There is more information is coming out about what Toyota knew about runaway and defective vehicles and when it knew it. State Farm Insurance says it alerted the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) concerning the Toyota problems in 2007. Because State Farm is a massive insurance company that covers about 42 million vehicles, which is about 18 percent of the U.S. market, it can see trends in vehicle issues. All it has to do is analyze data. In an autoblog article, State Farm says it alerted NHTSA about the unintended acceleration issue. State Farm says it began to see claims activities and that is when it went to NHTSA. A State Farm spokesman, Kip Diggs, told Reuters that the trend had to be sizeable to be noticed. Other insurance companies did not observe the trend. Progressive has told Reuters that it will now look back to see if there were any patterns of unintended acceleration early on.
All of this raises the question, where was NHTSA? Without a leader for a year, the agency is operating at about the budget it had in 2000 and has not been a priority for previous administrations. President Obama says he will fix that and plans on hiring more investigators and beefing up some programs. It is time for NHTSA to become a regulator and not just the Washington D.C. office of Detroit and Japanese automakers.
