Category Archives: Motor Vehicle Accidents

Some overly-enthusiastic passenger-side airbags are to blame for a worldwide recall that is affecting more than 3.3 million Honda, Mazda, Nissan, and Toyota vehicles worldwide.

The problem is that the airbags may deploy with too much force, resulting in metal shards showering the passenger cabin of the vehicle, which could make a bad situation worse for people who are involved in a car accident.

For Honda, this week’s airbag recall joins a list of others dating back to 2008, although prior problems involved driver’s side airbags deploying with too much force.

The airbags were manufactured by Japan’s Takata Corporation, according to the New York Times, and some of the affected airbags were also sold to BMW and General Motors, so we likely haven’t heard the last word on vehicles that have been affected by this problem.

For details on affected vehicles (all of which were model year 2000 to 2004 as of now) and instructions for vehicle owners, check out this L.A. Times article and the press releases linked up here: Honda | Toyota.

Learn more about vehicle recalls and defects.

A flurry of new driving and licensing laws may be triggering an epidemic of eye-rolling among teen drivers in several states. But lawmakers in New Jersey, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere have passed these laws to prevent car accidents and address some of the safety concerns that come along with putting brand-new drivers on the road. Here are a few highlights of some of the new teen driving laws:

New Jersey. A bill recently passed by state lawmakers would require teen drivers in New Jersey to log up to an additional year of driving with their learner’s permit before they can be fully licensed. This law has been passed by lawmakers in New Jersey, so stay tuned on when it takes effect. More from CBS NY.

North Carolina. Teen drivers with learner’s permits will need to jump through a few more procedural hoops in North Carolina’s graduated licensing system for young drivers. This law took effect as of the first of this year. Learn more from the North Carolina DOT.

Pennsylvania. A new set of laws puts restrictions on drivers who are under 18, including limitations on the number of passengers who may ride with the driver, if those passengers are also under 18. Other new Pennsylvania laws on teen driving make the failure to wear a seatbelt a “primary offense” for drivers and passengers under 18 (meaning they can get pulled over for it), and bump up the number of supervised driving hours required for new drivers. These laws went into effect close to the end of 2011. More here.

These are just a few of the newest state laws that target teen drivers. For a state-by-state look at similar laws, check out Young Driver Licensing Systems in the U.S., from the IIHS.

For a unique view on the impact of teen driving laws like these, read this blog plost from the New York Times website: Teenage Driving Laws May Just Delay Deadly Crashes.

The problem of distracted driving has the attention of lawmakers in every state these days. California laws on driver use of cell phones and other devices are already some of the toughest in the country. And now you can add to that set of rules yesterday’s decision from a California appeals court: Next time you grab your cell phone to make a quick call or send a brief text message while you’re waiting out a red light, you can still get ticketed for a $103 traffic violation, even though your vehicle isn’t moving. The three-judge appellate panel in yesterday’s decision held that a driver who is stopped at a red light is still “driving” under California’s Vehicle Code — specifically, the driver is merely “pausing momentarily” at the light, in compliance with the rules of the road. So, use of a hand-held device while stopped at a red light is still a violation of California’s distracted driving laws.    

Read a PDF of yesterday’s decision: People v. Nelson, from the California Courts website.  

With iPhones and Blackberries becoming more and more pervasive — and drivers increasingly unwilling to go unplugged even on a trip to the dry cleaners — distracted driving has become a leading cause of car accidents. In 2009, 20 percent of all injury-causing car accidents involved distracted driving, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). And a driver who is using a hand-held device is four times as likely to get into a serious-injury car accident, says the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS). This is all on top of numerous studies showing that drivers who use a cell phone while driving (even those who go hands-free) have their reaction time and judgment impaired to the same level as a driver who is legally intoxicated.

Learn more about Car Accidents Caused by Cell Phone Use from Nolo. And visit Distraction.gov, the federal government’s new web portal on distracted driving.

Parents who are shopping for the right car booster seat for their kids have better (and safer) options to choose from than ever before, according to testing and new ratings issued by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS).

When it comes to car booster seat safety, finding the right fit is the name of the game. And after its most recent comprehensive study of 62 booster seat models, IIHS has named a record 31 seats as “Best Bets.” According to the group’s press release on the study, a booster seat qualifies as a “Best Bet” when it “correctly positions a vehicle safety belt on a typical 4 to 8 year-old in almost any car, minivan, or SUV.”

Since a vehicle’s seatbelts are designed for adults, a booster seat is needed to elevate the child into a position where the belt can properly restrain the child in case a car accident happens or a sudden stop is necessary. IIHS advises parents to make sure that the lap belt lies flat across a child’s upper legs, and that the shoulder belt comes down over the middle of the shoulder — not up close to the child’s neck, and not down closer to the upper arm.

Read the IIHS press release on the study, and check out the complete ratings.

The IIHS website has a lot of useful information on child passenger safety, including this Q&A.

Allstate this week released its seventh-annual Best Drivers Report, ranking U.S. cities where the best and worst drivers can be found.

For the second year in a row, residents of Fort Collins, Colorado drove away (very cautiously) with top honors as the city where drivers are least likely to experience a car accident. According to Allstate, the average Fort Collins driver will go about 14 years between car accidents.

