Speaker 1: Pushkin. Hey Eddie here, before we get started, I wanted
Speaker 1: you to know that you can listen to Car Show
Speaker 1: ad free by becoming a Pushkin Plus subscriber. You'll also
Speaker 1: get access to detours, bonus episodes of Car Show, where
Speaker 1: we go for extended drives, play outtakes, and more. Fine
Speaker 1: Pushkin Plus on the Car Show page in Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 1: or at pushkin dot Fm. Is a fun car for
Speaker 1: fun lovers for car lovers. Corvet a most unusual car
Speaker 1: for people who enjoy the unusual. A most unusual car. Indeed,
Speaker 1: the nineteen sixty Chevrolet Corvet didn't look like you're tipical
Speaker 1: General Motors car of the era. Its bodywork was naked
Speaker 1: of tailfins and excess chrome. It's styling was restrained. It
Speaker 1: had a slim wraparound belt line and subtle body surfacing.
Speaker 1: And that's just the outside. The Corvette was unusual from
Speaker 1: top to bottom, from stem to stern, and it was
Speaker 1: poised to put General Motors and maybe the whole American
Speaker 1: car business on a more sophisticated, driver oriented path. It
Speaker 1: was the vehicle GM would send into battle with the
Speaker 1: European cars just starting to hit our shores in the
Speaker 1: late nineteen fifties and early sixties. You know it's funny,
Speaker 1: is this doesn't look like your typical American sixties car,
Speaker 1: does it. There's no chrome everywhere. It's got this beautiful
Speaker 1: like ridge to the side. It's almost like a modern
Speaker 1: car the way you've got this little bone line and
Speaker 1: the bodywork tucks under, super sophisticated for the era, real restraint.
Speaker 1: It's a cool face. It looks very European. You know,
Speaker 1: it does not look American at all. Pretty nice size interior. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you can make out ease here in the car. The
Speaker 1: Chevrolet Corvet was one of the most consequential cars of
Speaker 1: all time, but maybe not for the reason you think.
Speaker 1: It wasn't because the car was America's first real attempt
Speaker 1: to beat back the imports. It wasn't even because it
Speaker 1: became the target of a huge safety crusade, one we'll
Speaker 1: talk about later in the episode. The Corvet was important
Speaker 1: because it represents a fork in the road of human accountability.
Speaker 1: My name is Eddie Alterman, and I've been editing car
Speaker 1: magazines since I was in short pants. This is Car Show,
Speaker 1: my pod cast about why we drive what we drive.
Speaker 1: The Corvet takes us to an important moment. The question
Speaker 1: it posed was Kenny Carmaker trust its customers to learn
Speaker 1: how to handle and maintain an unconventional automobile or must
Speaker 1: it design for the lowest level of skill and involvement?
Speaker 1: And what does that mean for those of us who
Speaker 1: love to drive? Right? Yeah? So well this thing is
Speaker 1: great love. I love enamel paint. I don't know how
Speaker 1: old the paint it actually is. When I got it,
Speaker 1: it was, I guess just been painted or something. I'm
Speaker 1: in a parking lot in Encino, California, with Brian Morris
Speaker 1: and his light yellow nineteen sixty three Corvet convertible. Where
Speaker 1: is now? What do you want to do? Start the car?
Speaker 1: Probably okay, just turn that to the ride. A vuncular,
Speaker 1: self deprecating and clad in a light yellow shirt and
Speaker 1: pants to match the car, Brian drove the couple hours
Speaker 1: to La from Camarillo to let us drive his Corvet.
