a legendary success story.  It is the single best-selling vehicle in the U. S., and if Texas had a contest to name the state automobile, the F-150 would win hands down.  This is despite the fact that few F-150 owners routinely carry a half ton or more of stuff in the truck bed.  In other words, people buy pickup trucks for reasons other than practicality.  As any TV ad for pickups will show, the automakers have spent millions to associate pickup trucks with virility, toughness, and other he-man qualities.  The Wikipedia article on pickup trucks puts it this way:  "In America pickups are favored by low fuel prices, taxes and regulations that distort the market in favor of domestically built trucks, and a cultural attachment to the style."  (I especially like that "cultural attachment to the style.")  Ford has parlayed this attachment into a huge share of the U. S. automotive market, and with today's historically low fuel prices, the popularity of pickups shows no sign of abating.

But stopping a vehicle that weighs up to 2 tons (1800 kg) unloaded and more than 3 tons (2700 kg) loaded is no simple matter, so power-assisted brakes are standard on these vehicles.  Most brake boosters, as they are called, use a diaphragm actuated by a partial vacuum taken from the intake manifold or other source.  When the driver applies the brakes, this motion opens a valve that adds the force from the diaphragm to the brake-pedal force, and applies much greater force on the hydraulic master cylinder than one's foot can ordinarily supply.  If the booster fails, the brakes still work, but it takes much greater force for a given braking effect.

While it is too early to determine what may be going on with the F-150 brakes, it's easy to see what could go wrong with such a system.  Complaints to online auto-mechanic help websites about F-150 brakes indicate that in several cases, the brakes totally failed:  the brake pedal went to the floor and no braking happened.  When the vehicle was towed to the shop, no external signs of leakage were found but the master cylinder had no brake fluid in it.  That fluid had to go somewhere, and my guess is that a seal broke or an accidental passageway was formed between the master cylinder's high pressure and the vacuum in the brake-assist system, sucking the fluid into the vacuum system of the power assist. 

I have never worked on brakes more advanced than those in a 1955 Olds, and my idea of what is wrong with the F-150 brakes may be total nonsense.  But the NHTSA doesn't think the complaints are nonsense, and now both Ford and the government are trying to find out what's happening.

Besides this specific case, there may be something bigger going on with regard to the way the NHTSA is treating consumer complaints.  The Detroit News quotes NHTSA Administrator Mark Rosekind as saying recently that we are now in the era of the "Big Recall," which he says is not a good thing.  As anyone who has looked into the matter knows, automakers are constantly fielding complaints of flocks of problems of all kinds ranging from the trivial—interior trim that fades oddly in sunlight, for example—to the deadly, like the GM ignition-switch debacle I wrote about in this space in 2014.  The problem the automakers face is to allocate their limited investigative and engineering resources so that the truly dangerous problems get addressed promptly—hopefully before anyone gets killed—and the less serious ones are dealt with as time permits.  This is an art as much as it is a science, and historically the NHTSA has limited its involvement to situations where fatalities were involved and a serious defect could be identified.

The NHTSA's action in this brake-failure problem is not unprecedented, but is unusual in that no fatalities or even injuries have been reported in connection with the problem.  And the total number of complaints—about 30 in the last year—is not all that large, considering the millions of F-150s out there on the roads.  Perhaps this is the NHTSA's attempt to head a problem off at the pass, so to speak, before anybody does get killed as a result of an F-150's brake failure.  In any event, Ford has been called on the public carpet concerning the issue, and they now have no choice but to come up with documents requested by the government before April 20, or face large financial penalties. 

Has Ford done anything wrong?  That remains to be seen.  The NHTSA's action falls into the category of what legal specialists call "administrative law," which is in a kind of gray area between laws explicitly passed by legislatures, and arbitrary and capricious bullying by out-of-control government agency administrators.  As federal agencies go, the NHTSA has been fairly well-behaved compared to, for example, the Environmental Protection Administration, which has landed in the U. S. Supreme Court numerous times for what some say is vast overreaching of its statutory authority. 

