NHTSA Complaint #11544361 — 2018 JEEP COMPASS

I was recently involved in an accident driv'g 2018 Jeep Compass: no significant injury (so far) to a jogger, who was invisible due to a blind spot @driver-side A-pillar/mirror. I touched him w my car (5mph per police rept). It has taken me a month to understand why the accident occurred. I didn't see the jogger— he was NEVER w/in my scope of view. I was ticketed for failing to stop; I did stop but proceeded too soon...not writing to argue fault--- I accept that humans in crosswalks have right-of-way. A few years ago, I had a close call at an intersection w a truck coming (upgrade) from the right— it was early morning & I thot the near-miss was an artifact of pre-dawn light. Now I believe that as we converged at the intersection, the truck remained obscured until I had entered the intersection to make my left turn. Recently a friend who works at a gas station named the car part (A-pillar) & identified it as a “blind spot.” ...brand new concepts (to me) regarding this car part. I've never heard of them before— not fm the sales rep during test drive, nor fm techs during dealership service, nor fm other drivers. Ask your sister if she knows where the A-pillar is. "A-pillar blind spot" is not in the User Manual. The Compass has electronic blind-spot-monitoring (BSM) for vehicles that linger on either side of the car. There is extensive guidance about side-BSM in the owner’s manual, in add'n to boxed warnings @ using the back-up camera. "A-pillar blind spot" is not mentioned or warned about. However, in looking at Compass-Owner discussion group comments, I find this is an issue for other Compass owners, at least since 2011. All talk discussion is about near-miss with pedestrians, plus other vehicles as I described above.