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The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration ('''NHTSA''', often pronounced "nit-suh") is an agency of the Executive Branch of the U.S. Government , part of the Department Of Transportation . It describes its mission as “Save lives, prevent injuries, reduce vehicle-related crashes.” {Link without Title} . As part of its activities, NHTSA is charged with safety performance and fuel economy standards for motor vehicles, the latter called Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE).It also licenses vehicle manufacturers and vehicle importers, allows or blocks importation of vehicles, safety-related vehicle parts (including seatbelts, airbags, safety glass, side airbags, brakes, accelerators, bumpers, tires, doorlocks, odometers) vehicle-theft prevention including Vehicle Identification Number (VIN), anthropormorphic dummies used in testing, vehicle test procedures, insurance cost information, emissions controls, and child restraint seats. It has asserted preemptive regulatory control over Greenhouse Gas emissions but this has been disputed by many state regulatory agencies including California Air Resources Board . One of NHTSA’s major achievements in pursuit of its safety mission is the data files maintained by the National Center for Statistics and Analysis. In particular, the Fatality Analysis Reporting System , or FARS, has become a resource for Traffic Safety research not only in the US, but throughout the world. Research contributions using FARS by researchers from many countries appear in many non-US technical publications, and provide the most solid knowledge on the subject. Even with this database, conclusive analysis of crash causes often remains difficult and controversial, with experts arguing the statistical validity of results. HISTORY In 1940, the United States implemented automobile design Legislation , concerning Sealed Beam Headlamps , which had recently been invented and were an important safety advance at that time. This regulation, virtually unchanged for the next 40 years, set a pattern of using auto safety design legislation to freeze innovation at a point in time. In 1958, the UN established the World Forum For Harmonization Of Vehicle Regulations , which began to promulgate what would eventually become the internationalised ECE Regulations on vehicle design, construction, and safety performance. The United States declined to join the forum or adopt its (or any other) vehicle safety regulations at that time. However, vehicles meeting the ECE safety standards were legal to import into the United States. In 1965 and 1966, public pressure grew in the US to increase The Safety Of Cars , culminating with the publishing of '' Unsafe At Any Speed '', by Ralph Nader , an activist lawyer, and the National Academy Of Sciences ' "Accidental Death and Disability - The Neglected Disease of Modern Society". In 1966, Congress held a series of highly publicized hearings regarding highway safety, and passed legislation to make installation of Seat Belts mandatory, and created several predecessor agencies which would eventually become the NHTSA, including the National Traffic Safety Agency, the National Highway Safety Agency, and the National Highway Safety Bureau. One result was vehicles meeting the ECE safety standards were no longer automatically legal to import into the United States. The NHTSA was officially established in 1970 by the Highway Safety Act of 1970. In 1972, the Motor Vehicle Information and Cost Savings Act expanded NHTSA's scope to include consumer information programs. Since this era, automobiles have become far better in protecting their occupants in vehicle impacts. The number of deaths on American highways hover around 40,000 annually, a lower death rate per mile travelled than in the 1960s. NHTSA has conducted numerous high-profile investigations of Automotive Safety issues, including the Audi 5000/60 Minutes affair and the Ford Explorer Rollover problem. In the US, NHTSA has introduced a proposal to mandate Electronic Stability Control on all passenger vehicles by the 2012 model year. This technology was first brought to public attention in 1997, with the Swedish Moose Test . Consumers today have a far greater amount of auto safety information available, due to the efforts of NHTSA and the Insurance Institute For Highway Safety . US SAFETY PERFORMANCE SINCE CREATION OF NHTSA In the mid 1960s when the framework was established for US vehicle safety regulations, the US auto market was an Oligopoly , with just three companies ( GM , Ford , and Chrysler ) controlling 85% of the market. At that time, the USA had safer traffic than any country in the world, whether measured by the number of traffic deaths per thousand vehicles, or the number of traffic deaths per 100 million miles. Although a system of uniform Auto Safety Performance And Equipment Regulations had been in place in Europe since 1958, the US did not seek to adopt or harmonize with these ECE regulations, which have since been adopted by virtually all industrialized countries outside North America. Compared to the ECE regulations, US regulations are fundamentally different in philosophy, content, emphasis, and enforcement protocol. Vehicles conforming to the internationalized (originally European) ECE regulations are allowed or required throughout the entire rest of the world, but such vehicles are '''illegal''' in the US because they don't conform to the US regulations. Despite the evolution of the North American auto market to include most of the world's major automakers, and the ongoing proliferation of US safety regulations, the previously-existing market oligopoly still exerts strong influence: US vehicle equipment and construction regulations are based almost entirely on SAE standards, which were written almost entirely by US automakers. The results of this regulatory philosophy and practice do not support a safety-related basis for the prohibition on ECE vehicles: despite the sizeable auto safety lead enjoyed by the USA in the 1960s, by 2002 the US had sunk to 16th place(behind Australia , Austria , Canada , Denmark , Finland , Germany , Great Britain , Iceland , Japan , Luxembourg , the Netherlands , New Zealand , Norway , Sweden , and Switzerland ) in terms of deaths per thousand vehicles. In terms of deaths per 100 million miles, the USA had dropped from first place to tenth place. With the partial exception of Canada, all of the countries achieving better safety results either require or permit vehicles built to comply with the ECE regulations, not the US regulations. In a 2004 book, former General Motors safety researcher Leonard Evans asserts that changes in death totals, all from government-published data (FARS for US), showed inferior safety performance in the U.S. compared to other countries:
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