Speaker 1: Brian bought this car from a family friend. He'd always
Speaker 1: wanted a Corvet convertible because his fraternity brother had a
Speaker 1: yellow one in nineteen sixty six. Brian is convinced the
Speaker 1: car helped his friend woo his future wife and just
Speaker 1: looking at it, you can see why this was the
Speaker 1: kind of car a dashing ivy leaguer would use to
Speaker 1: cruise Princeton at night. No, this has lovely light steering,
Speaker 1: rides great. It's really kind of relaxing to drive. I
Speaker 1: would say I had put a word to it. I
Speaker 1: think it's got enough power. I'd say, the faster you go,
Speaker 1: the easier it is draft interesting. I mean, we're going
Speaker 1: fifty five thousand an hour. It feels really straight, stable, easy,
Speaker 1: and we're not doing any extreme maneuvers. But it's so
Speaker 1: mild manner. That was lovely. This sounds great. Well, you
Speaker 1: know what this is. This is a go get ice
Speaker 1: cream car, sleek trim, not like those other hulking jock
Speaker 1: cars the jock kids drove. This was the American car
Speaker 1: for the American sophisticate, the person who smoked Nat Sherman cigarettes,
Speaker 1: who read the New Yorker, who wore White Bucks, Who
Speaker 1: was General Motors answer to the VW's Reyna and Alpha
Speaker 1: Romeo's rapidly infiltrating America. A little context is important here.
Speaker 1: Up until this point, General Motors, the parent corporation of Chevrolet,
Speaker 1: was the apple of mid century America. Utterly dominant, essential
Speaker 1: to our way of life. It had an apparent monopoly
Speaker 1: on good ideas and seemed capable of achieving the impossible.
Speaker 1: Post World War Two, GM led the industry with an
Speaker 1: astonishing fifty percent share of the car market. Its mid
Speaker 1: century run was the stuff of epics. GM invented the
Speaker 1: automotive design department. It thought harder and better about self
Speaker 1: driving cars back in nineteen fifty eight than most autonomous
Speaker 1: car hucksters do today. It sent cars to the moon
Speaker 1: on Apollo rockets. It built a temple to itself in Warren, Michigan,
Speaker 1: designed by Aero Saarinen, the same guy who built a
Speaker 1: TWA terminal at JFK and the Gateway arch in Saint Louis.
Speaker 1: GM made trucks, buses, locomotives, home appliances, you name it,
Speaker 1: and of course cars, sleek corvettes, extravagant Cadillac Eldorado's chrome
Speaker 1: toothed Buick roadmasters. It was oz, but substantial headwinds buffeted
Speaker 1: its mid century progress. This administration will continue to undertake
Speaker 1: any maker dot Willard sis healthy economic recovery. At the
Speaker 1: start of Eisenhower's second presidential term, a recession had many
Speaker 1: car buyers reconsidering their lane filling tailfin barges. With their
Speaker 1: acres of chrome, European cars like vwzmg's presented new options
Speaker 1: for the sporty set or the frugally minded Jeffersonian. In
Speaker 1: nineteen fifty four, only about twenty thousand Americans bought small
Speaker 1: European cars. Four years later that number was twenty times higher,
Speaker 1: almost ten percent of the car market. Critically, the Big
Speaker 1: Three had no small Sunan offerings at that time. They
Speaker 1: only made them in two sizes back then large and
Speaker 1: extra large. Enter the Corvee. It was what happened when
Speaker 1: the mightiest car company on Earth set its mind to downsizing.
Speaker 1: The Corvee would fuse the engineering ingenuity of those small
Speaker 1: European cars to the comfort of a Chevrolet. Its name
Speaker 1: revealed GM's intentions. Corvee would have the verve of a
Speaker 1: Corvette and the solidity of a bell Air. But despite
Speaker 1: the portmanteau, Corvet was unlike anything GM had made before,
Speaker 1: from its engine type to its placement in the car,
Speaker 1: from its suspension to the design of its bodywork. It
Speaker 1: was a car to beat the Europeans at their own
Speaker 1: fencing match, using European engineering techniques and sense of style
Speaker 1: against them. Underneath its seductive lagdolce vit to bodywork was
Speaker 1: what automotive engineers call a rear rear layout. It's very
Speaker 1: rarely deployed. It means an engine in the rear of
Speaker 1: the car after the rear axle, with power routed to
Speaker 1: the rear wheels. It sounds odd as it's the complete
Speaker 1: inverse of the front wheel drive front engine sedan norm
Speaker 1: we know today, but it's a great formula for a
Speaker 1: sporting machine. The original VW Beetle had this layout and
Speaker 1: gifted it to the Porsche three fifty six, arguably the
Speaker 1: best sports car of its day. Putting the engine in
Speaker 1: the back of a rear drive car meant that the
Speaker 1: majority of the mass was over the driven wheels, which
Speaker 1: gave the car superb traction when accelerating, but having all
Speaker 1: that mass back there demanded attention when breaking hard or
Speaker 1: taking evasive action. And then there was the car's swing axele,
Speaker 1: one of the earliest and most basic independent rear suspension designs,
Speaker 1: which further complicated things. Unlike every car today, a swing
Speaker 1: axle lacks an outboard hue joint, where each axle meets
Speaker 1: the wheel hub, so as the wheels move up and down,
Speaker 1: like when you take a corner hard, the hub's position
Speaker 1: is fixed. It can't pivot to keep the tires alignment
Speaker 1: consistent to the road. This can upset the car's balanced,
Speaker 1: but it is not terribly hard to control. Lots of
Speaker 1: cars from the thirties through the fifties had swing axles.
