New materials boost car safety and resolve regulatory costs

The auto industry will find that new materials chart the surest solutions to rebuild legislative and regulatory confidence and address consumer anxieties over car safety and quality.

Heretofore, automakers will wisely contemplate regulatory costs and reputational risk as seriously as industry standard of roughly $5/lb component costs to sustain market share. 

{mosads}New textile materials have the ability to address and resolve the airbag catastrophe. These remarkably strong materials can contain shrapnel released when defective airbags activate, because they do not rend when stretched or shocked under intense stresses and pressure. They are immune to moisture and humidity. By retrofitting existing and insulating new airbags, new textile materials can redress uncertainty that replacement airbags may be as lethal as existing ones. 

In two blistering hearings examining auto injuries and fatalities in connection with defective Takata air bags, senators and congressmen grilled Takata, automobile manufacturers and National Highway Transportation Safety Administration regulators on faulty manufacturing, grossly inadequate notification and utterly ineffectual monitoring. As many as 6 gratuitous deaths and more than 140 injuries have allegedly occurred due to defective airbag inflators, which bombarded drivers and passengers with shrapnel when activating improperly. Manufacturers are recalling nearly 8 million cars due to potentially lethal air bags. As many 17 million cars may be affected or recalled. It will take two years to manufacture enough new air bags to replace defective ones, current data indicates, and drivers are at risk during the interval. 

Honda entered $70 M consent orders for failing to report airbag deaths and injuries to NHTSA so regulators could alert consumers in timely ways. From 2003 to 2012, Honda relied on code that failed to capture accurate data, its expert report to regulators showed.  Now, Honda will provide voluminous information to comply with the orders. And, Honda’s admission of unmanageable data is vastly less incriminating than acknowledging suppressing fatality and accident information. 

Two senatorsare pressing the Justice Department for a criminal investigation of Takata, which is retaining three former Secretaries of Transportation and a high power public relations firm to address anomalies and failures. 

The president wants to boost National Highway Transportation Safety Administration“> staff to 57 from 8 screeners and 16 defects investigators currently charged with monitoring 75,000 annual complaints and to cap finesat $300M up from $35M.  

In 2014, NHSTA issued $126,720,000 in civil penalties. 

More NHTSA funding and staffing amounts to little more than throwing good money after bad for some legislators.   

Personal injury litigators are cultivating class action and personal injury cases.   

“>Amid all the same-old, same-old tact of fines, compliance costs, lobbyists, public relations and litigation,  new materials express technology-driven  solutions to manufacture safe, efficient, attractive cars and to address spiraling regulatory and compliance costs.  

New textiles materials can solve airbag safety right now. 

New carbon fiber materials make electric cars and revolutionary ways of manufacturing possible.  Electric cars can be designed and manufactured to exact strength and weight characteristics for passenger safety, comfort, driving range and performance. For BMW’s all electric i3 and hybrid i8 vehicles, BMW spins carbon fibers at a Washington state plant, ships the carbon fiber threads to factories in Germany where it transforms them into fabrics and carbon fiber composites for roofs, rear sheet shells and car bodies. In a 2015 Super Bowl advertisement, former NBC Today Show anchors Katie Couric and Bryant Gumbel marvel at i3 electric mobility and their efforts to make sense of the Internet twenty years earlier. Alfa Romeo is offering a single shell carbon fiber chassis. Chevy Corvettes and Dodge Vipers use carbon fiber composites in roofs and hoods.  

Sourcingcarbon fiber composites from ethanol, synthetic oil-based polymers, lignin, and recycled plastics remains the crucial unit cost challenge to building safer, lighter, fuel efficient cars. As those costs fall and engineering knowledge grows, simpler assembly and joining and less tooling will enable designers to create and manufacturers to produce attractively designed, efficient, safer cars.  

New textile and carbon fiber materials build on industry innovations. Henry Ford rationalized assembly line production, and the Tin Lizzie transformed rural America.  Alfred P. Sloan architected the 20^th century corporation. Walter Chrysler pioneered production efficiencies.  Designers Harley Earl, Virgil Exner, Raymond Lowry, Bill Mitchell and others transformed taste. 

The roads ahead are better travelled steering through windshields toward new materials and innovative technologies than navigating with rear view mirrors of litigation insulation, price fixing and flimsy components. 

Donahue and Pastore are principals of Energetic Textiles, a technology originator, partnering new materials engineering and manufacturing innovators.