Imagine you’re buying a new van. You want something with plenty of seats, and you want it to be roomy and comfortable enough to take on long journeys with your family and friends. You decide on a Volkswagen ID.Buzz, in part because you found the third-row seats to be especially spacious and accomadating. Only then do you find out there’s been a recall for that very reason.
As covered by Road & Track, NHTSA isn’t happy with the US version of the ID.Buzz. The problem with Volkswagen’s electric van is clear: the third row seats are bigger than government regulations allow.
On the face of it, it sounds like nonsense. Surely automakers can make seats as big as they want, right? Well, actually, no. There are strict rules around the size of third-row seats in the US due to expected customer behaviors.
It all comes down to DSPs, an abbreviation for “designated seating positions.” The third row in the ID.Buzz is designed with two designated seating positions, as is obvious by the two seatbelts provided. The problem is that the seat is too wide to have only two designated seating positions. According to the recall notice, “the calculated seating surface width of the third-row rear bench exceeds the maximum value specified in 49 CFR Part 571.10 for two (2) DSPs.” Thus, the ID.Buzz is in violation of Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards.
Basically, the authorities think the seat is wide enough that you’ll sneakily put three people in the third row, even though there are only two seatbelts. This would mean that the unsecured passenger would be at increased risk of injury in a crash.
To meet the regulations, Volkswagen should have made the seats narrower to avoid this temptation. It doesn’t matter that the owner’s manual states the seating capacity quite clearly, nor that there are only two seatbelts. The physical dimensions still have to be small enough to meet the regulations.
The “cause” of the recall is quite amusing—NHTSA documents list it as an “error in the interpretation of 49 CFR Part 571.10.” That basically means the engineers and designers at Volkswagen read the regulations, but misunderstood their intended meaning.
In this case, the recall might seem a bit frivolous. The third row seating very obviously has two distinct seating positions and is not intended to have a third person sitting in the middle. It’s a back row for children and small-to-medium monogamous couples with no third wheels.
At the same time, it’s easy to understand why this regulation exists. If it didn’t, automakers could fit super-wide bench seats in cars and vans with only one seatbelt, claiming they only counted as one seating position. Obviously, such a design would encourage using the benches without seatbelts, and this would have negative safety implications. Volkswagen’s error is easier to understand as a mistake rather than a genuine attempt to circumvent the rules.
Thankfully, the fix is not too onerous. An additional trim will be fitted into the third-row seating area which will effectively reduce the available seating surface to be in compliance with the regulations. Owners will be hoping the trim doesn’t cut too far into the seating area to the point that it disrupts passenger comfort. Volkswagen is recalling 5,637 examples of the ID.Buzz, which likely covers all examples brought to the US at this stage.
It’s an oddball mistake to make on Volkswagen’s part, that much is certain. Automakers employ huge numbers of engineers and spend many billions on developing new vehicles, and it’s rare that they miss an obvious part of a long-standing regulation. It seems likely that one or more engineers over at headquarters will have bratwurst on their faces after this one.
Image credits: federal regulations, Volkswagen
Where is DOGE when you actually need them instead of gutting useful agencies? What a stupid recall.
I am not anti-regulatory normally. I get regulations. Something bad happened, we figured out why and we don’t want to happen again. I get it. But this just seems stupid.
Is there a regulation against using the word “stupid” more than once in a comment?
I guess I could use a thesaurus and get around it, if there is.
Geez, so much whining about regulations being BS and all that in the comments. To be sure, sometimes regulators could stand to do a better job but you know what they say about regulations being written in blood.
Better safe than sorry, after all.
And there’s the possibly apocryphal but also possibly quite true anecdote about the Yellowstone park ranger talking about the difficulties in designing bear-proof trashcans caused by the fact that there’s so much overlap between the smartest bears and the dumbest humans.
Many years ago I took an OSHA certification course where the instructor, a former OSHA inspector, told an anecdote about inspecting a factory that had a massive (like room-sized) piece of equipment (a stamping die press) with a six-inch-diameter shaft that had an exposed and smooth end sticking out less than an eighth of an inch on the side of press and because of the gearing the shaft spun less than one revolution per minute. He said the OSHA regulations back then required him to issue an order for the factory to install a substantial protective steel cage over the exposed end of the shaft despite its unobtrusiveness and its glacially slow rotation. When the factory owners balked at the expense of installing such a device somebody pointed out that if one of the workers (or one of the factory owners) was injured on the premises, regardless of whether it was from the exposed shaft’s end despite the sheer unlikeliness thereof or not, the factory’s insurance company would refuse to cover it by saying the factory was not in compliance with OSHA regulations and then drop the factory owners from their overall coverage. The factory owners immediately had the aforementioned device installed. The instructor said that eventually the OSHA regulations were updated to take into account of such situations so such a device would not have been required as of the time he was giving the certification course. He was amused by that particular situation but said he wasn’t about to gripe too much about it because of what he had seen on the job (regulations written in blood and all that.)
Time to ditch the stupid FMVSS regulations…