Speaker 1: Back with Brian Morris in the Corvet were applying in
Speaker 1: the concept. So when you're exercising the car and you're
Speaker 1: unloading the rear and there's less weight on the rear,
Speaker 1: and the rear of it lifts up, like if you're
Speaker 1: charging into a turn really hot and you've got the
Speaker 1: front end kind of planted in, the back end lifts up.
Speaker 1: Swing axles will droop down. They sort of tuck under,
Speaker 1: and it can take you by surprise if you're not
Speaker 1: ready for it. But you know, in every car I've
Speaker 1: driven with swing axles, the car really tells you what
Speaker 1: it's doing. It doesn't come as a surprise. And what
Speaker 1: you do in that situation, and this is really counterintuitive,
Speaker 1: you have to give it more gas, not less, like
Speaker 1: in a regular car. Things get squirrely you just lift
Speaker 1: off the gas pedal and everything rights itself. But in
Speaker 1: a car with swing axles and a rear engine, you
Speaker 1: need to settle the rear by accelerating and shifting a
Speaker 1: load of the thing and the mass backwards so the
Speaker 1: wheels could pull out of right exactly right. So to
Speaker 1: avoid the droop, you have to do something that feels unnatural.
Speaker 1: But once you learn how to drive a car with
Speaker 1: those kinds of axels, like a beetle or a three
Speaker 1: fifty six or a going it's really fun and it's natural.
Speaker 1: It's a skill that you have to develop. But once
Speaker 1: you do, it's pretty gratifying to drive a car like this.
Speaker 1: But if you didn't develop those skills, well, that's where
Speaker 1: the trouble came in the acquire Ralph Nader, a legal
Speaker 1: advisor to the United States Senate Inquiry, has just published
Speaker 1: a book called Unsafe at Any Speed. In an interview
Speaker 1: with Warner Troyer, Ralph Nader took aim at the corveer
Speaker 1: in Unsafe at Any Speech, alleging that GM withheld critical
Speaker 1: safety equipment in the engineering of the car. You say
Speaker 1: that the cor of air for three or four years, yes,
Speaker 1: was an unsafe vehicle to drive. Isn't that a pretty
Speaker 1: wild exaggeration. No. I think the core are models nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty to sixty three, and to some extent sixty four
Speaker 1: had a rear axle which is called technically a swing
Speaker 1: axle rear suspension system which, under certain predictable conditions of driving,
Speaker 1: the car would suddenly unexpectedly go out of control. He
Speaker 1: thought GM should have put an anti roll bar in
Speaker 1: the rear suspension to tame the car's handling. His argument
Speaker 1: was based on some one hundred lawsuits against GM filed
Speaker 1: by drivers who lost control of the car more than
Speaker 1: a statistical anomaly. GM would settle most of these suits
Speaker 1: out of court. In his book, Nader did not hold
Speaker 1: back from Unsafe's first sentence. Nader was often running for
Speaker 1: over half a century. He wrote, the automobile has brought death, injury,
Speaker 1: and the most inestimable sorrow and deprivation to millions of people.
Speaker 1: Ralph Nader was not a fun lover like our friend
Speaker 1: Brian Morris with a yellow corvet or your humble narrator.
Speaker 1: Nader was all business. He went to Princeton for undergrad
Speaker 1: and then Harvard Law School. After that, his best friends
Speaker 1: were books. He did not play Hackey Sack in the quad,
Speaker 1: nor did he rip Narley bongtoakes with the brost Sigma Kai.
