Concerns about Roof-Crush Safety
Updated July 2007: The “Emergency World Summit on Roof Crush” conference, which took place in Washington, D.C. in late July, convened to try and convince the National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration to implement stricter roof-crush safety standards.
The NHTSA is getting ready to issue its updated version of a new roof-crush safety proposal that it presented in November 2005. In the 2005 proposal, the NHTSA recommended that the standard that cars up to 6,000 pounds have to meet a static weight test should be strengthened. For the old test, the automobile had to be able to support at least 1.5 times the vehicle’s weight. The NHTSA said it would increase the amount of weight a vehicle has to be able to support to 2.5 times the vehicle’s weight. The new standard would apply to vehicles up to 10,000 pounds, which includes SUVs and pickup trucks.
The conference attendees, as well as many consumer advocates, hope that the updated proposal will include a requirement for a dynamic roof-crush test that involves a moving vehicle, so the point of specific impact for each vehicle can be found. This kind of test would measure how far the roof caves in and how well seat belts and airbags protect passengers in a rollover. The test would assess the vehicle in a more “real world” situation as opposed to the static test that does not represent all factors relating to vehicle rollover fatalities.
Vehicle rollovers take 10,000 lives every year, and seriously injure over 24,000 passengers. Hopefully the updated standards proposal will include stronger roof-crush safety standards to protect occupants.