SAN DIEGO -- Luis Pena has no memory of what happened a year and a half ago when his truck rolled over one night while he was on duty as a Border Patrol agent. He just knows he was lucky he didn’t die.

“If you look at the photos, you’d say, ‘How can anybody survive this?” says Pena.

The roof on the truck collapsed in the rollover, crushing his spine.

“Halfway down my neck, there’s that vertebrae which is the C6, C7 vertebrae where it got dislocated,” explains Pena. “It popped out and it dragged the spinal cord over with it and it created a tear and a pinch on the spinal cord, creating a quadriplegic.”

Pena has regained some movement in his arms and wrists. Before the accident, he used to be a firefighter, a police officer, a martial arts instructor. Now Pena can’t move 80% of his body and although he usually has a smile on his face, the pain is constant.

“I mean I’m still a father. I’m still a husband. You know I’m still a counselor for people who want to talk about a lot of things. It’s hard to do all that when you’re in pain.”

According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, more than 10,000 people are killed in rollover accidents every year. Even though rollovers make up only 3% of all vehicle accidents, they account for almost one-third of all driver and passenger fatalities. And it’s even more dangerous for SUVs, where more than 60% of SUV deaths each year involve rollover accidents.

Safety advocates argue that lives could be saved with one thing: a stronger roof.

“If you can fix it, you can get it done cheaply, and avoid this happening to anyone else, you know, then why not?” asks Pena.

“The federal government has estimated that a stronger roof would add about $50 to $70 to the cost of the vehicle, on average,” says Anne McCartt, a senior researcher at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.

The current regulations about roof strength were created by NHTSA and went into effect in 1973.

“It was never any good. It never protected people, the industry knew it,” says Paula Lawlor, a San Diegan who started People Safe in Rollovers Foundation. She’s been fighting for a stronger roof standard for years.

Lawlor says the auto industry had a huge hand in creating the 1973 regulations, crafting it so that more vehicles could meet the guidelines, rather than making cars safer for people.

She found damaging internal documents from car companies, gathered for court cases, and fought to declassify them so they could be shared with the public. In 2006, Lawlor put the evidence she found into a report called Roof Crush Intrusion, Deadly by Design to criticize the weak government roof strength standards.

In 2005, Congress ordered NHTSA to upgrade the rules about roof strength. The current standards say vehicles up to 6,000 pounds must have a roof that can withstand a force of up to 1.5 times the vehicle’s weight. NHTSA’s proposed upgrade is 2.5 times the vehicle’s weight, for vehicles up to 10,000 pounds. Lawlor says it’s still too weak.

“It only protects 13 to 44 of the 10,000 that they say that die. If they raise it up three and a half, four times strength to weight ratio, they’ll save thousands of lives.”

Lawlor is not alone. Consumer Reports, Public Citizen and the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety are among the groups that agree.

In fact, IIHS took it one step further and announced today a first-of-its-kind rating system for roofs. Vehicles can only get a good rating if the roof can withstand four times the car’s weight. That’s almost double what NHTSA and automakers want to call safe.

“A good rating in our system would have much better crash protection than the government is recommending,” says McCartt.

IIHS tested 12 small 2008-09 SUVs and four earned good ratings. Volkswagen Tiguan, Subaru Forester, Honda Element and Jeep Patriot.

The Volkswagen Tiguan has the strongest roof of the group. Its roof crushed less than two inches. The Kia Sportage performed the worst, crushing down past the driver’s headrest.

”We think it just makes a lot of common sense that a strong roof protects occupants better and our roof research backs that up,” says McCartt.

The institute’s goal is to give car buyers enough information to demand stronger roofs. For thousands like Luis Pena though, it’s too late.

“I’m really appreciative that I'm still here. However, with that said and done, let's do something about us -- let's prevent this from happening to someone else because I would not wish this on anybody,” says Pena.

NHTSA has postponed a final ruling on the new roof crush standards three times in the last year. The new deadline is April 30, 2009.