Speaker 1: I would say he was monk like, but he was
Speaker 1: way more self righteous than any monk. Either it's cheer,
Speaker 1: callousness or indifference, or they don't bother to find out
Speaker 1: how they're card behave. Nater took aim at the largest
Speaker 1: corporation in the world, arguing that the corvet was a lethal,
Speaker 1: unpredictable viper of a car ready to bite without provocation.
Speaker 1: That's simply not true. The car could be a handful,
Speaker 1: but it was predictable if you understood how it worked,
Speaker 1: also if you understood how to maintain it. In the
Speaker 1: corverre's case, maintaining balancing control depended a lot on setting
Speaker 1: the tire pressures properly. It required a conscientious approach to
Speaker 1: vehicle maintenance. But gas station attendance at the time had
Speaker 1: a saying twenty four pounds all around and did not
Speaker 1: care about keeping the corvert's tires at the right inflations.
Speaker 1: Those inflations, if we're getting technical, were eighteen pounds per
Speaker 1: square inch in front to give the tire a fatter
Speaker 1: footprint and thirty pounds of pressure at the rear. Even
Speaker 1: more stability he would be afforded by an anti roll
Speaker 1: bar in the chassis, which GM would put in the
Speaker 1: second generation of the car in nineteen sixty five. You
Speaker 1: had to take care of it. Most people did not.
Speaker 1: Though the Corvee was an above average car aimed at
Speaker 1: an above average driver, that's not necessarily who ended up
Speaker 1: buying it. Plenty of people in the nineteen sixties looking
Speaker 1: for a small, affordable sedan walked into a Chevrolet dealership
Speaker 1: and drove out in a corvee. The buyer for the
Speaker 1: car was probably more of a small sedan buyer, and
Speaker 1: so you had to apply that kind of sports car
Speaker 1: care to this car, which a lot of them probably
Speaker 1: didn't do. So a buyer of a three fifty six
Speaker 1: knows what he or she is getting into a little
Speaker 1: bit more, whereas maybe the buyer of the corvee was like, Oh,
Speaker 1: it's just like you know, the bell Air, except a
Speaker 1: little bit smaller, getting sportier, and I can afford it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I can afford it, and you know, I don't
Speaker 1: have to buy one of those imports. I think General
Speaker 1: Motors was saying we're just as good as those sporting
Speaker 1: imports from Germany, and we're gonna create a car that
Speaker 1: might challenge you a little bit. And I don't know
Speaker 1: if the average buyer was prepared for it. But also,
Speaker 1: there's nothing diabolical or crazy about this card. It's comfortable,
Speaker 1: you know, cor this thing tracks great. You know when
Speaker 1: in the Blues Brothers when Jake and Ellwood go into
Speaker 1: Ray Charles Ponshaw and need to buy some instruments, and
Speaker 1: you don't remember that I don't, and he quotes in
Speaker 1: this ridiculous price on a Rhodes piano, and he goes,
Speaker 1: that's crazy for this thing. It's all beat up, and
Speaker 1: Charles goes, excuse me, I don't think there's anything wrong
Speaker 1: with the action on this piano. And that's kind of
Speaker 1: how I feel about this. Whether all of this, it's great.
Speaker 1: He just got an auto to play it, He got
Speaker 1: an aw to drive it. Cheated death yet again, pocket
Speaker 1: signing nator Nader would have been unconvinced and unsafe at
Speaker 1: any speed. He suggests that the issue was an owner
Speaker 1: maintenance or driving behavior. The issue was that Chevrolet was
Speaker 1: too cheap that it chose to forego an anti roll
Speaker 1: bar in the rear suspension because it added cost. Nader wrote,
Speaker 1: an automobile representing a reduction of one thousand, three hundred
Speaker 1: and thirty two pounds of material, or more than one
Speaker 1: third the weight of a standard nineteen sixty Chevrolet that
Speaker 1: could sell for only about two hundred dollars less than
Speaker 1: standard models, would constitute a marvel of production cost efficiency
Speaker 1: and sales ingenuity. If the Corvee was such a miracle
Speaker 1: of profitability with so much economic headroom, why would GM
Speaker 1: care about the cost of adding a slim piece of
Speaker 1: metal to the rear end. Doesn't make a lot of sense.
