Killer Minivans: Rollaway accidents might have been
prevented by brake shift interlocks that were used on
all major minivans, except for millions made by Chrysler
In Pelzer, South Carolina,
Kim Golden, 31, five months pregnant with twins, was talking to a friend
in a carport barely five feet from where she’d parked her 1997 Dodge Grand
Caravan with her 4-year-old daughter inside, when the minivan inexplicably
started rolling away. She’d left the engine running, but put the
transmission in “park.” Chasing after the van, she grabbed the door
in a frantic attempt to stop it but was knocked to the ground and crushed
under a wheel. She was killed. So were the twins she was carrying.
In Ohio, Amy Dawson was in
her yard with her two daughters, getting the mail and retrieving trash
cans, when she watched horror-stricken as her Dodge Caravan rolled silently
down the driveway and struck her 4-year-old, Abby. Two-year-old Emily
had climbed into the parked van and apparently turned the ignition key
to play a CD, then jumped back out. The vehicle had gone into motion
even without its engine running. It took 80 stitches to close the
wounds on Abby's face.
Not 'Freak Accidents'
The inadvertent launching
of a vehicle into motion is not a "freak accident." One study identified
142 such events in North Carolina alone over a four-year span.
Nor do all such events end
in "fender-benders." When they examined 10 Orange County hospitals'
records spanning 24 months, researchers at the University of California
at Irvine identified nine collisions in which children were injured or
killed by a vehicle started by an unattended child. (They did not
tabulate those that resulted in injury or death to adults.)
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Three
of the nine children were injured fatally. |
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In
four cases, a child put the vehicle in gear; in the other five, the child
released the hand brake. |
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Eight
children were run over; the ninth hung on to the door and was dragged beside
the vehicle. |
A National Highway Traffic
Safety Administration (NHTSA) investigation of Chrysler minivans manufactured
for model years 1981 to 1990 identified 212 such unexpected starts.
They resulted in 111 injuries and 7 fatalities. Unfortunately, even
that investigation was severely limited: it covered only four-cylinder
front-wheel drive minivans that had gear-shift controls mounted on the
steering column. Chrysler insisted the incidents were caused by driver
error, and NHTSA closed its investigation at the end of 1991 without
taking action.
Chrysler’s Special Problem
Chrysler has had a special
problem with self-launching minivans. Chrysler minivan transmissions
slipping from "park" to "reverse" without warning, or being shifted inadvertently,
are on record in:
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222
dealer complaint reports. |
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50
reports between 1991 and 1999 listed on the National Highway Traffic Safety
Administration's Office of Defect Investigations website. |
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Allegations
in at least 37 lawsuits against Chrysler, including the one filed on behalf
of Kim Golden’s family, settled in mediation on December 5, 2000. |
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Eight videotape depositions
of Chrysler minivan owners taken in preparation for the Golden case. |
Children at the Wheel
In some cases, minivans inadvertantly
are shifted from "park" to "reverse," typically by an unattended child:
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A
small child, left momentarily alone in an idling car, tries to imitate
a parent and accidentally puts the vehicle in gear. |
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Children
playing in a parked car start its engine without depressing the clutch
and it lurches forward or backward. |
| 'Illusory Park'
But it is not always a case of human error.
In Arizona in 1997, a woman
left her pick-up truck idling in what she thought was “park” when she got
out to load chairs in the truck bed. The truck shifted into gear,
backed over her and crushed her to death.
In the Golden case, the South
Carolina Highway Patrol Mechanical Accident Investigation Team found the
likely cause of such self-starting: the "Illusory Park" defect.
The team reconstructed the event this way: |
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| Even though the gear shift
indicator in the Dodge minivan showed the transmission in “park,” in fact
the gear shift lever was not fully engaged in that position, merely resting
at its edge. The minivan was in a "no man's land" between “park”
and “reverse.” Hydraulic fluid could then bleed to the reverse hydraulics
and the transmission could shift itself into reverse, unpredictably.
