Anton Yelchin’s Death Highlights a Known Issue With Jeeps

Anton Yelchin’s Death Highlights a Known Issue With Jeeps

The interior of a Jeep Grand Cherokee. Problems with the car involve an electronic gearshift, whose operation is similar to that of a video-game joystick. Credit Joe Raedle/Getty Images

The death of the actor Anton Yelchin, killed when his Jeep Grand Cherokee rolled backward down a driveway and crushed him against a mailbox pillar last weekend, has cast a public spotlight on a problem with some models of Jeeps and other Fiat Chrysler vehicles.

But for the company, there is nothing new about the issue — which federal regulators first flagged last August.

The question is why, nearly a year later, Fiat Chrysler has still not come up with a fix for the problem, which has now been linked to hundreds of accidents, dozens of injuries and now — potentially — a well-publicized death.

The company, which issued a recall notice on more than one million affected vehicles in April, will say only it is still working on a solution, there was no decision about a recall until this year and there has been no delay. It has written to federal regulators that the remedy will include a software change and “an additional mechanism to mitigate the effect of operator error.”

That solution is expected no later than July or August, a Fiat Chrysler spokesman, Eric Mayne, said on Tuesday in an email.

And yet, as far back as March, Fiat Chrysler was telling federal investigators that it already had “potential solutions.”

The problem involves an electronic gearshift, whose operation is similar to that of a video-game joystick. It has confused many drivers, who thought they had left their cars in park, only to find they were in neutral, and started rolling away after the drivers stepped out.

Rollaway accidents are particularly dangerous, and the investigation and recall are taking too long, Clarence Ditlow, executive director of the Center for Auto Safety, a consumer advocacy group, said on Tuesday.

“There was no sense of urgency on Chrysler’s part or N.H.T.S.A.’s part given the potential for death or injury,” he said in an interview, referring to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

Last August officials at the highway safety administration told Fiat Chrysler that it was investigating complaints from 14 owners of some of Fiat Chrysler’s most popular models. The owners said their vehicles had rolled away — in some cases causing accidents and injuries — when they left the vehicles, thinking they were safely in the parking gear.

“As I stepped out, the vehicle started moving backwards and the driver door struck me, knocking me to the ground on my back,” a Jeep Grand Cherokee owner from Morganton, N.C., wrote to safety officials last summer. “The left front tire rolled over my pelvic area, causing serious injury.”

Details of Fiat Chrysler’s subsequent discussions with the safety agency still are not publicly available. In November, the automaker responded to 10 pages of detailed questions from the federal regulator, but that response has not been posted on the agency’s website. An agency spokesman, Jose Ucles, said on Tuesday that regulators were still going through the filing to remove “personally identifiable information” before publishing it.

But as the safety agency edits and Fiat Chrysler seeks a fix for the rollover problem, incidents and accidents have continued. By February, the agency had counted 314 complaints, 121 crashes and 30 injuries, including a fractured pelvis and ruptured bladder.

By mid-April, when the company issued a recall, the automaker had 700 reports “potentially related to the issue,” including 212 crashes and 41 injuries.

The problem involved the gear shifter on 2014-15 Jeep Grand Cherokees and some 2012-14 Dodge Chargers and Chrysler 300s.

The April recall applied to about 812,000 vehicles in the United States, 52,000 in Canada, almost 17,000 in Mexico and nearly 249,000 in other countries that Fiat Chrysler declined to identify Tuesday.

At the time of the recall, no deaths had been reported. And while the cause of Mr. Yelchin’s accident is still being investigated, federal safety regulators said in a statement Monday that his death was “the first fatality we’re aware of that may be related to this safety defect and vehicle recall.”

Fiat Chrysler introduced the gear-shifter design, which it calls the Monostable, in 2011. The company said the benefits included eliminating “high efforts in shifting” as well as improved “smoothness of garage and parking lot shifts.” The shifter and transmission were provided by ZF, a German parts supplier.

That shifter is unusual because it does not move to a different position with each gear. Instead, like a joystick, the lever returns to a center position. So, the driver must look at the shifter display to make sure the proper gear is selected. In its investigation, the national safety agency said the shifter is “not intuitive and provides poor tactile and visual feedback.”

The shifter was used only on the recalled models. The company discontinued it for 2016 models, citing the desire for “improved customer satisfaction.”

The recall of the shifter is unusual because it apparently does not involve a mechanical or electronic failure. Instead it is an ergonomic issue — involving a new design whose operation is not intuitive to some owners.

Typically, automakers test such new designs on consumers, said Matthew Reed, a professor at the University of Michigan who specializes in ergonomics.

“In general terms, one would want to conduct a substantial number of trials with what I would call naïve users, people who are among the population of people who could be customers but who are not engineers, not people familiar with the development process,” he said in an interview.

But something did not work in the case of Fiat Chrysler’s shifter, he said.

“We can look at that as a failure of process, a failure to anticipate how consumers would react,” he said. “I don’t know what their process was internally, but clearly it did not catch this particular risk.”

The month before the August notification, the N.H.T.S.A. had publicly chastised the company, which acknowledged delaying recalls in almost two dozen cases going back to 2013 and affecting millions of vehicles.

“This represents a significant failure to meet a manufacturer’s safety responsibilities,” Mark Rosekind, the head of the safety agency, said at the time.

The automaker promised to speed up its recalls and agreed to pay penalties that could amount to $105 million.

“That consent order is totally aimed at making Chrysler do a better job on recalls in the future,” Mr. Ditlow, of the Center for Auto Safety, said. “If this is an example of a better job, it is a failure.”

But Mr. Mayne, the Fiat Chrysler spokesman, said the automaker was following the government mandate and was doing a better job. For example, he said, last month it recalled one million more vehicles with deadly Takata airbags ahead of a schedule set by federal regulators.


source: www.nytimes.com