Speaker 1: By the time Nater's book came out in nineteen sixty five,
Speaker 1: the Corvee had already evolved from swing axles to a
Speaker 1: more advanced and stable type of independent rear suspension. It
Speaker 1: was an admission on GM's part that the Corvee had
Speaker 1: room for improvement. Though a new suspension is a big alteration,
Speaker 1: changes are common in the car industry, and all new
Speaker 1: model comes out, its flaws are cataloged by the press
Speaker 1: and owners, and the company works to modify it. It
Speaker 1: usually takes a few years. Though he wrote damningly that
Speaker 1: GM diluted its engineering standards for the Corvet. Nater's book
Speaker 1: did not prompt any changes to the car. The ebbs
Speaker 1: and flows of the car development process did. That. Nater's
Speaker 1: book came out after GM made the change. He himself
Speaker 1: noted in the very first chapter that GM had made
Speaker 1: these upgrades. Still, despite taking aim at the largest and
Speaker 1: richest corporation in America, the book did not make much noise,
Speaker 1: at least initially, but it worried GM. The corporation viewed
Speaker 1: it as an attack on its sterling reputation, and they
Speaker 1: sought to attack Nater in kind. When it became known
Speaker 1: that GM had Nater tailed by private investigators, the story
Speaker 1: erupted and the book got noticed, another great moment in
Speaker 1: the history of unintended sequences. In the wake of the book,
Speaker 1: sales of the re engineered Corvete without the swing axle collapsed.
Speaker 1: In three years, GM went from selling more than two
Speaker 1: hundred thousand Corveres a year to fewer than fifteen thousand,
Speaker 1: even as GM modified the car for greater stability. Nater
Speaker 1: gets all the credit for this precipitous drop in sales,
Speaker 1: but it is also true that the Ford Mustang did
Speaker 1: as much as natter to kill the unconventional little Chevy stampede,
Speaker 1: a stampede of one hundred thousand Mustangs Ford Mustang in
Speaker 1: less than four months. The board Mustang has become the
Speaker 1: most talked about, most exciting and fasto selling you've gotten
Speaker 1: over twenty years. It seems like just about everyone wants one.
Speaker 1: It was the Mustang, after all, that made small American
Speaker 1: cars sexied. Five must they call it them two blacktoos.
Speaker 1: It seats two upfront and when you pull down the
Speaker 1: two bag seats, and there's room for a beach umbrella,
Speaker 1: third board and a pheasant underglass. Henry's become quite a gourmet.
Speaker 1: So I try to have everything ready for him when
Speaker 1: he gets here. Why don't you change your nfe Ford
Speaker 1: pitched the staying down the middle of the strike zone
Speaker 1: at the largest, best educated, and most affluent generation America
Speaker 1: had ever seen, Baby Boomers. It's arrival in nineteen sixty
Speaker 1: four coincided with the boomer's first driving years. If the
Speaker 1: Ford Model T mobilized the New America, then the Ford
Speaker 1: Mustang mobilized a new American entity, the teenager with the
Speaker 1: affordable and fun Mustang out on the street. The Corvet
Speaker 1: was doomed anyway. Still, the car in the book are
Speaker 1: for ever linked. Nater made it so that Corvet's very
Speaker 1: name conjureous disaster. It is GM's analog to Ford's Edsel,
Speaker 1: And with the book, Nator basically invented what we now
Speaker 1: know as consumer advocacy. As the saying goes, consumer advocacy
Speaker 1: focuses on fighting baths rather than producing goods. It is
Speaker 1: a movement that has given us cleaner air, cleaner water,
Speaker 1: and more temperate McDonald's coffee. Unsafe at Any Speed launched
Speaker 1: a movement. It was the immediate precursor to the establishment
Speaker 1: of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and other government
Speaker 1: oversight agencies. Cars, of course, are safer now too. In
Speaker 1: the mid sixties, there were roughly five road fatalities for
Speaker 1: every one hundred million miles driven. Today it's roughly one
Speaker 1: fatality over that same distance and eighty percent improvement. That's
Speaker 1: incredible progress, and I find it hard to argue that
Speaker 1: Nader's book didn't bring the issue into the mainstream. But
Speaker 1: there's one number I can't quite get past. We'll talk
Speaker 1: about it after the break, Hey, listeners, while I've got
Speaker 1: you for a second. I want to talk to you
Speaker 1: about a podcast I've been enjoying that I think you
Speaker 1: might like to It's called Patented, and it's all about
Speaker 1: history's most impactful inventions, from the airplane to the humble
Speaker 1: cup of coffee, and the inventors who claimed these ideas
Speaker 1: as their own. The history of inventions is full of myths,
Speaker 1: stories of Eureka moments and genius loan inventors, but this
Speaker 1: reality is often a lot more complicated and interesting. Patented
Speaker 1: is hosted by Dallas Campbell, a science presenter who loves
Speaker 1: to try to get to the bottom of these messy stories.
