THE PROFIT IN HIGHWAY SLAUGHTER
NADER, RALPH
The Profit in Highway Slaughter by RALPH NADER In all the controversy over General Motors' private investigation of Ralph Nader—the young attorney who is one of the automobile industry's severest...
...This is hardly a new idea...
...To put it squarely, death on the highway produces incomes and profits for hundreds of thousands of people and companies...
...But drivers are exposed to criminal fines and imprisonment—manslaughter charges— for gross negligence leading to one or more deaths...
...Notice, for example, the uniformity of the useless, recessed bumper design which exposes fenders, lights, etc., to damage and costly repair in slight contacts with other vehicles or structures...
...A brand-new car with old-line negligence...
...Vehicle failure is routinely considered owner or driver neglect...
...Teenagers can turn on the radio and hear a commercial that begins with a deep growl...
...There are those rare instances when the impressive containment of public self-criticism by auto executives exhausts itself temporarily...
...Yet the orgy of expenditure for style, which is charged to the consumer every year as entirely standard equipment, continues unabated...
...Unconventional insight into the "why" of this deplorable condition was offered by George Rom-ney in 1958 when, as president of American Motors, he rendered his classic testimony before the Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust and Monopoly...
...T Tnder present conditions there is ^ little economic incentive for the auto maker to concern himself seriously with automobile casualties and collisions—for the costs and penalties are not upon him...
...An auto maker is not within the scope of such laws...
...The Profit in Highway Slaughter by RALPH NADER In all the controversy over General Motors' private investigation of Ralph Nader—the young attorney who is one of the automobile industry's severest critics—little detail has been revealed in the mass media about his specific charges that the industry bears responsibility for an appreciable part of the slaughter on the nation's highways...
...Three—Federal support function: Financial and technical assistance to the states for the establishment of proficient accident-injury investigative teams to collect the data for future preventive policies and to provide the facts for the just adjudication of legal responsibility instead of the automatic bias of blaming the driver in lieu of an investigation...
...The answer to this question must be "No...
...Only when there is a real threat of cost or other adverse feedback, as in the mass litigation over the 1960-63 Chevrolet Corvairs, does a manufacturer take notice and correct as General Motors did for the Corvair rear suspension system after those four tragic model years...
...The unknowing driver who survives a collision because of such defects is required to assume any legal responsibility—not the manufacturer...
...It does mean that the various endeavors undertaken by public authorities be analyzed to determine which level of government is best equipped to have the particular responsibility...
...Instead, the competition between the auto companies centers around exaggerated touting of trivial differences garnished by throbbing adjectives and beckoning young women, large promotional expenditures, the size and strength of dealer systems, and price adjustments at the dealer level...
...Thus, the economics of the highway accident industry and the operational health of the highway transport system do not breed self-correcting forces and the attention of government that obtains to a substantial degree in other forms of transportation...
...Why should they promote customer interest," Mr...
...Again and again, I have listened to independent scientists and engineers at universities and elsewhere—outside the industry—complain of the near impossibility of communicating with industry employes on what is presumably a common dedication to save lives...
...First, a genuine democracy has to provide for the participation of the public in decisions relating to technology whose use is so fraught with tragedy to millions of people...
...Still the juggernaut plunges ahead...
...The energies of lawyers and physicians (to choose the skills ideally most subject to professional standards of conduct) are so taken up in the care and handling of post-accident problems that they have had little time, even if they had the inclination, to exert effective and sustained efforts toward prevention of collisions and injuries...
...Nader's testimony before the Senate subcommittee followed publication of his book Unsafe At Any Speed, a critique of Detroit's failure to build safer cars for the protection of its customers.-—The Editors...
...The safety the motorist gets when he buys his car should not be determined solely by manufacturers—especially a tightly knit few—whose interests are necessarily those of profit-parochialism...
...Such knowledge might raise expectations or ignite indignations for greater safety...
...The reason is that the car makers want no public knowledge of their safety work or neglect of it...
...Such an instance occurred in January, 1964, when Donald Frey, a perceptive vice president of Ford Motor Company, told a gathering of automotive engineers: "I believe that the amount of product innovation successfully introduced into the automobile is smaller today than in previous times and is still falling...
...An analysis of the present scope of anti-trust laws may well lead to recommendations for strengthening them to cover subtler, though just as harmful, anticompetitive behavior...
...In the area of automobile design, this public participation to raise continuously the operational and crash-worthy safety of motor vehicles does not exist...
...Neither do automobile collisions and injuries threaten the economy generally—at least there is no felt threat to the economy as there would be if, for example, a pest attack destroyed most of the cotton crop...
...Auto companies opposed seat belts for years, ridiculing their proponents, then finally offered them as optional extra cost equipment and, in January 1964, under pressure of legislation, decided to make them standard equipment...
