TIMOTHY NOAH OCTOBER 4, 2011
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A number of readers have expressed surprise at my statement (which I attributed to the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then a Harvard professor and subsequently a senator from New York) that Ralph Nader was wrong about the Corvair. I thought the story was well known, but apparently it isn't. In his 1965 book Unsafe at Any Speed, Nader made the Corvair a case study in corporate irresponsibility. I don't know the details but the car had some sort of rollover problem. Many of the same criticisms of the Corvair were made around the same time by the journalist James Ridgeway in this magazine. GM lost the publicity war by putting a private investigator on Nader's tail. Nader found out about it and Morton Mintz and Ridgeway wrote it up in the Washington Post and the New Republic. Nader became a folk hero, GM a corporate villain, and the Corvair the leading example of Detroit's indifference to auto safety.
A few years later, the forerunner agency to the National Highway and Traffic Safety Administration--whose creation Nader had lobbied for--issued a report on the Corvair. It found that the car was not, in fact, appreciably less safe than a number of other cars on the market, including, ironically, the Volkswagon Beetle, probably the vehicle best-loved by the sort of people who tended to become Nader's Raiders. Nader attacked the NHTSA report, but an independent panel of engineers selected by the National Academy of Sciences subsequently upheld it. The conservative journalist Ralph deToledano later accused Nader of deliberately falsifying his account of the Corvair. Nader sued, the case was settled out of court, and deToledano (now deceased) reportedly lost his life savings. DeToledano will likely be remembered by history (if he's remembered at all) for two things. He re-established the principle that it's deeply unwise to mess with Ralph Nader. And, in ghost-writing the memoirs of W. Mark Felt, he managed never to find out that his collaborator was Deep Throat, Bob Woodward's secret Watergate source.
Conservatives who crow about Nader's being wrong about the Corvair miss the larger point, which is that no automobile on the market in those days was remotely safe by contemporary standards. The Corvair's safety problem was genuinely intolerable, even if there were other similarly unsafe cars on the road too. There was then, and remains today, nothing that most of us are likely to do in our everyday lives more potentially fatal than getting behind the wheel of an automobile. But it's a lot less dangerous today than it was back then. For that we have Ralph Nader to thank. And that, as best I can remember, was Moynihan's point when I attended his lecture on the subject 35 years ago.
18 comments
Then if all cars were unsafe back then - and they were by today's standards - why did Ralph Nader batten on to the Corvair? I am most definitely not a conservative but I am not exactly a fan of Nader (the 2000 presidential election had something to do with that).
- liberalref
October 4, 2011 at 11:47am
I was a fan of Naders until (like Libref) he gave us 8 bad years without remorse.
- Nusholtz
October 4, 2011 at 12:02pm
It's too bad, because Corvairs were pretty cool cars.
- subterran
October 4, 2011 at 12:12pm
The Corvair was "odd". A rear-engine, rear-wheel drive car (like the Beetle, which was also "odd"). It had a 'flat-6' air-cooled engine. It had a rear "swing axle" (like the Beetle). Under fast cornering, this design can 'spin-out'. Being rear-engine rear-wheel drive, it was unlike any other car in terms of its handling characteristics (except for the Beetle). This was enough to let Nader attack it, and base his book on it. Later NHTSA research demonstrated it was as safe as the Beetle, and a redesign of the rear suspension made it even safer than that, but by then the damage had been done.
- AllanL5
October 4, 2011 at 12:15pm
Did it get better mileage than other American cars of that period?
- stanmvp48
October 4, 2011 at 1:14pm
20 to 30 MPG, based on speed (apparently). That was very good for the day -- my 1974 VW Beetle got around 25 MPG average.
