National Highway Traffic Safety Administration July 2011 – Federal Register Recent Federal Regulation Documents

New passenger vehicles manufactured on or after September 1, 2007 must be labeled with safety rating information published by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) under its New Car Assessment Program (NCAP). This information is required by statute to be part of the Monroney (automobile price sticker) label. Effective beginning in model year 2011 passenger vehicles, NHTSA enhanced the NCAP ratings program to include, among other things, the incorporation of an overall vehicle score that is derived from the vehicle's frontal crash, side crash, and rollover resistance ratings. This final rule amends NHTSA's regulation on vehicle labeling of safety rating information to reflect the enhanced NCAP ratings program.

This document grants in full the Mazda Motor Corporation (Mazda) petition for an exemption of the CX-5 vehicle line in accordance with 49 CFR Part 543, Exemption from the Theft Prevention Standard. This petition is granted because the agency has determined that the antitheft device to be placed on the line as standard equipment is likely to be as effective in reducing and deterring motor vehicle theft as compliance with the parts marking requirements of the Theft Prevention Standard (49 CFR Part 541).

In compliance with the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1995 (44 U.S.C. 3501 et seq.), this notice announces that the Information Collection Request (ICR) abstracted below regarding motorcycles helmet labels has been forwarded to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) for review and comment. The ICR describes the nature of the information collections and their expected burden. The Federal Register Notice with a 60-day comment period was published on March 30, 2011 (76 FR 17746). The docket number is NHTSA-2011-0045. No comments were received.

Pursuant to the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), NHTSA plans to analyze the potential environmental impacts of the agency's rulemaking to implement the Pedestrian Safety Enhancement Act of 2010. The Pedestrian Safety Enhancement Act mandates a rulemaking to establish a standard requiring electric and hybrid vehicles to be equipped with a pedestrian alert sound system that would activate in certain vehicle operating conditions to aid visually-impaired and other pedestrians in detecting the presence, direction, location, and operation of those vehicles. Under NEPA, once an agency determines the purpose and need of the proposed federal action, it engages in scoping. This is the process by which the scope of the issues and the alternatives to be examined are determined. This notice initiates the scoping process by inviting comments from Federal, State, and local agencies, Indian Tribes, and the public to help identify the environmental issues and reasonable alternatives to be examined under NEPA. This notice also provides guidance for participating in the scoping process and additional information about the alternatives NHTSA expects to consider in its NEPA analysis.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) are issuing a joint final rule establishing new requirements for the fuel economy and environment label that will be posted on the window sticker of all new automobiles sold in the U.S. The labeling requirements apply for model year 2013 and later vehicles with a voluntary manufacturer option for model year 2012. The labeling requirements apply to passenger cars, light-duty trucks, and medium duty passenger vehicles such as larger sport-utility vehicles and vans. The redesigned label provides expanded information to American consumers about new vehicle fuel economy and fuel consumption, greenhouse gas and smog-forming emissions, and projected fuel costs and savings, and also includes a smartphone interactive code that permits direct access to additional Web resources. Specific label designs are provided for gasoline, diesel, ethanol flexible fuel, compressed natural gas, electric, plug-in hybrid electric, and hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. This rulemaking is in response to provisions in the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 that imposed several new labeling requirements and new advanced-technology vehicles entering the market. NHTSA and EPA believe that these changes will help consumers to make more informed vehicle purchase decisions, particularly as the future automotive marketplace provides more diverse vehicle technologies from which consumers may choose. These new label requirements do not affect the methodologies that EPA uses to generate consumer fuel economy estimates, or the automaker compliance values for NHTSA's corporate average fuel economy and EPA's greenhouse gas emissions standards. This action also finalizes a number of technical corrections to EPA's light-duty greenhouse gas emission standards program.