Great investigation and reporting effort about how used car dealers put profits over peoples' lives and how they use their profits to buy power in state legislatures, which gives them a chance to sneak through legislation that immunizes them from liability for selling actual killer products.
This is just another example of how our corrupted system of influence buying through campaign contributions threatens all Americans with a return of the "buyer beware" sales practices that consumer protection legislation and civil suits have helped fix.
This is just another example of how our corrupted system of influence buying through campaign contributions threatens all Americans with a return of the "buyer beware" sales practices that consumer protection legislation and civil suits have helped fix.
COPY, PASTE, LEGISLATE
Used car dealers didn’t want to fix deadly defects, so they wrote a law to avoid it
By Rui Kaneya with Pratheek Rebala, Center for Public Integrity
Carlos Solis never knew he was driving with a “shrapnel bomb” inside his steering wheel.
The 35-year-old father of two was waiting to make a left turn on a suburban road outside Houston when another car struck the front end of his Honda Accord, triggering its airbags.
Instead of protecting Solis, the defective airbags shot a piece of metal into his neck and severed his carotid artery, killing him within minutes.
Solis knew nothing about the danger: A used-car dealer sold him the car without fixing the airbags or warning him that Honda had recalled the vehicle three years earlier, according to a lawsuit filed by his family.
By the time Solis was killed in 2015, similar accidents were piling up nationwide amid an unprecedented series of recalls for an array of dangerous defects – from shrapnel-flinging airbags to ignition switches that shut off engines.
For auto dealers, the string of accidents was a warning sign of what was to come: a barrage of lawsuits filed against them for selling recalled used cars without fixing them first.
Auto dealers came up with a plan to preempt the problem.
They crafted what’s known as “model legislation” that would allow them to continue selling recalled used cars, so long as they disclosed open recalls to customers somewhere in a stack of sales documents. They then turned to their army of lobbyists – more than 600 on call in 43 states – to help get the measure passed, one state at a time.
The effort is paying off. (read the rest here)
The success of auto dealers’ effort is a case study in how special interest groups with deep pockets go from state to state with model legislation – copy-and-paste measures that can be handed to friendly lawmakers in any state – to get the policies they want, often with little public scrutiny and sometimes with tragic consequences.
During a two-year investigation, the Center for Public Integrity, USA TODAY and the Arizona Republic found thousands of similar pieces of legislation and retraced a number of them to their root. Many were written by corporations or special interest groups that stood to benefit directly. Some are pitched as public-service measures.
SIDEBAR: This story was produced as part of a collaboration between USA TODAY, the Arizona Republic and the Center for Public Integrity. More than 30 reporters across the country were involved in the two-year investigation, which identified copycat bills in every state. The team used a unique data-analysis engine built on hundreds of cloud computers to compare millions of words of legislation provided by LegiScan.In the past five years, versions of auto dealers’ copycat bill have been introduced in at least 11 states – California, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Virginia. So far only Tennessee and Pennsylvania have adopted them, but Massachusetts, Missouri, New Jersey and New York still have measures under consideration.
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