Manufacturers love to wave the FMVSS at juries. “This vehicle exceeded all federal safety standards,” the corporate representative will say, with a slight pause for emphasis. The argument is calibrated to suggest that compliance is the end of the inquiry. It is not.
The Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards are minimums—floors, not ceilings—and they were never intended to occupy the field of vehicle safety. The Safety Act expressly preserves common-law remedies, and the United States Supreme Court has repeatedly held that compliance with an FMVSS does not preempt a state-law product liability claim. This page walks through how the standards are made, what they actually require, and how Cronauer Law disposes of the FMVSS defense in crashworthiness trials.
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Congress passed the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act of 1966 (now codified at 49 U.S.C. §§ 30101 et seq.) to reduce traffic deaths and injuries. The Safety Act delegated authority to the Department of Transportation to establish minimum motor-vehicle safety standards; DOT in turn delegated that work to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). NHTSA’s product is the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards, codified at 49 C.F.R. §§ 571.1–.302.
The Safety Act contains a savings clause—49 U.S.C. § 30103(e)—that provides: “Compliance with a motor vehicle safety standard prescribed under this chapter does not exempt a person from liability at common law.” That language is not ornamental. It reflects Congress’s deliberate decision to preserve the role of state tort law as a parallel regulator of motor vehicle safety.
Most FMVSS are performance standards: they specify how a vehicle must perform under defined test conditions. The most familiar example is FMVSS 208, which sets injury-criteria thresholds—HIC, chest acceleration, femur load—for crash-test dummies in barrier impacts.
A smaller subset are design standards. FMVSS 210, for example, dictates the geometric zones in which seatbelt anchorages must be installed.
Manufacturers “self-certify” compliance with the FMVSS. NHTSA does not pre-approve vehicles. Compliance testing is performed by the manufacturer; NHTSA spot-tests a small fraction. The implications for jury argument are significant: the standard the corporate representative invokes was not validated by NHTSA on the specific vehicle at issue.
FMVSS 208, 49 C.F.R. § 571.208, prescribes injury-criteria limits in frontal and side barrier impacts. Plaintiffs use the standard’s published criteria to demonstrate that the occupant’s injuries far exceeded the levels the manufacturer’s own design targets recognized as severe.
FMVSS 209 governs seatbelt assemblies and webbing strength; FMVSS 210 governs anchorage location and pull-strength. Both standards have been criticized as outdated; many seats and belts comply by wide margins yet fail in real-world rollovers and high-energy events.
FMVSS 213, 49 C.F.R. § 571.213, prescribes child seat performance under sled-test conditions. It does not test side-impact performance comprehensively, and many child seat manufacturers have voluntarily exceeded the standard.
FMVSS 216, the standard most central to roof crush litigation, originally required roofs to support 1.5 times the vehicle’s curb weight before deforming five inches. The 2009 upgrade increased the requirement to 3.0 times curb weight for vehicles up to 6,000 pounds. The test is static, not dynamic, and uses a pitched flat plate that bears little resemblance to the loading patterns of a real rollover.
FMVSS 226 was promulgated in 2011 to require side curtain airbag and laminated glazing performance to reduce occupant ejection through side windows in rollovers. Phase-in compliance was completed in 2017.
FMVSS 301, 49 C.F.R. § 571.301, governs fuel system performance in front, rear, and side impacts. Like the other standards, it is a minimum and is widely outpaced by the engineering knowledge of post-collision fuel-fed fire risk.
The cleanest authority for the proposition that compliance is not a complete defense is the savings clause itself, 49 U.S.C. § 30103(e). The Supreme Court reinforced the point in Williamson v. Mazda Motor of America, Inc., 562 U.S. 323 (2011), holding that FMVSS 208’s options provision did not preempt a state-law claim that Mazda should have installed lap-and-shoulder belts in a rear inboard seating position. The Court distinguished Geier v. American Honda Motor Co., 529 U.S. 861 (2000), narrowing rather than expanding implied preemption.
Most states’ substantive law is consistent. In Missouri, for example, compliance is not even admissible to mitigate the manufacturer’s responsibility under strict liability. Lay v. P&G Health Care, Inc., 37 S.W.3d 310 (Mo. App. W.D. 2000). Other states permit the evidence but treat it as one factor among many.
Where a jurisdiction does have a rebuttable presumption of non-defectiveness based on FMVSS compliance, the presumption can be rebutted with the standard’s own legislative history, with documents showing the manufacturer’s own internal targets exceeded the standard, with industry data showing other manufacturers exceeding the standard, and with the manufacturer’s own corporate-representative concessions about the obsolescence of the standard.
Our standard approach has four components.
First, we educate the jury that every infamous defective vehicle in modern history—the Pinto, the Explorer, the GM ignition-switch cars, the Toyotas implicated in unintended acceleration—exceeded the FMVSS in effect at the time. Compliance is not safety.
Second, we examine the corporate representative on whether the manufacturer relied on the standard in design, whether the standard sets a target the manufacturer would tolerate in any of its vehicles, and whether the manufacturer participated in industry petitions to NHTSA opposing increases in the standard. Manufacturers’ representatives routinely concede the standards are obsolete.
Third, we use the petitioning history of the standard itself. NHTSA’s notice-and-comment record for FMVSS 216, for example, contains decades of automaker opposition to roof strength increases, all of which is admissible to demonstrate the manufacturer’s actual knowledge of the inadequacy of the rule.
Fourth, where the law and facts support it, we move in limine to exclude FMVSS compliance evidence under state rules paralleling Federal Rule of Evidence 403, on the ground that minimal probative value is substantially outweighed by the risk of unfair prejudice and jury confusion.
Manufacturers occasionally try to convert FMVSS compliance into outright preemption. The argument fails almost everywhere. The Safety Act’s express savings clause, combined with the Williamson narrowing of Geier, leaves manufacturers very little preemption ground. Specific issues—seatbelt configuration in older vehicles, certain types of restraint design—remain contested, but the general rule is that state-law product liability claims survive.
Yes, in nearly every state. The Safety Act’s savings clause and the Supreme Court’s decision in Williamson v. Mazda Motor of America, Inc., 562 U.S. 323 (2011), make clear that FMVSS compliance does not preempt a common-law product liability claim. State law treats compliance as evidence, not as a defense.
Because the marketing reads better than the truth. The standards are minimums, manufacturers self-certify compliance, and many of the standards are decades old. Every infamous defective-vehicle litigation in modern history—Pinto, Explorer, GM ignition switch—involved vehicles that exceeded the FMVSS in effect at the time.
A performance standard tells the manufacturer what result the design must achieve in a defined test. A design standard tells the manufacturer how the design must be configured. FMVSS 208’s injury-criteria thresholds are performance; FMVSS 210’s anchorage zones are design.
Some are; many are not. FMVSS 216 (roof crush) waited from 1971 to 2009 for its first significant upgrade. FMVSS 207 (seatback strength) has remained largely unchanged since the 1960s and is widely regarded as obsolete. NHTSA’s rulemaking calendar is notoriously slow.
No. The duty of care under state product liability law is independent of federal regulation. Manufacturers must use reasonable care to design, build, and warn about reasonably foreseeable risks, regardless of whether the FMVSS speak to a particular issue.
Geier held that FMVSS 208’s airbag-or-passive-belt options preempted a state-law claim that a 1987 Honda should have had an airbag, because the federal regulator deliberately chose to give manufacturers options. Williamson narrowed Geier, holding that an analogous options provision in the rear-seat seatbelt context did not preempt because the federal regulator did not have a similar deliberate purpose. The two cases together establish a fact-specific, narrow preemption doctrine, not a broad shield.
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