Collision repair is likely to become more technical now that the House Committee on Energy and Commerce has approved House Bill 1216, the Cameron Gulbransen Kids Transportation Safety Act of 2007. The bill directs the secretary of transportation to issue regulations to reduce the incidence of child injury and death occurring inside or outside of light motor vehicles.
The bill asks the secretary of transportation to initiate a rulemaking pertaining to light motor vehicles requiring power windows and panels to automatically reverse direction when they detect an obstruction to prevent children from being trapped, injured or killed.
It also calls for a rulemaking requiring a rearward visibility performance standard that will provide drivers with a way to detect the presence of a person or object behind the vehicle. This is designed to prevent injury and death resulting from backing incidents, especially those involving small children and disabled people.The bill also calls for the vehicle service brake pedal to be engaged when the car is shifted out of park to prevent children from disengaging the gearshift and causing vehicles to roll away. Finally, it establishes a child safety information program to collect non-traffic incident data and provide information to parents about potential hazards and ways to avoid them.
Bob Redding, the Automobile Service Association's (ASA) Washington D.C. representative, said the organization has been following the progress of the bill, but has not taken a position for or against it.
"The amount of federal dollars that is going into research has grown tremendously in recent years," Redding says. "Many changes in car design will be stimulated by this research. Design changes involving collision avoidance and airbag systems will lead to an impact in collision repair. It is not necessarily negative or positive for the industry, but they involve changes that require additional training and knowledge. These are all important pieces of legislation to the collision repair industry."
The bill gives the secretary of transportation the authority to structure compliance, according to Redding. For example, she may decide that because minivans and sport utility vehicles have a larger rear blind zone, they are more likely to be involved in backing accidents that result in injuries than other light motor vehicles. It allows her to prioritize what becomes effective and when, which could potentially lessen the burden on original equipment manufacturers, who will have to engineer and build these design changes into their new vehicles.
The bill instructs the secretary of transportation to issue regulations addressing power window safety within 18 months after the bill becomes law and within 24 months addressing rearward visibility and the service brake. New light motor vehicles manufactured 3.5 years after the final rule is issued must comply with the new regulations.
The bill, which was introduced in 2003, was named after Cameron Gulbransen, a 2-year-old boy who was killed when his father accidentally ran over him while backing up his BMW X5 sport utility vehicle in his driveway. Since that incident, more than 1,000 children have died in preventable accidents, according to the sponsors of the bill.