Speaker 1: They have episodes on everything from how corn flakes were
Speaker 1: created on a foundation of some pretty questionable science, why
Speaker 1: monks were the most inventive minds of the Middle Ages,
Speaker 1: and who should really get credit for the first motion
Speaker 1: picture spoiler it's not Thomas Edison. Coming up. They have
Speaker 1: episodes on cryonics, contactless payment, and plastic surgery. So if
Speaker 1: any of that sounds up your ally, you can subscribe
Speaker 1: to Patented History of Inventions from our friends over at
Speaker 1: History hit on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 1: Nater's advocacy in the nineteen sixties brought about a new
Speaker 1: awareness around automotive safety. But there's one statistic that nags
Speaker 1: at me. Before Nater entered the scene, roughly forty thousand
Speaker 1: people died per year in car collisions. Today, forty thousand
Speaker 1: people per years still die in car collisions. Sure, the
Speaker 1: population is larger, so the proportion of deaths is down,
Speaker 1: and fatalities per mile is a fraction of what it was.
Speaker 1: But forty thousand deaths is still forty thousand deaths. That's
Speaker 1: forty thousand real people, mothers, daughters, sons, and fathers. This
Speaker 1: in an age of air bags, passenger safety cells, crumple zones,
Speaker 1: blind spot warnings, and a host of other safety innovations
Speaker 1: that didn't exist sixty five years ago. With all the
Speaker 1: advances in automotive and road safety in those intervening six decades,
Speaker 1: you think that that number would be much much lower.
Speaker 1: So why is it still so high. Well, one theory
Speaker 1: is that, in the wake of nature, we stopped focusing
Speaker 1: on driver proficiency and started letting the car assume responsibility
Speaker 1: for our safety. Kenneth White wrote a book about that shift,
Speaker 1: in the Sack of Detroit. He tells us how it
Speaker 1: played out. So it wasn't until the twenties when everybody
Speaker 1: had a car and people were using cars a lot
Speaker 1: more and the roads were better and they were driving
Speaker 1: faster and driving off them faster. That's when traffic safety
Speaker 1: became more of an issue. And so Herbert Hoover has
Speaker 1: this big confab in the nineteen twenties where he invites
Speaker 1: the industry, he invites health authorities, he invites municipal and
Speaker 1: state governments and said, you know, we got to do
Speaker 1: something about it. Let's pull together all the information we
Speaker 1: have about auto safety and come up with a general
Speaker 1: approach to the problem. And that's where the Tripoli approach
Speaker 1: came from. Triple E. It stands for education, engineering, and enforcement.
Speaker 1: Education was about making sure people knew that cars were
Speaker 1: dangerous and that they knew how to drive, how to
Speaker 1: share the road, and how to maintain their vehicles. Engineering
Speaker 1: concerned road design and ensuring that highways were properly marked
Speaker 1: and had good sight lines and grading. This led to
Speaker 1: the divided highway and much greater levels of highway safety.
Speaker 1: An enforcement well you know what that means. But while
Speaker 1: the proportion of deaths relative to driven miles was going down,
Speaker 1: a huge number of people were still dying in car crashes.
