The Corvair -- "the one car accident"

I will use this video in class tomorrow, 11/14/19. Here is related material from the 2nd edition of my book, The Automobile an American Life:

Ralph Nader and Unsafe at Any Speed

            Just as modern corporations came under suspicion after Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was published in 1962, so too did the professionals associated with universities and the center economy. And as much as Ralph Nader attacked GM for its Corvair in his Unsafe at Any Speed, he also broadened his critique to include the engineers who worked in Detroit. Perhaps more than anyone else since Thorsten Veblen, Ralph Nader focused on the shortcomings of engineers and in the flawed institutional arrangements that existed where they worked. Published in 1965, Unsafe at Any Speed accused automotive engineers of disregarding ethical principles and ignoring public safety. The publicity given to his critical analysis, and Nader’s own crusade spurred the consumer movement and the work of trial lawyers, both of which have led to powerful social changes since the early 1960s.²¹

            At the heart of Nader’s early work was his attack on the safety of General Motor’s Corvair. In Nader’s opinion, “the Corvair was a tragedy not a blunder.” The tragedy was a consequence of engineers who cut corners to shave costs. This was a common occurrence in the auto industry and indeed all manufacturing, but with the Corvair it supposedly happened in a big way. Fatefully, during the late 1950s, General Motors, under the leadership of engineer Ed Cole, developed the Corvair, in part the consequence of the unexpected success of the Volkswagen Beetle, but also the result of two decades of engineers’ fascination with the concept of a vehicle with its engine placed in the rear. While the Corvair had its supporters who argued that the car got a raw deal by consumer advocates, it was generally regarded as one of a number of post-1960 Detroit products that were egregiously unsafe and based on flawed designs. Nader maintained that it was hubris, economics, and blind obedience on the part of engineers working in a flawed institutional environment that led to the Corvair tragedy. Thus, the Corvair was the wrong car at the wrong time in American history. 

            Nader’s convincing arguments were in part the consequence of translating the tragedy into human terms. In August 1961, Mrs. Rose Pierini of Santa Barbara lost control of her new Corvair while driving 35 mph. The car flipped on its top, and Mrs. Pierini was trapped underneath, blood gushing from a dismembered arm that was lying in the street. She would later receive $70,000 after being worn down by GM attorneys and deciding not to go any further with her lawsuit. In a similar fashion, GM Truck and Bus Vice-President Calvin J. Werner, living in Dayton, Ohio, purchased a Corvair for his daughter. She was afraid to drive the car, but her brother was not. That brother would die in a low-speed accident, the consequence of the vehicle’s inherent instability. The Werner family’s plight is reflective of just how little the public, and indeed even GM insiders, knew about the inherent design flaws of the Corvair during the first few years after its introduction. This was just one example of a conspiracy of silence about unsafe vehicles before the era of recalls.

            Indeed, the author of Unsafe at Any Speed asserted that during the 1960 to 1964 model years, the Corvair could go out of control at 22 mph with a turning radius of 50 degrees and front rear and tire pressures of 26 psi. His evidence came from the work of Ford engineers, who purportedly discovered this fact, when in 1959 two of them lost control of an early Corvair on the Dearborn, Michigan, test track.

            This story began, then, with conception and development of the Corvair by leading GM engineers – Edward Cole, Harry Barr, Robert Schilling, Kai Hansen, and Frank Winchell. Cole, a long-time devotee of rear-engined cars, saw a market as early as 1955 for a small, compact car, and in 1956, after rising to the head of the Chevrolet Division, put his finest engineering talent to work on the project. By 1957, the program was given a full go ahead, even though executives knew that several design obstacles had yet to be overcome.

            As early as 1953, GM executives were aware of the main problem that was associated later with the Corvairs. In that year, one of the GM’s brightest engineers, Maurice Olley, wrote a technical paper, “European Postwar Cars,” that contained a sharp critique of rear-engined automobiles with swing-axle suspension systems. He called such vehicles “a poor bargain, at least in the form in which they are at present built,” adding that they could not handle safely in wind even at moderate speeds, despite the tire pressure differential between front and rear. Olley went further, depicting the “forward fuel tank as a collision risk as is the mass of engine in the rear.”²²

            Despite these warnings, GM went ahead, with its primary aim being a target rate of return on investment. The 1960 Corvair came off the assembly line at two-thirds the weight of a standard Chevrolet, with a selling price $200 lower than standard models, but to keep costs down and profits high, compromises had to be made. Suspension stabilizers were left off, and a peculiar kind of swing axle was used that created “oversteer” or instability when deviating from a straight path. To compensate for oversteer, Corvair engineers recommended that owners maintain critical tire pressure differentials between front and rear wheels. This whole design, confessed one GM engineer, was based on lower cost, ease of assembly, ease of service, simplicity of design, and the desire to create a soft ride.