- AllanL5
October 4, 2011 at 1:23pm
Huh. Something I agree with libref on, as well as Nush. Before the 2000 election, I held Nader in pretty high esteem; I didn't want him to be President, not by a long shot, but I did vote for him in 2000, thinking he'd be an excellent contribution to the 2004 debates. Even after the 2000 election, I didn't quite hate on him. I thought blaming Bush on him was more than a little unfair. Gore officially lost Florida by 500 votes; one might just as righteously blame the butterfly ballots giving thousands of Gore votes to Buchanan for messing up Florida. Or purge of 54,000 non-felons, wrongfully identified as felons, from the Florida voter rolls. There were lots of things wrong in Florida in 2000, and Nader trying to make his case as a candidate for the Presidency wasn't one of them. However, despite all that, when Nader maintained that Bush and Gore would have acted exactly the same as President, he proved he'd gone off the deep end. When, in 2003 and 2004, he said that Gore would have invaded Iraq, he proved to me that he'd moved from fringe candidate to batshit crazy country. His ego and sense of smug superiority have long ago overcome any value he brings to our political discourse.
- janus
October 4, 2011 at 1:26pm
Excellent post, janus. The butterfly ballot design was horrible but we wouldn't even be talking about it if Ralph Nader would have urged his supporters to be sure and vote for him in New York but to vote for Al Gore in Florida. But he didn't and he is unrepentant to this day concerning his role in the 2000 election.
- liberalref
October 4, 2011 at 2:11pm
The last few weeks before an election, the newspapers all print the candidate's schedule for that day. I distinctly remember looking at Nader's schedule leading up to the 2000 election and noticing that he appeared only in state's that were considered close calls at that point; e.g., Oregon, Wash, Wisc, and Fla. I don't know how to check out this recollection and it is certainly possible I misremember; but it raised the suspicion that he wanted to tip the election to Bush.
- stanmvp48
October 4, 2011 at 2:27pm
Yes, thank Ralph Nader for George W. Bush. But thank him as well for those "We'll fight for you!" lawyer ads (Ralph convinced the courts that it was "restraint of trade" to discourage self-promotion by professionals). We architects thank him daily for our pitiful fees, a direct outcome of the same ruling. I cannot understand the "free ride" continually given to this stiff-necked, unrepentant, reckless egomaniac.
- billhub
October 4, 2011 at 2:44pm
And former contributor to right wing magazines who somehow amassed a fortune in a world in which everyone is corrupt except him.
- stanmvp48
October 4, 2011 at 2:59pm
As best I recall all these years later, "Unsafe At Any Speed" was comprised of a single chapter directly alleging Corvair shortcomings and the remainder of the book was leigal eagle supposition. For the mechanically inclined who also are under age 40, the German Volkswagen arrived in the USA in the late 1950s with a pair of swing axles at the rear, on either side of the engine-transmission. The 1930s engineering of it was adequate for normal driving, but the tilt of rear wheels when an axle swung to full downward extension of the rear suspension meant poor tire contact. The outer wheel then tended to "tuck under" while rounding a turn too briskly, spinning the rear of the tail-weighted car. (At the time, race car drivers exploited the tendency on all sorts of rear-engine race cars, which had much more sophisticated, much more costly rear suspension configurations. Dirt track racing typifies it.) Being less costly to manufacture was vital for the post-War Germans, striving to regain financial stability with sales to Americans. General Motors was huge and extravagantly innovative in that era, inventing and upgrading everything from train coaches to earth movers. Its Chevrolet division was the darling of the V-8 engine crowd and its contest with Ford to develop a smaller, more fuel efficient response to the nascent fuel-sipping import cars, notably VW, induced it to unveil a rear-engine car much lower than VW. But it differed from Ford Falcon's plain vanilla front-engine, solid rear axle behind driveshaft configuration by employing the same swing axle either side of engine-transmission as VW. But the Corvair lacked the devotee adulation of the VW Beetle owners, and when its sudden loss of cornering traction reared up and scared some drivers, the legal vultures came to circle overhead, ready to land beside any Corvair accident to pick at the remains. "Unsafe At Any Speed" legitimized court suits against Chevrolet for the design shortcomings of the Corvair. Ralph Nader became a fount of car safety inspiration for years afterwards. In combination with fuel economy imperatives occasioned by Arabs hiking the price of crude oil in the 1970s, American cars became safer, car designers more safety conscious and more gas-sipping aware. After 1969, they did it without any new model of Corvair, which graduated to a superior rear suspension in 1965. An independently configured pair of rea wheels retaining full tire contact when rounding corners briskly.