...This does not mean that the Federal government should preempt the field entirely from the states...
...It shares this monstrous affront to common sense with several Detroit cars this year...
...Our country has applied such a philosophy long ago to other areas of safety—safety codes for buildings and factories, food and drug regulations, safety standards for aircraft, ships, and trains, safety examinations for professional skills...
...Two—Research and development function: Behind the chrome curtain there is too little safety research and many an excuse between research and use...
...In the most important area—that of obtaining safer automobile design and construction, there is a need for five Federal functions: One—Standards and inspection function: The establishment of carefully administered dynamic standards for automobile safety performance...
...However innovative the auto companies have been in cutting the costs of production, their end product—the automobile—has been obsolete, particularly in terms of safety, for more than thirty years...
...President Johnson stated to the American Trial Lawyers Association that the "gravest problem before this nation—next to the war in Vietnam -—is the death and destruction, the shocking and senseless carnage, that strikes daily on our highways...
...Two—There is no public inspection to insure that automobiles are built even to conform with the manufacturers' own quality control standards...
...It must be "No" for two independently sufficient reasons...
...Three—The role of automobiles in causing accidents and injuries goes virtually uninvestigated while the police are duty bound to enforce laws written almost exclusively in terms of driver fault...
...Indeed, there is no requirement that there be a public filing of the numerous confidential bulletins and service letters or other communications between manufacturers and dealers concerning defects and deficiencies discovered in new car runs after thousands of these cars have already been sold...
...There are also the Plymouth Fury and Barracuda, the Oldsmobile Cutlass and the Buick Wildcat—to name a few...
...Other advertisements urge the potential driver to "drive it like you hate it," or, after spelling out the 400-plus horsepower, advise that "it's cheaper than psychiatry...
...Apparently, diagnosis is far from treatment...
...Data and other experience from these accident-injury investigations and [from vehicle] inspections should be aggregated and processed with the objective of determining patterns of make and model failure due to defective design or poor quality control...
...The expectant reader, rushing to read on, learns that this "magic" is composed of an optional stereo-sonic tape system [for music] and a station wagon tailgate that swings open for people and pulls down for cargo...
...Such concessions have been wrung from the industry only after thousands of deaths and millions of injuries have occurred...
...This condition has made the annual toll of 50,-000 dead and millions injured the most expendable horror of our technological society...
...The 1966 Ford advertisements boast of "engineering magic...
...vehicle design and manufacturing behavior are outside the rule of law...
...I want to allude to the industry practices that comprise the second reason for governmental action: The industry has actively cultivated a consumer ignorance about safety by promoting a concept of an automobile that stresses style, ride, and performance...
...The auto industry has shown that public pressure is the only stimulus to which it grudgingly and slowly responds...
...Protective imitation" by Ford, Chrysler, and American Motors becomes ever more insistent as the dominant product and price leader—General Motors, with more than half the market—reflects the limits of permissible variation...
...Is it a cue for Tarzan of the apes...
...When it comes to the product itself—the auto makers are competing more and more about less and less...
...Since the auto makers boast about their instrumented crash testing, they must have the answers...
...In the area of vehicle aerodynamics and handling analysis—a subject of growing urgency as vehicle speeds increase—there is deep neglect and shocking theoretical ignorance...
...Against such a background of industry practice and policy, the Federal government must take a decisive role in highway safety...
...As Professor Jeffrey O'Connell of the University of Illinois Law School asked recently in a letter to The New York Times, detailing some of these calculated appeals to power, speed, and other aggressive instincts: "Shall the wolves be shepherds...
...To have meaning, standards require an attendant form of inspection or crashwor-thiness certificate to make sure the standards are met...
...In no other area of mortality and morbidity statistics has the government relied on a private organization...
...Romney stated that the auto manufacturers by adopting a "common product philosophy" have ended "their basic product competition...
...Yet experts such as Harvard's Ross McFarland and California Institute of Technology's Arlie Haagen-Smit have warned about the fatigue and nausea-inducing impact of carbon monoxide levels not infrequent in heavy urban or suburban freeway traffic...
...This is the case because both the automobile and its maker are in the uniquely immune position of being outside of the law, in four ways: One—The automobile does not have to adhere to any meaningful public safety standards for crashworthiness and operational safety...
...With the immense potential offered by the computer for fast, complex, and meaningful data processing, it is all the more incumbent upon the Federal government to establish a complete statistical facility...
...The auto companies announced that a collapsible steering column and a dual braking system will be available for the 1967 models—thanks to the pressure by public officials...
...its purpose is to "stir the animal" in the car buyer...
...The public has not been able to make its collective judgments felt through the governmental process...
...But such feedbacks are very infrequent and, until the Corvair cases, never on a mass basis...