            Nader claimed that the biggest problem with the Corvair was that GM was slow to react to a known problem – the large number of accidents due to loss of control. The company was silent when questioned on the matter. And until Nader gained a wide public audience, GM did little or nothing. In sum, the moral of Nader’s story was that the corporations of the early 1960s only faced the consequences of their actions when threatened with government sanctions, expensive litigation and court judgments, or public hostility on a massive scale. Indeed, it took GM four years and 1,124,076 Corvairs to correct the problem.²³   

Ever since the Corvair product liability story corporations have been demonized by a segment of the public for their evil intentions. Yet, how wrong I was when writing the first edition of this book.  That is the problem when one focuses on one source and does not critically follow the topic start to finish!  Truthfully, the Corvair's unsavory reputation has its origins with Ford engineers wanting to protect their own compact car product during the fall of 1959.²⁴  Journalist Patrick Bedard, writing in a December, 1972 article in Car &  Driver, cited the work of Federal investigators who concluded that Ford engineers tested the car and unfairly pronounced its handling instability. In 1972, engineers working for the federal government carefully studied the Ford video and other materials and then repeated tests done a decade before.  What they found was a distortion on the part of Ford employees that started Nader along the path to his Unsafe at any Speed.   

For example, the use of Maurice Olley's 1953 SAE paper [cited above and seized upon by Nader in Unsafe at Any Speed] was circulated in an unmarked envelope sent to journalists the day after a 70-year-old Olley had given a presentation on the virtues of the rear engine automobile at the Detroit Athletic Club. Perhaps the real tragedy of the Corvair was that Nader's crusade thoroughly tarnished a car design that could have competed with future Japanese and German motor vehicles. Consequently Detroit pulled back to make cars with little downside risk. The complacency of the late 1960s and early 1970s, then, had a component that linked back to the failure of the Corvair – a radically different car that was truly innovative in several important respects.

In sum, I initially fell for the bait of telling a good but untruthful story that blamed engineers and corporate bean counters. It is the danger of any would-be scholar who follows what historian Robin Collingwood, in his The Idea of History, labeled as “scissors and paste” history.

            The convergence of forces for change took the industry by total surprise in the months immediately after the 1964 presidential election. The Johnson administration's willingness to sponsor social reform legislation, the appearance on the Washington scene of Ralph Nader, Abraham Ribicoff, and the American Trial Lawyers' Association are all part of the story. Significantly, a 1966 landmark case, Larsen vs. General Motors, marked a new trend in automobile liability decisions.²⁵ Manufacturers were now held responsible for inadequate designs that resulted in injuries due to a collision. Other cases followed Larsen, but it was this case, involving the dangerous design of the Corvair steering column, that made possible an additional recourse for consumers. With federal agencies, including the Department of Transportation, often influenced by industry, the judiciary proved to be  a second route that ultimately protected consumers.

Government Regulation: Safety and the Environment

            The Corvair was at the center of a consumer firestorm on auto safety that peaked by the end of the 1960s. In absolute numbers, traffic fatalities had risen from 34,763 in 1950, to 39,628 in 1956, to 53,041 in 1966, and 56,278 by 1972. During those years, the holidays between every Christmas and New Year resulted in the death of approximately 1,000 Americans. The rise of the interstate highway system beginning in 1956 and the marked increase in younger drivers contributed to the alarming trend. Design also played its part; along with horsepower gains, cars of the mid‑1960s often possessed poor handling characteristics and abysmal braking capabilities.

            The seminal legislative action that set in motion strict automobile safety regulations was the 1966 National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act.²⁶  Beginning in 1968, this Act mandated that seatbelts, padded visors and dashboards, safety doors and hinges, impact absorbing steering columns, dual braking systems, and standard bumper height be installed in all new autos sold in the U.S. Critics, however, argued that these measures would do little to save lives and prevent injuries. History has proved them to be somewhat correct.²⁷ Economist Sam Peltzman demonstrated in the mid-1970s that automobile safety devices resulted in “off-setting behavior” on the part of a number of motorists who engaged in more risky behavior as a result of the introduction of features that were designed to increase their chances of surviving a crash. And while seatbelts, soft interiors, and improved glass reduced driver fatalities, risky behavior increased the chance that a bicyclist or pedestrian would be killed or injured.

            With regard to the safety issues that followed, the most significant problems centered on drivers and passengers actually using their seat belts and the development and introduction of the air bag. In the former case, the federal government initially tried to force compliance with the mandate to install seat belt interlocks on all cars beginning in 1974, but due to public outcry, this measure would be repealed in 1976. However, it was federal pressure on the states to enforce the use of seat belts post-1990 that led to tough seat belt laws in which local traffic officers can ticket offenders. With the automobile becoming increasingly safe, the current issue with SUVs – high bumper height and reduced visibilities – remains to be solved. Additionally, with each decade from the 1930s forward, more emphasis was placed on drinking and drunk driving, as operator error superseded vehicle design limitations as causes of accidents. A key advance was that of the widespread use of the breathalyzer, a device that was pioneered first in Britain and only later used in traffic enforcement in the U.S.²⁸