FOIA: Essie Wagner, "We don't have ..."

During the June 23 hearing by the NHTSA on "Bell the Hybrid," Essie Wagner, an NHTSA employee, reported "we do not have enough data" to report the hybrid accident rate. Later, during the questioning, I introduced Dr. Christopher Hogan's report on 5 years of traffic showing the Prius has the same accident rate as ordinary cars. This time another gentleman in the back of the audience repeated Essie's claim,"We do not have enough data." I made note of it in my trip report, which I'd forwarded to Donna Ascone, the NHTSA coordinator.

Submissions for the hearing, NHTSA-2008-0108, ended August 1 and nothing showed up from the NHTSA to backup the claim,"We do not have enough data." So I've filed a Freedom Of Information Act request for their backup analysis and data.

The blind community has realized they are vulnerable on this point and continue looking for lay reports on hybrid-to-blind injuries. This is a good thing as it may get them to start looking at the facts and data and emphasize the importance of making reports. But their past practice has been to use anecdotal stories instead of empirical data. Perhaps we won't hear about the 8 year old boy who didn't look before turning into a Prius and his Mom blamed the car.

Bob Wilson

 

Dr. Hogan and I have been discussing this. One fact is there were only 11 Prius-to-pedestrian fatalities in the 5 years. What this means is if there had been one more, it would make the accident rate look 9% worse, or one less about 10% better. This is sometimes called the "trembling hand" problem.

However, fatalities have a marvelous ability to take the numbers out of the world of 'sampling' and reflect an exact measurement. No one in their right mind would claim NHTSA accident data is some 'statistical' nonsense ... not in this case and keep their employment.

What would have been more helpful would have been hospitalization injuries. There are roughly 4-5 times as many hospital treated injuries as fatalities. Unfortunately, we don't have direct measurement of these in the Prius-to-pedestrian data (not that we've found already.)

But it is not our job to tell the NHTSA what analysis they conducted to make this claim. It is our job to see what they did and make sure it meets the 'sniff test.'

One other thing to point out is the ratio of fatalities to injuries changes as a function of impact velocity. There is a fascinating study, "Literature Review on Vehicle Travel Speeds and Pedestrian Injuries" (DOT HS 809 021 October 1999) with these tidbits:

The key point is even the blind claim their noise generators are only needed at speeds lower than 25-28 mph. What this means is they have targeted the least fatal speed ranges for their noise makers.

Bob Wilson