There are good reasons to treat a large corporation like Ford differently than one would treat a private individual.  And in using complaints from private individuals to build a case against Ford, in that sense NHTSA is looking out for the little guy.  But it is easy to imagine how the NHTSA could overdo the thing by pestering Ford about every little complaint that could conceivably result in an injury.  So far, they don't seem to be doing that, but there is nothing except the integrity of NHTSA officials to keep the agency from going overboard.

The best outcome of this situation will be if Ford finds a definite cause for the brake failures and fixes it.  This might involve a massive recall, but we are almost used to those now.  Even if millions of F-150s are recalled, there is little chance that the American consumer will quit buying his favorite pickup.  The NHTSA is no match for all those he-man pickup ads. 

Sources:  I referred to the articles on the F-150 brake problem carried on Mar. 4 by Autoweek online at http://autoweek.com/article/car-news/nhtsa-investigating-brake-problems-2013-14-ford-f-150 and by the Detroit News at http://www.detroitnews.com/story/business/autos/ford/2016/03/04/ford-investigation/81310176/.  I also referred to the Wikipedia articles "Ford F-series," "pickup truck," and "vacuum servo."  I blogged on the GM ignition switch recall last year on Apr. 7, 2014 and June 9, 2014.

Will More Auto Safety Investigators Save More Lives?

Last Friday, the U. S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) announced that it was planning to improve the way it keeps tabs on automakers and the safety of their products.  NHTSA administrator Mark Rosekind admitted that the changes were largely inspired by his agency's failure to catch the GM ignition switch problem early enough.  The defective switches on older-model small cars such as the Saturn Ion and the Chevy Cobalt could accidentally cut power to both the engine and the vehicle's airbags, and have been identified as the cause of over 100 deaths and 200 injuries that took place before a massive recall of some 2 million vehicles last year to fix the problem. 

Rosekind acknowledged that although his staff had access to some of the data on the switch problem, they didn't understand that the switch could disable the airbags, and so in two reports issued by the agency, there are calls for improved technological expertise and more investigators in the agency's Office of Defects Investigation (ODI), which currently has about 60 full-time employees.  The report calls for increasing that number to 150, and maybe more.  Rosekind says that NHTSA has already undergone a "culture change" which relies less on the automakers to do self-policing and more on the agency to hold automakers accountable for producing needed data, and also for the agency to do more on-the-ground accident investigation itself.

The question here, as in any change of resources to address a problem with engineering implications, is:  will it do any good?  And will the good that might result be worth the resources expended?

As bureaucracies go, the NHTSA's ODI is pretty small compared to the total number of non-military Federal goverment employees—about 2.7 million people in 2014.  A few million dollars will give the NHTSA all they're asking for and more.  If you asked any of the relatives and friends of those 100 people who died because of defective GM ignition switches about this proposal, they would say the expenditure is worth it if it will save even one life in the future.  And here we get to an issue that tends to come up a lot in discussions of engineering ethics:  the monetary worth of a human life.

I'm not going to waste time playing with dollar/life quotients, because doing that means you have slipped into the never-never land of utilitarianism.  The philosophical approach to happiness called utilitarianism is conveniently (if not entirely accurately) summarized by the phrase "the greatest good for the greatest number."  It has a sneaky kind of appeal to engineering types, because it holds out the (false) promise of reducing complex morally-freighted issues to a straightforward process of mathematical optimization. 

I reject utilitarianism for a number of reasons.  While it has limited usefulness in extreme cases—it tells you, for example, that placing the value of a human life at zero is unwise—the thing usually falls apart well before you can actually sit down with a calculator and do a mathematical operation that will tell you which of several alternatives in an ethical problem is the right one.  It falls apart for me because the very act of putting a dollar value on a human life makes one no different in principle from the slave traders who did exactly that for profit.  It is simply a thing not to be done.

Well, if we can't make the situation into an optimization problem in mathematics, how should we decide if giving the NHTSA more bucks to hire more inspectors is a good idea?  To begin with, a little background might be helpful.

