Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

In 2020, voters in Massachusetts chose to extend that state's automotive "right to repair" law to include telematics and connected car services . But this week the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration told automakers that some of the law's requirements create a real safety problem and that they should be ignored, since federal law preempts state law when the two conflict.

Almost all new cars in 2023 contain embedded modems and offer some form of telematics or connected car services. And the ballot language that passed in Massachusetts requires "manufacturers that sell vehicles with telematics systems in Massachusetts to equip them with a standardized open data platform beginning with model year 2022 that vehicle owners and independent repair facilities may access to retrieve mechanical data and run diagnostics through a mobile-based application."

At this point, some of our more security-minded readers might need to have a lie down because, yes, that language does essentially mean there would be no proper security controls preventing someone from remotely connecting into a car.

Enlarge / Emergency braking systems have been on the road for some years, but now the federal government wants them to be mandatory equipment on all new light trucks and passenger cars. (credit: Volvo)

On Wednesday, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration issued a notice of proposed rulemaking that would see automatic emergency braking become a standard feature on all new light passenger vehicles. If adopted, NHTSA says it would save 360 lives and prevent 24,000 crashes each year.

"Today, we take an important step forward to save lives and make our roadways safer for all Americans," Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said. “Just as lifesaving innovations from previous generations like seat belts and airbags have helped improve safety, requiring automatic emergency braking on cars and trucks would keep all of us safer on our roads."

NHTSA added automatic emergency braking to its list of recommended safety features in 2015 . At the time, it started noting the presence or absence of this advanced driver assistance system when determining a car's rating under the New Car Assessment Program (NCAP), which is aimed at giving consumers safety information about new vehicles.

Enlarge / We used this image of an Ars staffer's stolen Hyundai to illustrate how common the thefts were in February 2022. Since then, one of this author's neighbors had a Kia broken into, and another had a joyride Hyundai ditched on his lawn after crashing through his fence. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Hyundai and Kia will pay out $200 million in a class-action lawsuit settlement, compensating roughly 9 million people for their losses after a 2022 social media trend revealed how relatively simple it was to steal certain models.

As reported by Reuters , $145 million of the payout goes to the out-of-pocket expenses of those whose cars were stolen. Many Kias made between 2011-2021, and Hyundais from 2015-2021, lacked electronic engine immobilizers, which would prevent a car from starting unless an electronically matched key was present. Without the immobilizer, the car could be started by turning the ignition with other objects, such as a USB-A cable that thieves discovered was a perfect fit.

Customers whose cars were totaled are eligible for up to $6,125, while damaged vehicles and property can receive a maximum of $3,375, along with costs for raised insurance, car rental, towing, tickets, and others. Kia and Hyundai had previously pledged to provide free software upgrades to vehicles and free wheel locks (i.e. The Club ), typically in coordination with regional police departments. The NHTSA said in February that the companies have given out 26,000 wheel locks since November 2022.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

There's another massive airbag safety scandal brewing. Last week, General Motors issued a recall for almost a million SUVs in order to replace potentially dangerous airbag inflators, the third such recall it has had to issue for this problem.

Many vehicles from other OEMs (including BMW, Hyundai Motor Group, and Stellantis) may also contain the same inflators, which can rupture during inflation, spraying shrapnel during a crash. But the supplier that manufactured the airbag inflators has rejected claims by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration that there is a systematic defect.

The airbag inflators in question were manufactured by ARC Automotive, a tier-two automotive supplier based in Knoxville, Tennessee, and NHTSA has had an inkling of the problem for some years now. In fact, NHTSA's Office of Defects Investigation started a preliminary evaluation in 2015 of ARC's airbag inflators and whether they could rupture dangerously, following two reports of people suffering shrapnel injuries during a crash when their driver's airbag deployed.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images )

Today, the US Department of Energy published a notice of proposed rulemaking that would change the way the government calculates the energy efficiency of electric vehicles. If adopted, the changes will substantially downgrade the fuel-efficiency ratings given to EVs and be used to determine corporate average fuel economy (better known as CAFE). That might have serious implications for automakers, but don't worry—the consumer-facing MPGe and kWh/100 miles numbers you see on Monroney window stickers and at the US Environmental Protection Agency's fueleconomy.gov site won't change.

