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Fiat Chrysler will pay $70M to settle safety disclosure suit

FCA US will pay a $70 million civil penalty to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration for failing to submit Early Warning Report data going back to 2003. The automaker will also provide any missing data since that time, and an auditor will monitor future compliance. NHTSA says the failures to report this information "stem from problems in FCA's electronic system for monitoring and reporting safety data, including improper coding and failure to account for changes in brand names." There are no allegations of any intentional deception by the automaker. NHTSA will wrap up the latest fine with the previous consent order against FCA US earlier this year for the automaker's handling of 23 recalls. The company will know owe the safety regulator a total of $140 million in cash, and there will be possibility of $35 million more in deferred penalties if FCA doesn't comply with the agency's requests. In a statement about the fine to Autoblog, FCA US said the automaker "accepts these penalties and is revising its processes to ensure regulatory compliance." The company strongly believes that it didn't miss any safety problems over the time with this problem. Early Warning Reports include information on deaths, injuries, crashes, and other potential safety concerns, and NHTSA often uses the data in investigations for possible recalls. In September, the safety agency first announced the automaker failed to submit these documents. At the time, the regulator's administrator Mark Rosekind promised to "take appropriate action after gathering additional information on the scope and causes of this failure." FCA US also released a statement then about the lapse and said the company notified NHTSA immediately after discovering the problem. FCA US is not the first company to run afoul of NHTSA's reporting requirement. The agency fined Triumph Motorcycles and Honda this year for similar lapses. It also punished Ferrari in 2014. U.S. DOT Fines Fiat Chrysler $70 million for Failure to Provide Early Warning Report Data to NHTSA WASHINGTON – The U.S. Department of Transportation's National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has imposed a $70 million civil penalty on Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (FCA) for the auto manufacturer's failure to report legally required safety data. The penalty follows FCA's admission in September that it had failed, over several years, to provide Early Warning Report data to NHTSA as required by the TREAD Act of 2000.

Wish you had a world-famous auto exec give your commencement speech? Watch this

We've seen some pretty great commencement speeches over the years. There was Steve Jobs' incredibly inspiring Stanford address in 2005, John Stewart's insightful speech to the graduating class of William and Mary in 2004 and Steven Colbert's hilarious 2011 address at Northwestern, but automotive executives aren't strangers to honorary degrees. Former General Motors CEO Rick Wagoner spoke at Virginia Commonwealth University in 2011, and Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne recently gave the keynote at Walsh College's 100th Commencement Ceremony. The executive knows a thing or two about success and following one's beliefs to fulfillment.
"I constantly encourage my co-workers at Fiat and Chrysler to go beyond the cliche and the conventional to try new approaches and change perspective each and every day," Marchionne said. "I exhort them not to repeat the same things, the same approaches, and I remind them they are indeed free. The freedom I am talking about is something inside you. It is determined by how open minded you remain, how receptive you are to the new and to the different, to the infinite possibilities that present themselves even if you don't go looking for them or could never have imagined. Being free means that you have the strength not to be conditioned by what others want you to do or by what may seem to be the easiest choice."
Amen to that. You can check out the brief press release on the address below as well as a video of a few highlights from the speech.

2016: The year of the autonomous-car promise

About half of the news we covered this year related in some way to The Great Autonomous Future, or at least it seemed that way. If you listen to automakers, by 2020 everyone will be driving (riding?) around in self-driving cars. But what will they look like, how will we make the transition from driven to driverless, and how will laws and infrastructure adapt? We got very few answers to those questions, and instead were handed big promises, vague timelines, and a dose of misdirection by automakers. There has been a lot of talk, but we still don't know that much about these proposed vehicles, which are at least three years off. That's half a development cycle in this industry. We generally only start to get an idea of what a company will build about two years before it goes on sale. So instead of concrete information about autonomous cars, 2016 has brought us a lot of promises, many in the form of concept cars. They have popped up from just about every automaker accompanied by the CEO's pledge to deliver a Level 4 autonomous, all-electric model (usually a crossover) in a few years. It's very easy to say that a static design study sitting on a stage will be able to drive itself while projecting a movie on the windshield, but it's another thing entirely to make good on that promise. With a few exceptions, 2016 has been stuck in the promising stage. It's a strange thing, really; automakers are famous for responding with "we don't discuss future product" whenever we ask about models or variants known to be in the pipeline, yet when it comes to self-driving electric wondermobiles, companies have been falling all over themselves to let us know that theirs is coming soon, it'll be oh so great, and, hey, that makes them a mobility company now, not just an automaker. A lot of this is posturing and marketing, showing the public, shareholders, and the rest of the industry that "we're making one, too, we swear!" It has set off a domino effect – once a few companies make the guarantee, the rest feel forced to throw out a grandiose yet vague plan for an unknown future. And indeed there are usually scant details to go along with such announcements – an imprecise mileage estimate here, or a far-off, percentage-based goal there. Instead of useful discussion of future product, we get demonstrations of test mules, announcements of big R&D budgets and new test centers they'll fund, those futuristic concept cars, and, yeah, more promises.