If you’ve never seen the movie “Titanic," you know the famous ending sequence where Rose is floating in freezing water on top of a door. As the frost sets in, lifeboats come but think that everyone has perished and there are no survivors. Rose, however, is still alive and remembers that a fellow victim of this horrible disaster had a whistle. She abandons the safety of her floating door and swims over to the person with the whistle… and starts to sound it. She eventually gets noticed by the rescuers and is ultimately saved from the same fate that her fellow passengers and crew succumbed to.

Manufacturing defects happen quite often and are a natural result of the manufacturing process. That's why OEMs have stepped up to notify NHTSA of defects that could lead to a safety risk. This is all part of the partnership between manufacturers and the government to promote transparency. For the most part, it’s working. In 2021, there were more service bulletins issued by OEMs than formal NHTSA campaigns. Still, some of these defects might have been preventable at their birth – while on the assembly line. In the interest of maintaining production levels and filling the supply chain, some can be overlooked, or known but not corrected. But factory employees do notice this happening and the outcome can get ugly… and expensive! In November 2021, CNN published a story about this and the largest award ever made to a whistleblower – an ex-engineer for Hyundai – who received $24 million for informing the NHTSA about safety lapses.

How does this affect the relationship between an OEM and engineers moving forward? It’s definitely the strategy that NHTSA embraced by offering rewards to company insiders who may be aware of these practices. What we don’t know is the motive behind this strategy. Perhaps the government is trying to prevent future recalls at their source. By offering cash rewards to employees of OEMs, perhaps employees will be more vigilant in reporting safety defects on the assembly line before they get to a dealership and, ultimately, in the hands of consumers. This can, however, create a wedge between the government and the OEMs by essentially using the OEM’s own employees to police their employer.

Could this become a snowball of engineers and factory workers crying wolf in the hopes of a big payday? This would even further dilute the authenticity of reports making the government's job harder to identify which reports are valid versus which are not. On the flip side, could it lead OEMs to slow production to prevent these instances and not be held liable for any issues after the fact? This, of course, leads to less new vehicle inventory which hurts car dealers by providing them with fewer vehicles to sell. Still, all it took was one instance to shake the confidence of the media and consumers about whether manufacturers are intentionally not disclosing information that threatens driver safety. I don't have any deep insight into the details of this specific event, but it doesn't shed the best light on our industry. At the very least, it undermines the decades-long work to promote vehicle safety and transparency. A black eye for sure, but there’s a lesson here.

Some may argue that this strategy of huge payouts to whistleblowers could lead to MORE recalls rather than less simply because of the – perhaps – quantity of unfounded reports by engineers and factory workers looking for a big payday and/or the lack of resources for the government to follow up with all of them. If you want to get even more cynical, an OEM could simply start diluting its staff when it feels threatened. All of these possibilities bring harm in one way or another to various parties.

These days, new cars cannot be sold with an open safety recall. But what is not always clear is how many of those new cars delivered to dealerships actually have safety issues from the start? And how long before these hidden defects become an official recall? A year? Two? All the while a consumer is driving their new vehicle with an unidentified (or unreported) safety issue, completely unknown to them.

The point is to ensure that vehicles are safe from the start. Nobody's perfect and mistakes happen. But, in the end, it is the consumer driving the vehicles and their fellow drivers' lives that are at stake. Whistle away and hope the OEMs fix the issues before those vehicles are headed on a 16-wheeler to dealerships. I want to believe this was an isolated issue. We really can’t afford to turn back the clock and turn our backs on consumer safety. There’s too much at stake.

With everyone's cooperation and quick action, it is not outside the realm of possibility for the trio of the government, OEMs, and the frontline workers to spot these things and take corrective measures immediately… which would ultimately lead to LESS recalls and safer roads for everyone.