Speaker 1: It was the medical community that first said, you know,
Speaker 1: maybe triple E isn't everything here. Maybe there's something else
Speaker 1: we can do to keep people from getting smashed to
Speaker 1: pieces in their automobiles. They were more concerned with what
Speaker 1: was called the second collision, which was after the bad
Speaker 1: thing on the road had happened, and then driver or
Speaker 1: passenger hits the dashboard or goes flying out of the vehicle,
Speaker 1: and that's where the whole second collision theory, which was
Speaker 1: taken as an alternative to the triple East school, came
Speaker 1: into play. In the nineteen fifties. Nader was a second
Speaker 1: collision man. He thought the car was the problem, not
Speaker 1: the driver. In Unsafe, he called the Corvette an American
Speaker 1: car that abruptly decides to do the driving for the driver.
Speaker 1: The idea that we had to concentrate now on car
Speaker 1: interiors as the leading factor in human carnage was appealing
Speaker 1: to the men folks, but it was also appealing to
Speaker 1: the tort industry in the US in the fifties, the
Speaker 1: tort industry saw an opportunity to use second collision theory
Speaker 1: to argue that all traffic accidents were the responsibility of carmakers,
Speaker 1: because if carmakers could make a crashproof car, and surely
Speaker 1: to God, carmakers, being big and rich and smart and
Speaker 1: you know, the world's best engineers, knew how to make
Speaker 1: a crashproof car. If they could make a crashproof car
Speaker 1: and weren't making a crashproof car, they were liable for
Speaker 1: all of those deaths on the road. They have failed
Speaker 1: to give people the degree of safety to which they
Speaker 1: were entitled. GM had faith in the customer. They figured
Speaker 1: that drivers could play up to the Corvette in much
Speaker 1: the way an average tennis player improves when hitting with
Speaker 1: a great one. Nader argued that that trust was misplaced.
Speaker 1: He thought that people shouldn't have to adapt to the car,
Speaker 1: and shouldn't have to maintain awareness or tire pressures to
Speaker 1: keep the car shiny side up. It was the corporation's
Speaker 1: responsibility to protect us from the effects of our own incompetence.
Speaker 1: But the irony is that the Corvet didn't require special skills.
Speaker 1: It was not a hard car to drive fast, nor
Speaker 1: an inherently dangerous one. You just had to learn how
Speaker 1: it behaved and how to maintain it. Nader, a legendary autodidact,
Speaker 1: did not think other people were capable of such feats.
Speaker 1: The density of safety features in our cars today is
Speaker 1: generally considered an outgrowth of this thinking. The safety crisis
Speaker 1: precipitated by Nator did lead to safer cars. It led
Speaker 1: to cars with air bags, with anti breaks, with traction control,
Speaker 1: and now with all kinds of driver assist technology. So yeah,
Speaker 1: those things came after Nader. Did they really come because
Speaker 1: of Nader? I don't think that necessarily follows. I mean
Speaker 1: a lot of the things like the traction control were
Speaker 1: already operable in some European models before then. You know,
Speaker 1: it took time for Detroit to adopt the technology and
Speaker 1: put it in cars, but it didn't do so because
Speaker 1: the government told it to it did it, did it,
Speaker 1: and when it was ready. I would argue that actually
Speaker 1: the second Collision view that air bags were the answer
Speaker 1: to everything actually set in America back in terms of
Speaker 1: public safety and killed more people than would otherwise have
Speaker 1: died because the focus on the car and the crash
Speaker 1: worthiness of the car detracted entirely from what had been
Speaker 1: a fairly steady concern about the driver and what the
Speaker 1: driver was doing. Was the driver sober? Was the driver reckless?
Speaker 1: Did the driver bothered to put on his seatbelt? Here's
Speaker 1: what we have to wrestle with the set of ideas
Speaker 1: nater espoused. Undoubtedly led to cars that better protected us,
Speaker 1: But did they make us better? Road fatalities maybe down.
Speaker 1: But is that because we're better drivers? Or is it
Speaker 1: because the car is shouldering the work? Does the image
Speaker 1: American driver today have more mastery of their five thousand
Speaker 1: pound car than they did sixty years ago? Or do
Speaker 1: we think of it as an appliance, a four wheeled microwave,
Speaker 1: not really understanding how it works, never taking it too
Speaker 1: or beyond the limits of its capabilities unless we're about
Speaker 1: to crash into something? Do we even know what's happening
Speaker 1: under our feet? These are, of course all rhetorical questions.
