Sunroofs Are Growing in Size and Popularity. Rules Haven’t Kept Up.

After 18-year-old Liza Hankins was thrown through the closed sunroof of her sport-utility vehicle during a crash and paralyzed, her family sued the truck’s maker, claiming it had failed to live up to its safety responsibilities.

The carmaker, Ford, won the case after it pointed out that no government regulations required a sunroof — even a closed one — to keep someone inside a vehicle in a crash.

Today, more than a dozen years after Ms. Hankins’s crash, there are still no government regulations meant to prevent the hundreds of sunroof ejections that happen every year — even as more buyers are ticking the box for the sunroof option and more carmakers are stretching the size of the glass overhead with larger, panoramic sunroofs. read more »

Congress May Seek New VW Emissions-Cheating Probe

Congress should investigate new allegations that Volkswagen AG diesel cars were sold overseas with rigged software after the company’s $14.7 billion settlement of a cheating scandal in the U.S., a Republican lawmaker said Wednesday.

A new probe is "almost inevitable," Representative Darrell Issa of California, the former chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said in a phone interview.

"There is a growing sense executives need to be held accountable," he said, adding that an earlier settlement reached between U.S. regulators and Volkswagen in 2016 didn’t reflect the scope of current "global conspiracy that we now understand." read more »