The Secret Auto-Safety Files

For almost three years, the major automakers have shipped voluminous data to U.S. traffic-safety regulators: Eight million consumer complaints, 138 million warranty claims and 5 million field reports on product malfunctions. It's part of an "early warning reporting'' program Congress set up to prevent a repeat of the Firestone tire-failure scandal.

General Motors, Ford, Chrysler and some German and Japanese manufacturers have argued that this information should be kept strictly confidential. And officials at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration have agreed, despite protests and court challenges from public safety groups.

Late last month, the highway-safety administration proposed the latest in a string of rules over the confidentiality of those millions of documents. It did so on the orders of a federal judge, who accused the agency earlier this year of pulling a "switcheroo'' by deleting from an earlier draft a presumption that the data would be available to the public.

The tug of war over disclosure is intense because millions of dollars -- and many lives -- may be at stake. In the Firestone debacle, the tire company said it would recall 10 million tires because of tread separations and other failures that were linked to at least 271 deaths.

Many of the accidents came after rollovers by Firestone-equipped Ford Explorers, and Ford ended up doing a substantial redesign of the popular sport-utility vehicle. Both companies faced massive legal bills from resulting lawsuits, and their reputations took a beating.

"What manufacturers are afraid of is not cases already filed, but people mining for trends to file class-action suits'' if the data are made public, said Sean Kane, president of Safety Research & Strategies in Rehoboth, Mass., which has worked for plaintiffs' lawyers.

Automakers have campaigned through their trade group in Washington, the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, to keep the quarterly reports classified as "confidential business information.''

"This is all information that is unsubstantiated and submitted to the manufacturer,'' said Robert Strassburger, vice president of vehicle safety for the alliance. He argued that the data are "competitively sensitive.''

The alliance told NHTSA in 2002 that it would cost auto manufacturers $52.5 million to set up the early warning system and $10 million a year to maintain it.

The traffic-safety agency says the new information is worth collecting, even if only its investigators see it.

"It is serving the purpose Congress intended -- putting vital information in the hands of our defects investigators,'' said Rae Tyson, an NHTSA spokesman.

Still, the agency said it has opened about the same number of defect investigations in the five years since Congress passed the early warning system than it did in the five previous years. That suggests that the new data haven't had an extraordinary impact.