The National Truck Equipment Association (NTEA) is claiming a "huge victory" for the commercial truck and transportation equipment industry in the wake of the recently issued and long-awaited final rules on multi-stage vehicle certification by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA).
The NTEA says that as a result of its persistent efforts over the past decade, regulations finally have been issued, forcing a major restructuring of the certification requirements to recognize the differences between mass-produced passenger cars and multi-stage produced work trucks.
"This is a huge victory for the NTEA as it reverses more than 30 years of NHTSA policy and allows for better regulation of the industry," said Mike Kastner, the NTEA's director of government relations. "The NTEA's persistent and successful efforts will provide benefits to the industry for years to come."
Prior to the new regulations, final-stage manufacturers-many of them NTEA members-bore full legal responsibility for certifying any truck they built to all applicable safety standards, even if they did not install the particular system (i.e., windshield wipers). In the past, the Association has made significant strides in protecting the membership from unreasonable safety standards on an individual basis, but this has been a difficult battle due to the limitations imposed on NHTSA by the basic structure of NHTSA's certification scheme.
In its final rules issued Feb. 14, 2005, NHTSA amended the certification regulations in several ways to assist multi-stage manufacturers. More importantly, however, NHTSA recognized multi-stage vehicles as a separate vehicle type, giving itself the ability to regulate such vehicles differently than other vehicle types when appropriate.
The first amendment to the regulations states that pass-through certification will be available for trucks built from any type of chassis. Previously, legal protections for final-stage manufacturers passing-through certification from the chassis manufacturer only existed for chassis-cabs-not for strip chassis, cutaways or cowls. While this change is unlikely to alter the way a vehicle is built, the NTEA believes it will afford invaluable legal protections.
The second amendment gives multi-stage manufacturers an additional year of lead-time over and above the amount chassis manufacturers receive when NHTSA issues a new or amended standard. This will allow chassis manufacturers time to certify their vehicles and work with the NTEA to provide compliance information on their trucks to members.
NHTSA also approved an amendment that creates a new safety standard exemption process for manufacturers. Today, a small manufacturer can petition for a specific model to be exempted from an individual standard. The new process allows the NTEA to submit a petition on the industry's behalf for a range of vehicles. As a result, individual companies would only need to submit limited information to NHTSA in order to opt-in.
Additionally, NHTSA approved an amendment to more fairly allocate legal responsibilities for certification. Currently, final-stage manufacturers assume full legal responsibility for every vehicle they certify. Under the newly approved regulations, each company in the manufacturing chain will be legally responsible for their own work.
The amendments are slated to take effect Sept. 1, 2006.