Thanks to NHTSA, 8 SUV owners will be able to open their sunroofs in car washes. Wait, what?
As you read this little story about a Mercedes-Benz recall of eight—yes, eight—vehicles, try to mentally calculate what the total administrative cost might be.
Seems the problem began with the “car wash mode,” a feature that we didn’t even know the 2020 Mercedes-Benz GLS580 had. Presumably punching the car wash button on the infotainment screen prepares the vehicle for a car wash by, we suspect, tucking in the mirrors and that sort of thing.
Apparently, car wash mode also causes the sunroof to close, which you might think would be good. However, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says it’s a bad thing. There’s a chance, NHTSA says, of injury, assuming that you maybe have a hand or a cheerleader sticking out of the sunroof when the roof tries to close.
Mercedes says the emergency-reopen function, should it detect an impediment such as a thigh, still works. (The function, by the way, is called “anti-pinch.”) So, you say, what’s the problem?
That’s what Mercedes said, filing for a waiver due to “inconsequentiality”—a waiver which, of course, NHTSA categorically denied, because to the federal government, hardly anything is inconsequential.
So we now have an anti-pinch recall for eight GLS580s, requiring that the software be flashed so those who prefer to leave their sunroofs open in carwashes be allowed to do so.
Mercedes, get to work. There’s pinchin’ to prevent.
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Somewhere there are a few cubicles of government “burro-crats” with job security. I hope they have a hard time explaining to their children what they did at work today by helping to bring about the idiocracy.
Government incompetence strikes again. This is an issue that needs their help?
Why don’t they do something useful? Like maybe making a blinking light show on the dashboard so people will be made aware of when they are driving for miles with their turn signal on? What, that’s a thing? You don’t say! Well maybe they CAN’T save people from themselves after all!
Here’s how I suspect these things go down…
Someone lodges a complaint stating that the feature is unsafe. The NHTSA investigates and concludes it could be unsafe. Now they have to act on it. Why? Because if one idiot gets injured because a sunroof closes on them after hitting ‘car wash mode’, now the NHTSA is a bunch of incompetent idiots because they didn’t act on the safety issue in a timely manner. It’s a lose-lose scenario. Who created this monster? WE DID
One must question does this button need to be there in the first place and even worse now that it is there do we really need to remove it?
The best part seems to be that MB asked for the inconsequential judgement in May 2020 but it took the government until October 2023 to tell them “no.” Seems like if the government would have just said “no” quickly that all 8 cars could have been flashed at the dealers before they were sold. It’s not like cars were flying off dealer lots in May 2020…
From my experience with dealing with the government, MB contested the finding, then between May 2020 and October 2020, there was correspondence back and forth before NHTSA finally provided their final disposition. That correspondence probably contains detailed basis on why NHTSA rejected their request – which tends to get left out of the story