ATA Requests Flexibility on NHTSA Proposal to Require Electronic Stability Control System

This story appears in the Aug. 27 print edition of Transport Topics.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration should provide more flexibility in its proposed mandate that new heavy trucks be equipped with electronic stability control systems, American Trucking Associations said in comments filed last week.

Although ATA said it generally supports a mandate, it said the trucking industry is diverse, and NHTSA should not limit the requirement to ESC. Instead, the agency should allow different roll stability control systems to be installed on new trucks, ATA said.

“ATA is not convinced that the estimated ESC effectiveness is large enough, significant enough or actually real enough to mandate only the ESC system for an industry as diverse as trucking,” ATA said. “This concern is further validated through independent research.”

In May, NHTSA proposed that all trucks with gross vehicle weights of 26,000 pounds or more be equipped with ESC systems, which the agency said can best prevent fatalities and injuries.

The comment period on the proposal, which does not require retrofits for existing trucks, ended Aug. 21. NHTSA has not set a target date for the mandate if it publishes a final rule.

Although ATA agreed that ESC systems reduce rollovers, it cited a study by the American Transportation Research Institute that found some trucks equipped with roll stability control systems had fewer rollovers and less crash-related costs than trucks with more expensive ESC systems (8-20, p. 3).

RSC is designed primarily to mitigate rollovers. ESC, on the other hand, is designed not only to reduce rollovers but also to mitigate severe understeer or oversteer conditions that lead to loss of control by using automatic computer-controlled braking and reducing engine torque output, NHTSA said.

The agency said the ESC proposal annually would save as many as 60 lives, 858 injuries and damage to 1,499 vehicles. The ESC system cost is estimated to be $1,160 (in 2010 dollars) per vehicle to install, NHTSA estimated.

Deborah Hersman, chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, said her group has advocated implementation of crash avoidance technologies such as ESC for commercial vehicles since 1997.

NTSB said RSC systems alone “lack the ability to affect the directional control of a vehicle in situations of potential rollover.”

Road Safe America, a nonprofit organization that supports the use of crash avoidance technologies, encouraged truckers to not only install ESC systems on new trucks, but retrofit existing vehicles with roll stability control systems.

Other comments on the proposal posted on a government regulatory website last week were mixed.

John Boyle, president of Boyle Brothers Inc., Marlton, N.J., called the cost of the proposed rule “excessive” and said it would not eliminate rollover issues.

“We are still dealing with the costs associated with [Environmental Protection Agency] compliant emission control systems,” wrote Boyle, whose firm owns about 100 trucks. “Please understand that previous government mandates have already caused a 15% to 20% increase in the cost of new heavy trucks in the last four years.”

Truck driver Nadya Viktoriya Gerber strongly disagreed with the need for the mandate.

“In 10 years, the only rollovers I have seen on the highway were obvious driver stupidity, or a vehicular problem,” Gerber wrote.

Justin Barriault, an employee of Yankee Trucks in Concord, N.H., said ESC systems would add new parts that could malfunction, increasing repair costs.

“By constantly raising the cost on new trucks and adding more components that can cause downtime, more companies are simply going to either keep their old equipment or stop driving altogether, taking experienced drivers off the road and adding more non- or less-experienced on,” said Barriault.

But Tim Sullivan, president of Skagit Transportation Inc., Mount Vernon, Wash., thought the mandate idea was a good one.

“This is simply a no-brainer rule,” Sullivan said. “It is simply put, a very good and inexpensive way to make our highways a safer place to be.”