Safety Research Portfolio Public Meeting, Opening Remarks

As we begin this morning, I want to thank and congratulate this community. You are responsible for helping to produce the safest vehicles in the world and for helping to continue to reduce the number of serious crashes and fatalities on our roadways. I also want to thank and compliment the NHTSA career staff for their commitment and their contributions to achieving these goals. All of you are amazing, and America is indebted to you.

There is a full agenda today, and I want to get you to it. We’ll begin with presentations on experimental and computational biomechanics and anthropomorphic test devices. You’ll learn more about the new THOR 5th percentile female crash test dummy that Administrator Morrison announced yesterday. After that, you’ll hear about our work on vehicle structures and restraints, followed by vehicle electronics and cybersecurity.

After lunch, we’ll reconvene for a session on alternative fuels and battery electric vehicle safety. That will be followed by a review of our behavioral research and human factors projects.

All of these sessions touch on NHTSA’s and the U.S. Department of Transportation’s key priority: ensuring safe transportation and saving lives.

America’s vehicle self-certification model, supported by the ongoing research being discussed here and by the strong working partnership between manufacturers and NHTSA, is the global gold standard. The self-certification model maximizes vehicle safety while enabling manufacturers to bring innovative technologies to market quickly. That key feature is increasingly important today, when technology is transforming vehicles more rapidly than ever and global competition is acute.

While the self-certification model is the gold standard, we recognize that some of the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards may have become freighted with elements that no longer serve any safety purpose and whose elimination could further stimulate innovation and technological progress. We welcome your input to help us identify these as we work to alleviate regulatory burden.

Through our CAFE fuel economy rulemaking and other efforts, we’re hard at work to bring down new vehicle prices so everyone can benefit from new safety features in new cars, trucks, and SUVs.

Vehicle safety technology should go hand in hand with programs targeting driver behavior.

At Administrator Morrison’s and my urging, our NHTSA team is focusing our behavioral safety programs on those that can have the greatest impact on reducing roadway crashes and fatalities.

In partnership with law enforcement, and with NGOs like the Governors Highway Safety Association, MADD, and many others, we are committed to making meaningful progress in further reducing the number of roadway crashes and fatalities.

This entails attacking, with a multi-pronged approach, the risky driving behaviors like impaired driving, distracted driving, excessive speeding and unbelted driving that cause the great majority of traffic fatalities. Through education and enforcement, we need to save lives by getting people to drive sober, wear their seat belts, slow down, and focus on the road. As just one example, MADD has done an amazing job of driving cultural change around impaired driving.

There is much more work to be done, and all of us should set an example to younger generations that making smart decisions when it comes to driving is caring for your friends and family.

We also are examining how we can innovate in the post-crash care space. Nationally, 43 percent of people killed in crashes between 2019 and 2023 were initially alive when EMS arrived on the scene. So, there’s a lot of room here to increase survivability.

One of the most exciting innovations in care in recent memory is prehospital blood transfusion, and we’re all in. Research shows that prehospital blood transfusion decreases mortality among trauma patients with severe bleeding by 37%. We are also moving forward on prehospital blood transfusion demonstration projects, and we look forward to sharing the results with you in the coming years.

When today ends, I have a request for you – please don’t let the conversation end here. Administrator Morrison and I are committed to increasing NHTSA’s engagement with stakeholders. We want a continuous dialogue on the issues that matter most to you. For starters, please provide your comments, suggestions, and ideas on the projects presented at this research meeting while they are fresh in your mind.

Thank you, safe travels home, and a happy Thanksgiving to you and your families.