Unsafe At Any Speed
Unsafe At Any Speed: The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile was the book that launched Ralph Nader to national prominence. In 1965, before many of us in the Livable Streets movement were even born, Ralph published this anti-car, pro-pedestrian screed that would help change the auto industry, and may have helped to save countless lives of both drivers and pedestrians in the process.
I was reminded of Nader’s role in trying to clean up the auto industry when I saw his appearance on the best news show in the world, where he gave some background on the auto bailout. I decided to look up his book, Unsafe At Any Speed, but couldn’t find the text free, online - not even a way to search parts of it, as you can with some books on Amazon and Google Book Search - so I finally gave in and went to the library. I found it, skimmed it, took some notes — it’s awesome — an absolutely brutal take-down of an absolutely brutal industry.
Keep in mind that the excerpts that follow are from a book published over 40 years ago. This fact alone is incredible when we look at the state of the industry today and see how much damage the auto industry has done over the decades since Ralph first started alerting the public to the brutal mix of money and politics and power from the auto industry executives and lobbyists to the politicians in Washington, DC and around the U.S.
Ralph Nader, to me, represents one of the earliest heros of the Livable Streets movement.
On the deaths caused by the automobile — p. 87:
But in 1951, the Air Force made a simple statistical comparison which revealed that it was losing more men–dead and injured–in automobile accidents than in combat in Korea.
On the preference for GM to style their cars aggressively and dangerously at the expense of humans — p. 222:
In the October 1964 issue of Automotive Industries, Mr. Bordinat had approvingly described the Lincoln Continental’s flush-mounted parking light in the “leading edges of the blade-like front fenders.”
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The callousness of the stylists about the effects of their creations on pedestrians is seen clearly in the ase of William Mitchell, chief stylist at General Motors and the principal creator of the Cadillac tail fin. This sharp, rising fin was first introduced in the late forties, soaring in height and prominence each year until it reached a grotesque peak in 1959 and gradually declining thereafter until it was finally eliminated in the 1966 models.
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His two favorite saying are, “Seeing is selling,” and “The shape of things shape man.”
The matter of Cadillac tail fins, however, transcends the visual world of Mr. Mitchell. Fins have been felt as well as seen, and felt fatally when not seen. In ways that should have been anticipated by Mr. Mitchell, these fins have “shaped” man.
In the year of its greatest height, the Cadillac fin bore an uncanny resemblance to the tail of the stegosaurus, a dinosaur that had two sharp rearward-projecting horns on each side of the tail. In 1964 a California motorcycle driver learned the dangers of the Cadillac tail fin. The cyclist was following a heavy line of traffic on the freeway going toward Newport Harbor in Santa Ana. As the four-lane road narrowed to two lanes, the confusion of highway construction and the swerving of vehicles in the merging traffic led to the Cadillac’s sudden stop. The motorcyclist was boxed in and was unable to turn aside. He hit the rear bumper of the car at a speed of about twenty miles per hour, and was hurled into the tail fin, which pierced his body below the heart and cut him all the way down to the thigh bone in a large circular gash. Both fin and man survived this encounter.
The same was not true in the case of nine-year-old Peggy Swan. On September 29, 1963, she was riding her bicycle near her home in Kensington, Maryland. Coming down Kensington Boulevard she bumped into a parked car in a typical childhood accident. But the car was a 1962 Cadillac, and she hit the tail fin, which ripped into her body below the throat. She died at Holy Cross Hospital a few hours later of thoracic hemorrhage.
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“…The ability of the sharp and pointed tail fins to cause injury when they contact a pedestrian is visually apparent.” Wakeland gave details of two recent fatal cases that had come to his attention. In one instance, an old woman in New York City had been struck by a Cadillac which was rolling slowly backward after its power brakes failed. The blow of the tail fin had killed her. In the other case, a thirteen-year-old Chicago boy, trying to catch a fly ball on a summer day in 1961, had run into a 1961 Cadillac fin, which pierced his heart.
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Recent models avoid these particular ornament designs, not for pedestrian safety but to conform to the new “clean look” that is the trademark of current styling.
Systematic engineering design of the vehicle could minimize or prevent many pedestrian injuries. The majority of pedestrian-vehicle collisions produce injuries, not fatalities. Most of these collisions occur at impact speed of under twenty-five miles per hour, and New York City data show that in fatality cases about twenty-five percent of the collisions occurred when the vehicles involved were moving at speeds below fourteen miles per hour. It seems quite obvious that the external design and not just the speed of the automobile contributes greatly to the severity of the injuries inflicted on the pedestrian. Yet the external design is so totally under the unfettered control of the stylist that no engineer employed by the automobile industry has ever delivered a technical paper concerning pedestrian collision. Nor have the automobile companies made any public mention of any crash testing or engineering safety research on the problem.
But two papers do exist in the technical literature, one by Henry Wakeland and the other by a group of engineers at the University of California in Los Angeles.
Nader did all this stuff back in the day. We should take up the cause today. The auto industry is not going to go quietly, with so many of the American workers - up to 15% or so - somehow dependent on the auto industry for jobs. Still, we have to continue to make it as expensive as possible for the industry to continue to harm us.
And we should not restrict our efforts to making just cars and buses and trucks safer for pedestrians and cyclists, but trains and trams and streetcars and anything and everything else that threatens us.
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