The next speaker is Steve Ridella.
He's the Director of the Applied Vehicle Safety research program
at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
NHTSA. NHTSA is an agency that deals with driver safety
and car safety.
Mr. Quade talked about truck and bus safety.
So, Steve.
Thank you.
Thank you for your patience. I'll be brief in my comments,
but I appreciate being here today.
I'm a biomechanical engineer that works for the
National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
I also happen to speak French, Mr. Stone,
and if you were here for his talk,
I used it recently when I was on a business trip to Brussels
in Belgium and I had to ask directions
to get to the airport to pick up my lost luggage.
Engineers make up a vast amount of the people
we have at NHTSA.
We are a very small agency, but we have about
six hundred people I would say.
Easily over two hundred of these peoples are
engineers or scientists
working every day to make the roads and cars that you drive or are in every day
safer.
And we do that in a variety of ways.
Our mission is to save lives,
prevent injuries
and reduce economic costs due to road traffic crashes
through education, research, safety standards and enforcement activities.
Engineers play a big part in all those activities.
I'm going to briefly review what engineers
do for you every day at NHTSA.
We go by numbers, and these numbers
we calculate every year.
We have over 15 different data sets that we use every year,
but this is the one that we focus on most
and you probably hear the most in the news.
Fatalities are at a record low in our country
these days on the road.
In 1950 we had 33,000 people who died in car crashes
in this country.
It went up as more and more people drove
through the '60s and the '70s
then tailed off, but remained
fairly stagnant.
In the last few years this number has dropped to where we're
actually at fatalities, and we just announced last week,
almost, even lower than this number that we were in 1950.
The work that we're doing at the agency is making a difference.
Traffic fatalities are down.
The rates of fatalities that we calculate and
fatalities per hundred million miles vehicles travelled every year
is down to about one.
So your odds of getting into a fatality in a car crash are extremely low.
And we hope to get this even lower every year.
Our priorities are driven by data.
Data is the source that we use
to plan,
do research, do our rulemaking and enforcement.
Engineers play a big part and
scientists play a big part in
all these areas of our agency
to help us develop new plans.
We've just announced a three year plan for research and development
and rulemaking activities at our agency.
And even longer term plans that go beyond five years
in the future.
Technology and engineering at NHTSA involves
data, where we have people analyzing data for safety issues.
Benefits of proposed rules.
The research and the development activity that I'm involved in,
we develop tools and test procedures,
we do research across the country
and interact with our friends around the world,
our counterparts around the world to develop new tools and procedures
to make cars safer.
Our rulemaking group takes this information from data and research
and creates federal motor vehicle safety standards.
And they also promote international harmonization of these rules
so that manufacturers can make cars around the world
that comply with safety standards.
Our enforcement activity and defects investigation group ensures
that these standards are met.
Engineers are out there every day making sure that cars
meet our standards
and they respond to potential problems that may arise.
And I'm sure you've heard about several in the news
that happen every year.
Our research activities, and
I don't expect you to even read this graph,
but they're vast.
We break up, we look at the entire spectrum of a car crash
from during normal driving events,
just before the crash,
during the crash
and after the crash.
We're doing research on passenger cars.
We're working with our friends at other agencies and
heavy vehicles and trucks,
motorcycles, pedestrians.
Even starting to look at new battery technologies that are on the road or
are going to be coming on the road
so that we can wean ourselves off of
the fuel dependency in the future
and use these new battery technologies to drive our vehicles.
But it requires research and understanding how they charge,
how they shut down
and what happens during a crash event.
So these activities we do in research
are used by our rulemaking group
to drive safety standards and
let me just touch on a couple of technologies and challenges
that we're going through right now
in the research group.
Driver distraction.
Our Secretary of Transportation, Mr. LaHood,
is driven crazy by distraction
and would like to eliminate this from our roads.
It contributes to nearly six thousand fatalities per year.
We have new and more vehicle electronic
technology coming for both entertainment and infotainment.
And active safety systems that drivers will be bombarded with
messages and information about road hazards
that may be coming at them
and they have to respond to them.
So we're looking at research and technology
that can be used to help drivers stay focused in the future.
We're actually looking to you folks to tell us
what we should be doing too.
We do have a plan.
It's called a distraction plan
that has four initiatives to look at.
Understanding the problem.
Data.
Reducing the workloads from the interfaces that drivers will face in the future
how to keep those drivers safe and recognizing the risks and consequences of those technologies that are going to be
put on vehicles.
Connected vehicles.
Believe it or not, cars are going to be
talking to each other in the future,
called V to V, vehicle to vehicle and
vehicle to infrastructure.
All these vehicles will be connected together,
helping us in mobility applications,
traffic management
and environment.
So that in the future as cars talk to each other and talk
to the environment,
they're going to be understanding
where they are in relation to each other
and can actually help prevent crashes so
they never actually occur in the first place.
We won't have,
that should drive down the death and injury rate
that we see on the roads.
We look at new technologies to
understand new crash events.
This is a narrow offset crash,
that is,
this car is impacting a pole outside of its normal structural
framework.
And it causes tremendous damage to the vehicle
as you can see.
It's a challenge to the vehicle structure,
it's a challenge to the airbag and restraint systems,
it's a challenge to the human driving the car
and the passengers in the car.
We're looking at ways to help vehicle manufacturers
improve their crash event and
the technology in their crash event like this
so that cars in the future can be safe,
safer than they are now.
Cars are extremely safe.
We think looking at this kind of crashes
and different kinds of crashes help us
understand how to make cars even safer.
We're looking at
as cars get lighter because of our,
as I said, trying to get out of our dependency on fuel,
we're going to be using simulation technology.
I know that was just brought up by Mr. Quade.
That we're using simulation to drive
lighter weight vehicles
to understand how those counter measures
of making vehicles lighter can keep them safe
and also increase their fuel efficiency.
So we're using a whole process to try to understand that.
Engineers are at the heart of this kind of analysis and research.
Our rulemaking group takes all that information,
these challenges,
and develops motor vehicle safety standards
and they provide consumer information.
You may have heard of Stars on Cars, the NCAP program.
That's what this rulemaking group does
in addition to many other things.
And I guess I said also
they're working with international partners to develop
standards that can be used across the world.
Video coming up shows an example of
a side impact crash that is used to evaluate
side impact safety.
We look at restraint system performance,
we look at vehicle performance
in this kind of crash.
This is about 35-37 miles an hour crash into the side
of a vehicle.
Very, very severe crash.
And cars do extremely well in this.
We're hoping that we can make them
even safer in the future.
Our enforcement group.
Engineers that investigate and correct
vehicle defects.
They're out there every day
on the roads responding to
requests that come in to the agency
and issues that come up from our data systems
and they assure that these vehicles
comply with our standards.
An example of this is shown in the next video.
To try and understand what, a fan that was breaking
in a particular vehicle and these were tests
that were conducted to
understand the failure of these fans
and how to correct them.
In summary,
engineering at NHTSA includes many disciplines.
I'm a biomechanical engineer.
We have electrical engineers,
civil engineers, mechanical engineers,
human factors engineers.
The list is growing.
We contribute to all aspects of vehicle safety to make
occupants safer.
And we want to move that safety into the future
to achieve our mission goals.
Thanks for your attention.