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HOUSTON -- They are by far the deadliest types of crashes on the road, accounting for nearly 35 percent of all fatalities.

But should a rollover accident occur are you protected enough in your vehicle?

When it comes to keeping you safe, safety standards have changed over the years on nearly every part of a vehicle—the front, the side and the rear.

But one place hasn’t changed—the roof.

“It looked pretty bad, it gave in completely,” said Patricia Chacon.

Her husband Oscar was coming home to El Paso from a business trip, when the SUV rolled over, and the roof crushed him to death.

“There’s no way he would have been able to survive,” Chacon said.

It was their daughter Valerie’s 17^th birthday.

“We hugged and we cried, we couldn’t believe it, we were just waiting for him to cut the cake,” Patricia Chacon said.

But with this widow’s pain, also comes anger because of what she’s learned about laws regarding roof strength.

“The government needs to take action, they’re doing nothing,” Chacon said.

Nothing is no exaggeration, because roof regulations have remained the same since we were still sending men to the moon and gas was 35 cents a gallon.

The same since 1971.

“The legacy of that is literally tens of thousands of deaths and injuries,” said Sean Kane, an auto safety advocate with the firm Safety Research and Strategies.

“You need to provide survival space for an occupant, front, side, rear, and top,” Kane said, describing a sort of safety cage designed to protect those inside from all sides.

But without any tough standards for the roof, “The manufacturers have eliminated the top part of that cage,” Kane said.

As a result, when a vehicle rolls over, the roof can collapse and cause critical head, neck and spine injuries, or even death.

“For the most part, vehicle manufacturers have skated with very weak roofs,” Kane said.

So how could this happen? The 11 News Defenders dug up documents nearly 40 years old which show automakers basically wrote the law themselves, and in doing so, ignored safety recommendations from their own engineers.

11 News photo

For starters, in the late 1960s, U.S. automakers began to abandon dynamic rollover tests, in which vehicles were driven onto ramps to cause them to flip. Instead, companies began pushing for something far less real world—a static, stationary test, applying pressure with a metal plate to both sides of a car’s frame.

But turns out, internal General Motors documents from 1971 show five of six GM body styles failed that test. So company management lowered the bar again, this time applying pressure to only one side of the car.

In the meantime, engineers at Ford Motor Company defined a safe roof as capable of withstanding a load twice the curb weight of the vehicle. But corporate officials there once again lowered the bar, reducing roof strength to 1.5 times a vehicle’s curb weight.

“Those internal recommendations by the engineering side were changed by management,” Kane said.

In the end, Kane and other safety advocates said management pushed for those changes to be made into law, and the government signed off.

The result?

“No surprise we see a growth in deaths and injuries in rollover crashes,” Kane said.

And it only got worse, when Americans started driving more roll-over prone SUVs.

Ofelia Perret was a passenger in one of them. When the vehicle rolled over and the roof collapsed, it left her in a human trap.

“With the roof on my head, pushing me, pushing me down,” Perret said.

The accident left the wife and mother paralyzed from the waist down with doctors telling her it’s unlikely she’ll ever walk again.

“And when they told me that, I felt oh my God, this cannot be true,” Perret said.

But what is true is that automakers claim stories like Perret’s are not their fault.

“The industry mantra has been that roof crush doesn’t cause injury,” said plaintiff’s attorney Rob Ammons.

Ammons has challenged that argument in court. It’s known as the diving theory, and holds that injuries occur when occupants dive headfirst into the roof before it crushes...

“What needs to happen is that the industry needs to take responsibility for its actions,” Ammons said.

But turns out, U.S. automakers’ corporate partners in Europe, such as Volvo and Saab, have been building stronger roofs for years. A 1994 Saab television ad touted “the load required to collapse the Saab’s roof, is three times the weight of the car.”

Why hasn’t it happened in America after 37 years?

“I think the government has not fallen asleep at the wheel, but they’ve gotten out of the car, shut the door and gone home,” Ammons said.

Consider what 11 News found on Capitol Hill by the head of the National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration.

“We are actively engaged in the preliminary research now in upgrading our roof crush standard,” said Dr. Jeffery Runge.

Finally, right? Unfortunately, Dr. Runge’s comments took place at a Senate hearing in 2003. Still, nothing has changed, five years later and counting.

A NHTSA spokesperson told 11 News it has taken so long because the agency wants to make sure any changes were made on sound science. It expects to pass new roof regulations this July.

Meanwhile, Ford, General Motors, Chrysler and the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers all declined requests for on-camera interviews.

Ford did send us a statement saying that simply strengthening roofs will not reduce injury risk, and that safety belts are the best line of defense. Ford claims 95 percent of belted occupants in rollover crashes avoid serious injuries.

GM and Chrysler referred us to the Alliance of Auto manufacturers, which said it’s proud of introducing safety enhancements to reduce injury—such as installing electronic stability control and side curtain airbags.