The history of U. S. auto safety has been one of gradual but cumulatively remarkable improvement, starting with the adoption of safety glass in the 1920s by Ford Motor Company, and progressing to seat belts, air bags, and many other safety-related technologies, only some of which were federally mandated.  The result of these improvements has been a pretty steady decline in deaths due to automobile accidents from a high of nearly 3 per 10,000 people per year in the 1930s to about 1 per 10,000 today.  So to begin with, things are getting steadily better, and if self-driving cars realize their early promise, the operator errors and drunk-driving accidents that cause most crashes today may largely go away too.  In the perspective of these numbers, while the 100 or so people who died in the GM switch accidents died needlessly, they were only 0.3% of the 30,000 or so people who died in auto accidents in each of the last few years. 

Ironically, it looks like the public is less upset when a single bad guy can be identified as the cause of a fatal crash, than when the immediate cause is something mechanical like a weak ignition switch spring.  This has nothing to do with mathematical optimizing of resources, and everything to do with how people perceive risk and danger.  You get in your car and tool out on the highway.  Maybe there's a drunk driver out there, but you think you can do something about that.  You can see him weaving around and steer out of his way, for instance.  But some un-thought-of hidden mechanical defect like a defective ignition switch—there's nothing you can do about that.  It's a lot scarier, and the news media know that, and the automakers know that.  Which is why they have been highly motivated to avoid causes of safety recalls, and deeply regret the ones that slip through their own bureaucracies (as the GM ignition switch problem did) and cause only a few verifiable fatalities.

So what is the bottom line here?  I think the bottom line is, there is no bottom line.  This is not an accounting problem.  Maybe three times as many investigators at the NHTSA will make the automakers three times as vigilant to catch the next major safety flaw before it gets built into millions of cars.  While that would be nice, I doubt it will happen, and I don't know of any objective way to tell whether it's happened after it happens, if in fact it does happen.  But the public has read in headlines that the feds are doing something about the problem, and that perception itself, rather than any meaningful actions that may happen afterwards, may have been the main point in this exercise.

Sources:  The Associated Press article on the NHTSA reports was carried by a number of outlets, including the Los Angeles Times under the headline "U. S. auto safety agency admits flaws, starts reform after GM case" at http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-hy-nhtsa-gm-20150605-story.html.  I referred to the Wall Street Journal for the statistic on the current (2014) number of Federal employees at http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2014/11/07/the-federal-government-now-employs-the-fewest-people-since-1966/.  I also referred to the press release of June 5 at the NHTSA website, http://www.nhtsa.gov/About+NHTSA/Press+Releases/2015/nhtsa-forming-new-safety-teams, and the Wikipedia articles "List of motor vehicle deaths in U. S. by year" and "Windshield."  I most recently blogged on the GM ignition switch issue on April 7, 2014 at http://engineeringethicsblog.blogspot.com/2014/04/the-gm-ignition-switch-recall-too.html.

Do Not Sit Here: The Exploding Airbag Recall

Airbags are a required safety feature on cars sold in the U. S. since at least 1998.  They have undoubtedly saved lives, especially in situations where the driver or passengers neglected to use seatbelts.  So whatever else we say about them, we should bear in mind that overall, cars are probably safer with airbags than without them.  But only if the airbags themselves are safe.  And lately, some drivers have found that the airbag cure was much worse than the accident disease.

Over a hundred injuries and at least two fatalities have been attributed to defective airbags made by Japanese supplier Takata.  According to the New York Times, in 2009 a 33-year-old mother of three ran into a mail truck in Richmond, Virginia, and her airbag deployed.  The injuries from the wreck itself were minor.  But a piece of shrapnel from the metal canister containing the airbag explosive shot through her neck and she allegedly bled to death as a result. 

For an airbag to be an effective cushion during a collision, it has to deploy in well under a tenth of a second.  This involves creating a large volume of high-pressure gas in a short time.  The early airbags used an explosive called sodium azide, but the residue was toxic. So in the 1990s, manufacturers began to research other chemicals that would be less noxious and also allow for a smaller propellant package. 

Takata, one of the largest airbag suppliers in the world, developed a compound based largely on good old ammonium nitrate (the same chemical involved in the West, Texas explosion on April 17, 2013), along with other components designed to moderate the tendency of this substance to detonate and to absorb moisture.  The manufacture of any product involving explosives requires rigorous adherence to procedures that maintain the integrity of the ingredients all the way from the raw materials to the finished item.  But as various documents have indicated, Takata has not always been sufficiently diligent in their manufacturing processes.

