U.S. DOT hosts workshop to boost recall completion rates |
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National Highway Traffic Safety Administration
April 28, 2015
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WASHINGTON – The U.S. Department of Transportation’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) today hosted its Retooling Recalls event, a one-day workshop that brought together leading transportation officials, automotive industry representatives, safety advocates, and researchers to examine how to increase unacceptably low recall completion rates.
“Recalls are only successful and can only save lives if they end up getting the cars fixed, but we know that 20 percent of vehicles that are recalled – and possibly more than that – go unrepaired,” said Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx. “This is a safety risk to the drivers of those vehicles and all the people they share they share the road with, too.”
NHTSA marked a record year in 2014, with the highest number of vehicle recalls in more than three decades. There were 803 vehicle recalls involving 63.9 million vehicles, including two of the ten largest vehicle recalls in history.
The Retooling Recalls workshop focused on public education of the recall process; customer and dealership outreach; parts production challenges and recall repair rates. The input gathered by the working groups will be used to identify best practices and new approaches for improving the recall process.
“While NHTSA has worked hard to improve our processes for identifying vehicle safety defects, simply identifying problems isn’t enough. To keep Americans safe, the problems we find have to get fixed,” said NHTSA Administrator Mark Rosekind. “Recent high-profile recalls have taught us important lessons about the obstacles to higher completion rates, and we brought everyone to the table to help spread those lessons and develop new approaches to the recall process.”
Administrator Rosekind’s opening and closing remarks, and the presentations from the workshop will be available to view here. Transcripts from the panel discussions and summaries from the working group sessions will be posted as they become available.
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