- lespin
October 4, 2011 at 3:19pm
Oh please, give Nader's sin of running in 2000 a rest. The race was so close that any stray breeze could have won the Electoral College for Gore. If you're going to blame someone or something, blame that stupid butterfly ballot.
- Timothy Noah
October 4, 2011 at 4:55pm
Or blame Gore's bone stupid legal strategy in the recount fight. "Let's have a recount, but only in precincts where the undervote is predicted to be two-to-one in my favor. THAT won't look biassed to anyone..."
- AaronW
October 4, 2011 at 6:56pm
I believe that Ralph Nader published some early articles in the anti-Semitic American Mercury in March of 1960. He claims that he didn't know that it was antisemitic which harder to believe than Bill Clinton's "I didn't have sex with that woman."
- arnon
October 4, 2011 at 7:16pm
Noah's piece here is pretty good and I would summarize it as this: Just because Nader's Crazy, doesn't mean he wasn't right. Longer post to follow.
- CRS9TNR
October 4, 2011 at 11:05pm
From Detroit: When I broke into the Automotve Engineering business as a young man I had made a disparaging remark about Ralph Nader and was corrected by a much older, very conservative Engineer. He told me that Ralph Nader had done a great thing. What Nader had figured out was that automakers had no reference or database of information on how to design safe cars. There are so many competing claims and requirements that it is almost impossible to know what to do. The thickness of the metal, where it is fastened, how it bends, these things have big impacts on safety, but we did not know how to evaluate these. Areas like Brakes, Seating, Steering were vastly improved once NHTSA wrote the rule book. If you remember the cars of the 1960's they didn't have seat belts, barely had power brakes, and turned like a barge. What's surprising is that no one else saw this opportunity but Nader. But the Nader story really isn't about cars or safety. This was a clash between the corporate world represented by General Motors, and the Government. GM didn't really do anything wrong investigating Nader. But becuase Nader had testified before Congress on Auto Safety, getting support from Bobby Kennedy, he had Congressional Protections. GM's actions were tampering and intimidating a Federal Witness. You just do do that. TNR certainly played a part. It was David Cort's blistering attack on the American Auto industry as part of his review of 'Unsafe at Any Speed' that caught the attention of Washington. James Ridgeway's reporting the GM Shenannigans in trailing and trying to entrap Nader that sealed GM's fate. As many suspected, even after his sucess in establishing NHTSA and getting safety standards adopted, Nader Morphed again. By the early 1970's he was arguing for pollution standards and civil rights in hiring. Nader's fight over safety was just his first bitch. He was not going to be happy until he was running the whole show. Nader in his later years has cemented his cranky reputation and he may well be crazy. Too busy to Marry, and never driving, his eccentricities start to overwhelm his accomplishments. Picking up Pat Buchanan's Flag to run for President, and then later following Leonard Peltier as The Peace & Freedom Candidate confirms what a lot of us already knew. Nader beleives his crazier ideas and will not let any honorable contradictions stand in the way. As the old Engineer told me at the time, he may be crazy, but that doesn't mean he was wrong.
- CRS9TNR
October 4, 2011 at 11:23pm
Who knew. So this is how I put my mom's VW into a ditch, got into huge trouble with my Dad, who didn't buy that my mom was driving, so I was grounded for about 100 years and never did learn to manage a stick shift; and all of this could have been avoided if Ralph Nader had spoken out about the right car. Ralph Nader, I am now really mad at you! I mean besides putting Dubya in the White House, dang. You should have seen the poor Bug, it was dent city and the next car I drove, about 5 years later, had a zip code. I put her into a ditch also, twice:( That was in Florida too, come to think of it; could this be mere coincidence? I demand an investigation!
- Sophia
October 5, 2011 at 3:41am