...I view the task of the Federal government as one of implementing a public policy for automobile safety that brings into operation the scientific and engineering talents and resources of the nation...
...But they will fight to the end to deny their publication for the motoring public—notwithstanding the-fact the nearly half of all cars will be involved, sometime in their use, in an injury-producing collision...
...Romney noted, "in new product engineering possibilities that might eventually obsolete their existing production facilities...
...This information should be then translated into readily understandable consumer publications distributed by the Government Printing Office to better inform the car buyer about the choices available to him and generally to improve his critical capacity...
...The smog-ridden people of Los Angeles for many years have been troubled by the same thought as they struggled against an intransigent, unified industry that produced millions of little pollution factories on wheels and refused to apply the necessary remedial engineering to clean them up...
...Nader's testimony before the Senate subcommittee on automobile safety presents a number of his findings along with his proposals for comprehensive and forceful Federal legislation to reduce the annual toll of deaths and injuries...
...Implicit in this statement would seem to be an increased awareness of the necessity for Federal leadership...
...Of more immediate interest is the flimsy allocation of human and financial resources to crashworthiness or second collision [driver impact] research...
...Because its market structure, conduct, and performance have subverted the basic requisites of a free market system, we have the spectacle of a gigantic industry wallowing in a profitable technological stagnation and relying on superficial cosmetic changes and the inexorable coming of a new year every twelve calendar months to peddle the "all new, unsurpassed" car model...
...A style change for the rear end of a Mustang [Ford], for example, will cost the manufacturer close to $50 million...
...In addition, the anti-trust laws should be rigorously enforced to dissolve any collusive or concerted activity on an industrywide basis or between various manufacturers to restrain the development and/or marketing of safety features...
...There is an old Roman adage which says: "Whatever touches all should be decided by all...
...Henry Ford II seemed troubled by this same lack of innovation when he told the same audience: "When you think of the enormous progress of science over the last two generations, it's astonishing to realize that there is very little about the basic principles of today's automobiles that would seem strange and unfamiliar to the pioneers of our industry...
...How tragic are the results and how costly is the impact on purchasers of America's largest consumer durable...
...The following condensation of Mr...
...With the President's recommendation for a Department of Transportation, it is quite clear that the Administration is engaged in just such an endeavor as part of an overall reorganization of the government machinery for transportation...
...The annual model change ritual is not meaningful innovation for the public safety and welfare...
...The automatic transmission was first adopted on a mass-production basis in 1938-39...
...Four—There are no statutory criminal penalties for manufacturing a defective automobile dangerous to life...
...Four—Statistical and data processing function: The nation can no longer rely on a private organization—the National Safety Council—for its traffic accident-injury statistics...
...By no means...
...Is it any wonder that, at present rates, at least one out of every two living Americans will either be killed or injured (disabled beyond the day of injury) in an automobile collision...
...It is the Pontiac widetrack tiger and the announcer urges the listener to come on down and ride the tiger at tiger country (formerly known as your Pontiac dealer...
...they are grossly inadequate even in the areas they purport to cover and enforcement is virtually nonexistent...
...The Federal government must establish once and for all, as it has for aviation safety, the principle and practice of recalling defective makes and models of automobiles for correction by the manufacturer at its dealer or other suitable location...
...Instead, the amount of safety should be determined by a fuller dialogue and clash of values of the entire democratic community...
...The hardening of the corporate arteries even extends to an adamant refusal to recognize the dangers of pointed ornaments, dagger fins, and sharp edges prevalent on the front and backs of automobiles to many of the nearly 500,000 pedestrians struck each year by motor vehicles...
...Such a facility will be a major contributor to the constant upgrading of Federal performance standards and would include the design, construction, and testing of prototype vehicles...
...It is a multibillion-dollar industry whose dynamics are hardly about to be in the direction of self-liquidation...
...Actually, the more cars depreciate through collisions, the greater the demand for new and used cars...
...These technical values can all be given in quite precise terms against clearly expressed criteria...
...If these and other Federal functions in highway safety are to be administered fairly and efficiently, a thorough reorganization of the present dispersal of responsibility into one or possibly two administrative units is necessary...
...Driver behavior is within the rule of law...
...The irreverent question was never truer—"Did you see the latest Ford, made by Chrysler, down at the Chevrolet dealer...
...It is doubtful whether General Motors, a company which grossed $20.7 billion in 1965 (greater than the entire gross national product of Brazil and greater than the revenue of the government of France that year) devoted $1 million for second collision research in 1965—or two-hundredths of one per cent of its gross receipts...
...The copy asks the reader: "Ever prodded a throttle with 445 pound-feet of torque coiled tightly at the end of it...
...By concentrating so heavily on auto style, the companies achieve the flexibility of stimulating and then exploiting a wide array of emotional involvements by the buying public in their new automobiles...
...An announcement of a circus coming to town...