After Fort Collins, the top five stays midwest-heavy (maybe it’s those wide open spaces):

1. Fort Collins, Colorado

2. Boise, Idaho

3. Lincoln, Nebraska

4. Colorado Springs, Colorado

5. Huntsville, Alabama

And the cities where you’re most likely to get into a car accident? Steer clear of the coasts, and if you’re driving our nation’s capital, have your car insurance agent on speed-dial. In Washington D.C., drivers can expect to get into a car accident once every 4.8 years. So, for one-term politicians, getting run out of town may not be all bad.

Here is Allstate’s bottom five:

189. Hartford, Connecticut

190. Newark, New Jersey

191. Glendale, California

192. Baltimore, Maryland

193. Washington, D.C.

Where does your city rank? Check out this press release from Allstate.com, which includes a link to the full report as a PDF file.

Dangerous driving habits like texting and talking on cell phones while driving can be “drastically reduced” when public awareness of the problem is increased and enforcement is ramped up, at least that’s the conclusion federal highway safety officials have reached based on two pilot programs that sought to kick distracted driving to the curb.

The pilot programs in Syracuse, New York and Hartford, Connecticut utilized an intensive media campaign and stepped up enforcement efforts to get drivers’ attention when it comes to distracted driving laws. The media campaign theme was “Phone in One Hand, Ticket in the Other” (somewhere Don Draper is shedding tears of jealousy into his Dewar’s).

The pilot programs were very effective, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which did some before-and-after investigation to conclude that in Syracuse, both handheld cell phone use and texting behind the wheel decreased by one-third. And in Hartford, the NHTSA saw a 57 percent decrease in drivers’ use of handheld phones, plus a decline of almost 75 percent when it came to drivers’ texting behind the wheel.

Those numbers are encouraging, especially in light of some more stark statistics on distracted driving: 20 percent of injury car accidents in 2009 involved reports of distracted driving, according to the NHTSA, and drivers who use hand-held devices are four times as likely to get into crashes serious enough to injure themselves, says the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.

Read the full report from NHTSA.gov here. To learn more about distracted driving laws, check out Nolo’s article Cell Phones, Texting, and Driving: State Laws.

New federal guidelines on child passenger safety advise parents to keep their kids in rear-facing car seats for as long as possible, to keep them as safe as possible in a vehicle accident.

The new National Highway Traffic Safety Administration guidelines come on the heels of a recent American Academy of Pediatrics study, which looked at safety data on car accidents involving young children, and concluded that parents should keep kids in rear-facing seats until they’re at least two years old or have clearly outgrown the seat. In short, parents shouldn’t treat their kids’ graduation to a forward-facing seat as an age-based milestone. As the NHTSA puts it, “there is no need to hurry to transition a child to the next restraint type.”

You can read the press statement and new age-based child passenger safety guidelines on the NHTSA’s website, but here’s an outline for parents and caregivers to follow:

• Birth to 12 Months: Always keep your child in a rear-facing car seat.
• 1 Year to 3 Years: Keep your child in a rear-facing seat for as long as possible. New studies show that a rear-facing seat is the best option for keeping your child safe in a car accident.
• 4 Years to 7 Years: Your child should be kept in a forward-facing car seat equipped with a harness, until they’ve outgrown the seat.
• 8 Years to 12 Years: Use a booster seat until your child is big enough to use a seat belt properly.

The new child safety seat recommendations are largely based on a combination of two factors that are unique to a young child’s physical development: disproportionately large heads, and bones and musculature that may not be up to the task of providing adequate support for the head in an accident.

For more help understanding and complying with child restraint laws, check out and this Child Safety Portal from the NHTSA and this Chart of State-by-State Child Passenger Safety Laws.

Toyota will pay $32.4 million in fines over the company’s bungled handling of recent recalls that affected millions of Toyota and Lexus vehicles, under a deal announced last week.

The 2009 and 2010 Toyota-Lexus recalls were prompted by a number of incidents in which drivers reported gas pedals “sticking” and causing unintended vehicle acceleration. The problem was that the gas pedals were getting caught in the vehicle’s floor mats. These “unintended acceleration” incidents grabbed headlines and the instant attention of worried Toyota and Lexus owners. But, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation, early recall efforts by Toyota — related to the pedal/floor mat issue and a separate steering column defect — were too narrow in scope and didn’t go far enough toward fixing the problems.

So, Toyota has agreed to pay the fines in response to the DOT’s assertion that the company failed to comply with the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act’s rules for reporting safety defects to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. The $32.4 in fines adds up to the maximum possible penalty allowed under the law, and it’s also the largest recall-related penalty ever paid by a car company, dwarfing the $1 million paid by GM in 2004, according to the Los Angeles Times.

For more information about the Toyota recalls — and to understand the legal issues behind vehicle defects — check out these articles from Nolo:

• Toyota Recalls and Litigation Over Acceleration
• Safety Recalls for Cars and Motorcycles
• Product Liability Claims Involving Defective Cars

“Asleep at the wheel” isn’t just the overused metaphor flavor-of-the-month for politicians these days. According to a new study from AAA it’s also a dangerous reality on the nation’s streets and highways, one that’s more common than you might think.

How bad is the problem of drowsy driving? 41 percent of drivers surveyed by AAA admitted to falling asleep at the wheel at some time in their driving history, and 10 percent of responders said that they had nodded off while driving at least once in the past year.

Being overly tired behind the wheel can pose many of the same risks that come from drinking and driving or talking on a cell phone or texting while driving. In terms of nationwide numbers, drowsy driving causes over 100,000 car accidents every year — including 40,000 injuries and 1,550 deaths, according to research from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

Learn more about causes of car accidents and how to prove fault with Nolo’s Vehicle Accidents articles and FAQ.