The recent recall decision on 1.7 million Hyundai and Kia cars in the United States was based on data, not politics, the chief of the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration told The Korea Herald on Monday.

“Our agency is based on data. We don’t care if it’s a company in Detroit or Korea. Our job is safety on the U.S. road,” said David L. Strickland, administrator at the U.S. traffic safety agency. 

He was visiting Seoul to attend the International Technical Conference on the enhanced Safety of Vehicles, an international forum on road safety co-hosted by Korea’s Transport Ministry and the U.S. agency.

The NHTSA, considered to have the most active defective investigation program in terms of car safety, is the same agency behind recent high-profile recall cases, including the 2010 Toyota fiasco.

Following a gas mileage overstatement scandal early this year, Korea’s Hyundai Motor and its affiliate Kia Motors also underwent a recall in April after the NHTSA found electronic defects in more than 1.7 million cars on sale in the United States.

About the recent decisions, industry officials, including some Hyundai executives, argued that the U.S. carmakers may have started holding Hyundai and Kia in check as they were gradually eating up their market share.

But the administrator, who has been leading the NHTSA since December 2009, denied that any other factors aside from data played a role in the agency’s decisions.

“We don’t care who makes the car. If decisions are made based on data, the outcome is always right,” he said.

He emphasized that collaborative efforts among governments and carmakers are possible and crucial to solving major risks, such as limited resources, to elevate public awareness about safety and related tests.

“Every country has few resources to spend on anything, so the more we can do in terms of collaborative research and learning together, the less we can spend on research,” he said.

He also expressed future intentions to expand partnerships between the U.S. agency and its Korean counterpart, the Korea Transportation Safety Authority, to find common solutions more efficiently.

By Lee Ji-yoon (jylee@heraldcorp.com)