Speaker 1: We know what happens when something goes wrong. We're unprepared
Speaker 1: for it. We lack the skill to react appropriately. We
Speaker 1: crash into stuff, and the air bags and crumpled zones
Speaker 1: keep us from dying. We have followed second collision philosophy,
Speaker 1: not triple E. Think about the path that begins at
Speaker 1: the corvet because some of its buyers didn't understand it,
Speaker 1: they didn't properly maintain it, and because that small group
Speaker 1: of drivers got into trouble with it, cars began to
Speaker 1: be engineered for the lowest level of skill. We began
Speaker 1: to blame the car for our bad driving, which led
Speaker 1: the carmakers to try to bubble rap every aspect of
Speaker 1: their operation, and we became reliant on that safety net.
Speaker 1: Thus began a long erosion of skills that led us
Speaker 1: to now the age of the no consequences car. Stuff
Speaker 1: on new cars meant to help us avoid crashing on
Speaker 1: account of our own distraction stuff like lane keeping, blind
Speaker 1: spot monitoring, backup cameras. These are all ultimately making us
Speaker 1: less attentive drivers. How many of us feel safe to
Speaker 1: eat while driving, to grab a quick beer on the
Speaker 1: way home from work, to send a really important meme
Speaker 1: to our coworker, secure in the knowledge that the traction
Speaker 1: control and lane keeping and breaking assist will sort it
Speaker 1: all out. Fatalities per mile driven maybe down, but forty
Speaker 1: thousand people are still dying on the road every year.
Speaker 1: That's where the negligence lies. The loose nut behind the wheel.
Speaker 1: The Corvere was a new kind of car from a
Speaker 1: high riding General Motors, more sophisticated, more innovative, and more
Speaker 1: of a European style sedan than anything the corporation had
Speaker 1: produced to that point. The Corvere was General Motors, flexing
Speaker 1: its muscles, showing the world that it could out engineer
Speaker 1: and outthink the foreign competition. The Corvere tragedy lies in
Speaker 1: the car it was trying to be, and how those
Speaker 1: aspirations stalled. The Corvere affair cut down an emergent style
Speaker 1: of driver oriented American car. It deprived a generation of
Speaker 1: car enthusiasts, an American alternative to European sport sedans. But
Speaker 1: more than any of that, it may have wounded an
Speaker 1: important part of the American spirit. Who knows what might
Speaker 1: have happened if the Corvere had succeeded, if we sought
Speaker 1: to make drivers safer rather than just the cars. Never know,
Speaker 1: Nader let us off the hook. Our independence and self
Speaker 1: determination have caveats. Now. We are more reliant than ever
Speaker 1: on big corporations to keep us safe. And isn't that
Speaker 1: a scarier concept than a swing axle Car show is
Speaker 1: written and hosted by me Eddie Alterman. It's produced by
Speaker 1: Sam Dingman, Jacob Smith and Amy Gaines. Our editor is
Speaker 1: Jen Guero. Original music and mastering by Ben Taliday. Our
Speaker 1: executive producer is Mia Lobell. Our show art was designed
Speaker 1: by Sean Karney. An airbrush by Greg la Fever. Our
Speaker 1: patron Saints are Leetal Mallad and Justine Lange. Special thanks
Speaker 1: to my guests Brian Morris and Kenneth White. Check out
Speaker 1: Ken's book The Sack of Detroit, all about GM's dominant era.
Speaker 1: Car Show is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you
Speaker 1: love this show and others from Pushkin Industries, consider subscribing
Speaker 1: to Pushkin Plus. Pushkin Plus is a podcast subscription that
Speaker 1: offers bonus content and uninterrupted listening for just four ninety
Speaker 1: nine a month. Look for Pushkin Plus on Apple podcast subscriptions.
Speaker 1: To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app,
Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Aeroplanes, spacesuits, condoms, coffee, plastic, jury,
Speaker 1: warships over on the patented podcast by History Hit. We
Speaker 1: bring you the fascinating stories of histories, most impactful inventions,
Speaker 1: and the people who claim these ideas as their own.
Speaker 1: We uncover exceptional stories behind everyday objects we manage to
Speaker 1: put two men on the moon before we put wheels
Speaker 1: on suitcases. