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Edited on Thu Aug-28-03 07:00 PM by 5thGenDemocrat
Ralph Nader was nothing more than a mercenary who was paid $20,000 up front to write a book critical of the American auto industry. In the Corvair, Nader rightly found his target.
The true hero in the Corvair story was Bunkie Knudsen, manager of the Chevrolet Motor Division beginning in 1961.
John DeLorean noted to J. Patrick Wright, in Wright's 1979 book "On a Clear Day, You Can See General Motors":
"These problems (specifically, toe-in of the rear wheels during tight turns inherent in a rear-engined vehicle with a swing axle suspension) with the Corvair were well-documented inside GM's Engineering Staff long before the Corvair ever was offered for sale. Frank Winchell, now vice-president of Engineering, but then an engineer at Chevy, flipped over one of the first prototypes on the GM test track in Milford, Michigan. Others followed."
Wright goes on to mention the heated discussions between GM's engineering and sales divisions as to whether to release the vehicle for general sales. The engineers "...collectively and individually made vigorous attempts inside GM to keep the Corvair, as designed, out of production or to change the suspension system to make the car safer. One top corporate engineer told me that he showed his test results to (Chevy General Manager Ed) Cole but by then, he said, "Cole's mind was made up."
"At the very least, then, within General Motors in the late 1950s," deLorean continued, " serious questions were raised about the Corvair's safety. At the very most, there was a mountain of documented evidence that the car should not be built as it was then designed."
Cole, a production and sales type, told the engineers to "stop these objections. Get on the team, or you can find someplace else to work." And so the Corvair was released to the general public in the fall of 1959.
"The results were disastrous," DeLorean continued. "I don't think any one car before or after produced as gruesome a record on the highway as the Corvair. It was designed and promoted to appeal to the spirit and flair of young people. It was sold in part as a sports car. Young Corvair owners, therefore, were trying to bend their car around curves at high speeds and were killing themselves in alarming numbers."
"The son of Cal Werner, general manager of the Cadillac Division, was killed in a Corvair. Werner was absolutely convinced that the design defect in the car was responsible. He said so many times. The son of Cy Osborne, an executive vice-president in the '60s, was critically injured in a Corvair and suffered irreparable brain damage. Bunkie Knudson's niece was brutally injured in a Corvair. And the son of an Indianapolis Chevrolet dealer was also killed in the car. Ernie Kovacs, (DeLorean's) favorite comedian, was killed in a Corvair."
So, obviously, General Motors was well aware of the problem and of the carnage it was creating. DeLorean goes on:
"When Knudsen took over the reins of Chevrolet in 1961, he insisted that he be given corporate authorization to install a stabilizing bar in the rear to counteract the natural tendencies of the Corvair to flip off the road. The cost of the change would be about $15 a car. But the request was refused by The Fourteenth Floor as "too expensive."
"Bunkie was livid. As (DeLorean understood) it, he went to the Executive Committee and told the top officers of the corporation that, if they didn't reappraise his request and give him permission to make the Corvair safe, he was going to resign from General Motors. This threat and the fear of the bad publicity that surely would follow from Knudsen's resignation forced management's hand. They relented. Bunkie put a stabilizing bar on the Corvair for the 1964 models. The next year a completely new and safer independent suspension designed by Frank Winchell was put on the Corvair. And it became one of the safest cars on the road. But the damage done to the car's reputation by then was irreparable. Corvair sales began to decline precipitously after the waves of unfavorable publicity following Nader's book and the many lawsuits being filed across the country. Production of the Corvair was halted in 1969, four years after it was made a safe and viable car." ("On a Clear Day You Can See General Motors: John Z. DeLorean's Look Inside the Automotive Giant". J. Patrick Wright, Wright Enterprises, Grosse Pointe, Michigan, 1979, pp. 54-56).
In other words, Knudsen himself forced GM to redesign the previously "Unsafe at Any Speed" Corvair at least a year before Saint Ralph's book even came out. General Motors' top hierarchy may have been villains, but Nader was nobody's hero, either -- just a mercenary hired beforehand to do a cheap hatchet job.
Bunkie Knudsen, not Ralph Nader, was the true hero in the Corvair saga.
John
"Done to further vehicle safety"? That would have been Knudsen, but I will admit no one is better at promoting Ralph Nader than Ralph Nader. And I surely don't recall his mentioning that GM had already fixed the problem alluded to in his cheap-ass, prejudiced "book". But he sure has ridden that piece of crap for almost 40 years now.
I wouldn't piss on Saint Ralph if he was on fire.
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