The South Carolina investigators found the problem in a significant number
of Chrysler-made minivans.
Ignoring the Solution
From 1914 to 1930, inventors
patented at least three “interlock” devices that prevent a vehicle from
going into motion unless certain safety measures are in place. In
1930, and again in 1934, 1935 and 1937, General Motors alone acquired four
patents. By the early 1970s, all three major American automakers
had their own modern patents in place – General Motors in 1969, Ford in
1970, Chrysler in 1971.
The devices involve one of
several strategies:
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Brake/Shift
interlock: The vehicle's gear shift cannot be moved out of the “park”
position unless the brake is depressed. |
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Brake/transmission
interlock: Brakes are automatically applied if the driver’s seat is not
occupied by an adult or if its seat belt is not fastened; or, the clutch
is automatically disengaged and the power train shifted into neutral when
the starter is activated. (A seat-activated system invented in the
1920s is used in forklifts and some other special-use vehicles.) |
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Starter/ignition
interlock: In manual-shift vehicles, the key will not start the engine
unless the clutch or brake is depressed; in automatic transmission vehicles,
the gear shift must be in "neutral" or "park" before the engine can be
started or the ignition key removed. |
Although such interlocks
have proven effective for 30 years, auto manufacturers have been slow to
adopt them as standard equipment. A recent study could find no European
cars with interlocks, although BMW has equipped its motorcycles with the
devices since 1974.
An Insurance Institute for
Highway Safety study of mid-1990s car models recommended retrofitting all
standard-shift cars with interlocks, and estimated it would take 1.5 to
2.5 hours of labor and $40 in parts for each vehicle. The only parts
that would have to be designed were mounting brackets.
Meanwhile, Back at Chrysler…
Brake-shift interlocks are
particularly effective in preventing small children from putting a vehicle
in gear, because the children are typically unable to shift gears and reach
the brake pedal at the same time.
Such interlocks were installed
in Chrysler’s competitors' minivans by the 1993 model year, but Chrysler
did not begin including it until 2001 models, even though it possessed
the technology: it had installed interlocks on its Mitsubishi Eagle
Summit vehicles starting in 1993, and even offered to retrofit Jeep Cherokees
and Wagoneers it had manufactured for model years 1984 through 1995.
Nevertheless, from 1995 to 2000, Chrysler manufactured some 3 million Town
and Country, Dodge Caravan and Plymouth Voyager minivans – all without
brake-shift interlocks.
Marketing Safety
The omission of brake-shift
interlocks did not keep Chrysler from marketing its minivan as a safe family
vehicle, and even touting it for transporting small children. For
example, Chrysler advertised how easy it was for children to move back
and forth between the van’s front and rear seats. Company advertising also
claimed, "We have made advanced safety engineering a top priority."
To support this claim, Chrysler
even established a Minivan Safety Leadership Team to investigate
the safety features of its competitors' minivans. The team’s chair,
Paul Sheridan, informed Chrysler executives about the brake-shift interlocks
on other manufacturers’ vans and recommended that Chrysler do the same
if it wanted to continue making its claim that it was the leader in minivan
safety. Sheridan calculated that installing the safety feature would
cost no more than $9 per minivan.
His advice was ignored, Sheridan
says, because he was told the company would have to put interlocks on all
its vehicles and that would make the cost too high. He was fired
less than a year later. |
Chrysler's Denials
Chrysler maintains Sheridan
was fired, not because he was preparing to go to federal regulators with
his information, but for leaking corporate information to a trade
publication, a charge Sheridan denies.
The automaker also says cost
was not the “determining factor” in ignoring Sheridan's advice. It
insisted the problem was not with Chrysler vehicles but with parents who
left their children in those vehicles unattended.
When ABC-News’ Prime Time
examined NHTSA records this year, it found 48 reports of “gear shift incidents”
attributed to children during the past six years; 40 of them – 83
percent – had occurred in Chrysler minivans. Installation of interlocks
by Chrysler probably would have prevented most if not all of those potentially
tragic "incidents."
(05/29/01)
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