Unsafe At Any Speed

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Exhibit featuring the book at Henry Ford Museum, Detroit

Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile by Ralph Nader, published in 1965, is a book detailing his claims of resistance by car manufacturers to the introduction of safety features, like seat belts, and their general reluctance to spend money on improving safety. It was a pioneering work of consumer advocacy, openly polemical but containing substantial references and amaterial from industry insiders. It made Nader a household name and the style is much imitated. Michael Moore cites Nader as an influence.

One of the examples of the book was General Motors' Chevrolet Corvair. The 1960–63 Corvairs had an unusual rear-engine configuration, a 63:37 rear:front weight distribution, significantly more unequal than contemporary European rear-engined cars, and a novel suspension design which was prone to "tuck under" in certain circumstances and which required drivers to maintain proper tire pressures which were outside of the tire manufacturer's recommended tolerances for the tire and with an unusually high front:rear differential (15psi front, 26psi rear, when cold; 18 psi and 30psi hot). The pressures were more critical than for most contemporaneous designs, but this was not made explicitly clear to salesepeople or owners. The pressures also rendered the tires overloaded, according to the standards laid down by the Tire and Rim Association, the relevant industry body, with two or more passengers on board. An unadvertised at-cost option #696 included uprated springs and dampers, front anti-roll bars and rear axle rebound straps to prevent tuck-under. Aftermarket kits were also available, such as the EMPI Camber Compensator, for the knowledgeable owner. The suspension design was modified for the 1964 model year, just far enough ahead of publicatio to allow its inclusion in the book; most significantly a second, outboard constant velocity joint was added to maintain a constant camber angle at the wheels. Corvairs from 1965 on were of this type and did not suffer the characteristic tuck-under crashes.

GM responded by both trying to silence Nader with a private investigation and by improving the Corvair's suspension. On March 22, 1966, GM President James Roche was forced to appear before a United States Senate subcommittee, and to apologize to Nader for the company's campaign of harassment and intimidation.

The Corvair's image was permanently tarnised and Unsafe is still often characterised as the book "about the Corvair", but this is only one of eight chapters, the theme of tire pressures chosen for comfort not safety is recurrent, and the main theme througout is the way in which the motor industry evades even well-founded and technically informed criticism.

The book also claims that the road safety mantra called the "three E's" ("Engineering, Enforcement, Education", subsequently expanded to four Es in the presidency of George H. W. Bush with the addition of "Emergency") was created to distract attention from the real problems of vehicle safety, such as the fact that some were sold with tires that could not bear the weight of a fully-loaded vehicle.

Some claim that the book still has relevance today: It denounced what Nader perceived as the political meddling of the car industry to oppose new safety features. Some see parallels in contemporary debates over the mandatory fitting of air bags, in the United States, and industry efforts by the ACEA to delay the introduction of crash tests to assess vehicle front pedestrian protection in the European Union. It has recognisable echoes in more recent consumer advocacy books such as Fat Land and High and Mighty.

Unsafe At Any Speed

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