UNSAFE AT ANY SPEED?

In the late 1950s, Volkswagen beetles were sucking away large numbers of car buyers who relished the VW's much higher gas mileage when compared to heavy American sedans. Chevrolet General Manager Ed Cole responded by coming out with the Corvair in 1960. The Corvair was a revolutionary design and featured an aluminum air-cooled engine in the rear which provided excellent performance and 29 MPG (which was astounding at the time). However, unlike the VW beetle, it was relatively spacious inside and could carry six passengers. 

It had only two minor flaws. First, because of the uneven weight distribution with the engine in the rear, the car was prone to spinning out of control unless the tires were exactly at the correct inflation at all times. It was difficult for the average lazy motorist to constantly monitor his or her tire pressures every time the temperature changed a few degrees, and many owners did not realize that the rear tires had to have substantially higher pressure than the front.

Second, when the car did spin out of control, the crash was often fatal, as there was nothing in the front of the car except the trunk to absorb the impact.

The stability problem could have been reduced considerably with the addition of a simple iron bar bolted to the front of the car, and the original GM test models had this feature. However, GM wanted to save a a dollar or two per unit and eliminated the bar from general production--although it did add the bar a few years later when enough customers were getting killed--including famed comedian Ernie Kovacs.

Ralph Nader, then an unknown young attorney, wrote a book in 1965 called Unsafe at Any Speed. It was not particularly flattering to the Corvair. Nader became an expert witness in lawsuits involving Corvair accidents, and GM started investigating him, which resulted in a privacy invasion lawsuit by Nader against GM (which was settled in 1970 for $425,000, or about $2.5 million in current dollars). 

One major fallout of the Corvair litigation was the acceptance by the courts of a new theory of product liability. Previously, only a defectively manufactured product could engender liability on the part of the maker. After the Corvair suits, the law was expanded to make the manufacturer liable if the product was poorly designed, even if manufactured correctly.

Corvair safety ended up in Senate hearings and the passing of the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act in 1966, which further encouraged Congress to pass various other laws regulating other agencies on products ranging from pipelines to X-ray machines to chickens.

Due to plummeting sales resulting from the adverse publicity, GM killed the Corvair in 1969. In 1972, the federal government exonerated GM and declared that there was in fact no abnormal problem with the suspension or handling of the car. 

Ed Cole, disgraced by the whole Corvair experience, nonetheless went on to become President of GM. One of his later contributions was the development of the catalytic converter for pollution control.

In short, Cole's desire to trump VW had several unforeseen consequences:

1. Ralph Nader was elevated to consumer advocate Tsar and he, with his organization of Nader's Raiders, became a gadfly against both governmental entities and corporations. Because of his fame, he ran for President in 2000, sucked up 95,000 votes in Florida (most of which would have gone to Al Gore), and gave the Presidential election to George W. Bush.

2. Lawsuits against corporations increased exponentially as a result of the Corvair cases, including a $2.9 million judgment against McDonald's for brewing its coffee at 180 degrees.

3. Federal bureaucrats, some competent, and some not, now determine options, equipment, and features you must get or cannot get in your new car.

By Greg Gjerdingen from Willmar, USA (64 Chevrolet Corvair Monza)
 [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)],
 via Wikimedia Commons