They call it CAFE, but you can’t drink it

Congress enacted CAFE in 1975 in the wake of the country's first serious energy crisis. It gives an average fuel efficiency number that each automaker must achieve to not be sanctioned by the government, and the standards and penalties are enforced by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

But the fuel efficiency numbers that NHTSA calculates are much higher than the actual efficiency you or I might experience, or the numbers posted by the EPA for consumers to make buying decisions.

Enlarge (credit: Wayne Eastep/Getty Images)

Women and older people are being failed by our crash test dummies, according to the US Government Accountability Office. The GAO has just published a new report on the topic and is concerned that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has not done enough to fill knowledge or research gaps that would make our vehicles safer for those more-vulnerable classes of occupants. Consequently, the GAO is recommending that NHTSA create a comprehensive plan to improve that crash test dummy data.

There's no question that cars today are safer than they were even two decades ago. In addition to the crash testing required by the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (FVMSS), programs like NHTSA's New Car Assessment Program (NCAP) and the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety's Top Safety Picks publicize their test scores, which has forced manufacturers to improve occupant protection to get those all-important safety scores, and now cars have to be designed to deal with offset collisions, side impacts, and rollovers, as well as head-on crashes.

But the benefits of improved in-car safety have been mostly seen by men.

Enlarge / Even Tesla says you should keep your hands on the steering wheel, but it helps if that wheel is actually connected to the steering column. (credit: Tesla)

Tesla has yet another federal headache to contend with. On March 4, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's Office of Defects Investigation opened a preliminary investigation after two reports of Tesla Model Y steering wheels detaching in drivers' hands while driving.

NHTSA's ODI says that in both cases, the model year 2023 Model Ys each required repairs on the production line that involved removing their steering wheels. The wheels were refitted but were only held in place by friction—Tesla workers never replaced the retaining bolt that fixes the steering wheel to the steering column. In 2018, Ford had to recall more than 1.3 million vehicles after an incorrectly sized bolt resulted in a similar problem.

The ODI document states that "sudden separation occurred when the force exerted on the steering wheel overcame the resistance of the friction fit while the vehicles were in motion" and that both incidents occurred while the electric vehicles still had low mileage.

Enlarge / If you own a Tesla with FSD Beta, there's a recall in your future. (credit: Tesla)

On Thursday Tesla had to issue a recall for nearly 363,000 of its electric vehicles. At issue is the company's highly controversial "Full Self Driving" Beta, which the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration believes is dangerous.

NHTSA has four principal complaints with the driver-assistance system:

The FSD Beta system may allow the vehicle to act unsafe around intersections, such as traveling straight through an intersection while in a turn-only lane, entering a stop sign-controlled intersection without coming to a complete stop, or proceeding into an intersection during a steady yellow traffic signal without due caution.

Additionally, NHTSA says that "the system may respond insufficiently to changes in posted speed limits or not adequately account for the driver's adjustment of the vehicle's speed to exceed posted speed limits."

Enlarge / Early VW ID.4s will need to visit a dealership for a software update. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

Volkswagen is the latest OEM to issue a recall for some of its electric vehicles. This time the problem afflicts the MY2021 ID.4, VW's EV crossover. The problem concerns the battery management control module, as well as the pulse inverter control module. This version of the battery management control unit software can be too sensitive and reset itself in some circumstances, and the pulse inverter control module can, under rare conditions, deactivate if there's a software failure.

VW first had an inkling there was a problem in July 2021 when reports started coming in of potential problems with the high-voltage battery management software. By September 2021, VW had concluded there was no unreasonable risk to drivers but continued studying the problem. By January 2022, VW's supplier told it that the pulse inverter software had problems, too.

Last summer VW went through feedback questionnaires from ID.4 owners and found that "some reports from the US market indicated that the battery management software issue could have led to stalling allegations."