Auto Safety: Status of NHTSA's Redesign of Its Crashworthiness Data System

In 2010, motor vehicle crashes in the United States cost almost 33,000 lives, injured 2.2 million people, and resulted in almost $900 billion in economic costs. As part of its mission to reduce these losses, NHTSA collects and analyzes data on motor vehicle crashes. One NHTSA program that collects crash data is NASS-CDS—a nationally representative sample of police-reported motor-vehicle traffic crashes; however, the NASS-CDS sample was designed in 1988, and subsequent shifts in the population and a declining sample size have necessitated an update of this sample. In 2012, NHTSA started taking steps to redesign NASS-CDS.