...With such "magic" our space endeavors would have gotten us no further to the moon than Mount Everest...
...Both criminal penalties and injunctive powers should be provided in any legislation...
...While the recent spate of Ford safety advertisements in response to a growing public outrage over unsafe design, urges the reader to "cultivate a safety state of mind . . . thinking safety" (and GM is doing the same), Ford continues to name its cars with such aggressive and ferocious titles as Comet, Meteor, Thunderbird, Cobra, Mustang, and Marauder (which means literally "one who pillages and lays waste the countryside...
...A massive wedgelike projection on the sides would be murderous to a hapless pedestrian unfortunate enough to step in its path...
...Lamentably, this industry's secrecy places severe restraints on company researchers and ruptures the canons of scientific communication with professional colleagues outside the industry...
...In America, life is cheapest on the highway...
...Instead, cars are being built which, standing still, can kill adult and child pedestrians who fall or are inadvertently pushed into their sharp points and edges...
...The auto makers are spending a pittance on safety research and development for basic innovation...
...The corporate plea of proprietary data is an excuse, not a reason...
...A Federal facility for research into automobile design safety will serve to advance sharply the state of knowledge and will also encourage and support independent centers of such work around the country...
...The auto industry is utterly devoid of any measure of corporate humility so necessary for internal regeneration...
...For the costs of the highway epidemic are essentially economic demands feeding a vast highway accident service industry composed of medical, hospital, police, legal, insurance, repair, and administrative services...
...And passengers can die in collisions at speeds as low as five miles per hour...
...The car buyer pays more than $700 (according to a study by Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard, and University of Chicago economists), when he buys a new car, for the cost of the annual model change which is mostly stylistic in content...
...The Federal role has been held to the barest minimum through the efforts of the automobile industry, whose overriding objective is to preserve complete control over the design of automobiles and the manner in which they are merchandised...
...No longer can we afford to repeat the general invocation—so beloved by the traffic safety establishment—that "the primary responsibility for traffic safety is vested in the states...
...And coming soon to join the menagerie on the highways are the Mercury Cougar and the Chevrolet Panther...
...Existing state standards are limited to headlamps and a small number of other items of equipment...
...A democratic policy should not permit an industry to decide unilaterally how many years it wishes to hold back the installation of superior braking systems, safer tires, and fuel tanks that do not rupture and incinerate passengers in otherwise survivable accidents, suppress safer instrument panels and steering assemblies and seat structures and frame strengths, or to engage in a stylistic orgy of vehicle-induced glare, chrome eyebrow bumpers, and pedestrian impalers—to take only a few examples of many...
...The inherent thrust is to expand and exploit consumer ignorance of the basic functional qualities of the vehicles and focus attention on images and trivial distinctions...
...The automobile has been the sacred cow...
...Consider the description of the 1966 Toronado [Oldsmo-bile]—a brand new muscle-car—by Hubert Luckett, executive editor of Popular Science: "Functionally, the front bumper design is insane...
...Could corporate and managerial immunity from public accountability be more complete...
...The automatic transmission was the last major innovation of the industry...
...Five—Educative and alert function: The manufacturers should be required to file annual reports detailing, with supporting technical data, the operational safety and crashworthy improvements in their automobiles and disclosing any deteriorations...
...What we need even more than the refinement of old ideas is the ability to develop new ideas and put them to work...
...While eager to tell the potential customer about the rated horsepower, acceleration capability, and kinds of interior decor, the auto maker will not tell him, even if he demands it, such important facts about the safety of the cars as: brake stopping ability, tire skid and blowout resistance, roof collapse strength, door latch and door hinge strength, the dash panel's and windshield's cushioning ability, the amount of rearward displacement of the steering wheel and shaft under a forward crash into a fixed barrier, the side and roof crash resistance of the vehicle, and the seat anchorage strength...
...Never once in response to public questioning has any company representative admitted the dangerous connection between auto exhaust and driver safety...
...Can there be anything less than a fundamental contempt for the consumer in the following advertisements: A closeup picture of the front of the Buick Skylark over the title, "Son of a gun...
...Do that with one of these and you can start billing yourself as the human cannonball...
...The automobile touches us all in the most ultimate ways...
...The continuance of private control over automobile design is considered important by these companies as they continually narrow the quality of their competition between themselves—a phenomenon well known to economists who study the behavior of highly-concentrated or oligopolistic industries...
...In terms of product competition, the automobile industry is closer to closed enterprise than it is to free enterprise...
...Consider how much safer today's automobile would be if over the past two decades the car buyer received annually a substantial safety advance—both in the operational and crashworthy aspects of his automobile—for that $700 payment...
...And it could easily hang up on a guardrail post, turning an otherwise minor mishap into a disaster...
Vol. 30 • May 1966 • No. 5