As Takata has responded to inquiries by automaker customers and regulatory agencies, it has admitted to several manufacturing errors over the years.  Again according to the Times, one set of defective airbags was attributed to workers in a Mexican assembly plant who allowed moisture-sensitive explosive ingredients to sit on the plant floor too long in a humid environment.  Other documents show rusty propellant containers and foreign objects in the propellant cans may have been responsible.  Problems with the airbags began to show up as long ago as 2004, and in a series of widening recalls in the last few months, eleven automakers have recalled over 14 million vehicles for replacement of suspect airbags made by Takata.  Many of the vehicles being recalled are in the most humid states in the U. S., which indicates that deterioration due to high humidity is the main culprit here.  Toyota has told its dealers that if the replacement airbags on a recalled vehicle are not immediately available, they should put a sticker on the dashboard next to the defective airbag.  The sticker reads "Do Not Sit Here."  Good luck with that.

This particular story comes close to home, personally.  In our Honda household we operate both a Civic and an Element.  They are very good cars, but neither has been in a major collision that set off the airbags.  For this I am grateful.  I checked their VINs (vehicle identification numbers) at a U. S. government website designed to let owners know of any recalls out on their vehicles, and hit the jackpot both times.  I don't think I'll wait for the dealer to write me.  My 89-year-old father-in-law rides in the passenger seat of the Element.  It would be a shame for a World War II U. S. Navy veteran of the Pacific theater to be cut down by a defective Japanese airbag.  But it could happen, at least until I get those airbags replaced. 

As hazards go, this one is not worth lying awake nights about, unless maybe you work for Takata or one of the affected automakers.  As long as you're not in a wreck, apparently the airbags won't spontaneously combust, and most of them appear to work properly, especially if you don't live in an area that's particularly humid (watch out, Houstonians!).  But even a few defective airbags are too many. 

We won't know for some time why it took so long to uncover the problems and do something about them.  But some contributing factors are apparent already.  First, the problem arose not in a particular automaker's design (as was the case with the GM ignition recall), but with a supplier's manufacturing process.  It is impossible to test an airbag non-destructively, so except for sample testing, which automakers may or may not do, I'm not sure how they could have caught the problem by incoming inspections of Tanaka's product. 

People can be injured even by airbags that work properly and have no design or manufacturing defects, so sorting out incidents that involve defective airbags from those that don't is not a trivial problem, except in the glaringly obvious cases when metal shards from the airbag tear it to ribbons and slice into passengers.  And while the automakers did the minimum required when they received word about the airbag injuries, which was to notify the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) within five days, they don't have to give a lot of details.  And if the feds choose not to follow up the notification, the matter ends there, as it did for most of the last ten years.  Only when lawsuits and headlines began to pop up about the matter did the automakers start issuing recalls and pressured Takata to shape up.

I don't know what Takata's market share in the airbag industry is, but my guess is it's pretty high.  Companies that sell products to large OEM (original equipment manufacturer) firms often develop too-chummy relationships with their few customers, who in turn are reluctant to threaten to take their business elsewhere if problems arise.  It's the old monopoly problem, but in this case the consumer is harmed not by exploitative prices—I'm sure the automakers pressured Takata to keep their prices down—but by defective merchandise.  Unfortunately, there is no easy solution for this type of structural problem, except for buyers and regulators to be increasingly vigilant for signs that there is a manufacturing problem.

If you happen to drive one of the fourteen million vehicles affected by the recall, here's hoping you get your car to the dealer soon—and you get it back with something better than a "Do Not Sit Here" sticker.

Sources:  Car and Driver magazine's online edition carried a report on the recall that I referred to, at http://blog.caranddriver.com/massive-takata-airbag-recall-everything-you-need-to-know-including-full-list-of-affected-vehicles/.  I also referred to the New York Times article published online on Sept. 11, 2014 at http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/12/business/air-bag-flaw-long-known-led-to-recalls.html.  The U. S. NHTSA's VIN recall website is at https://vinrcl.safercar.gov/vin/.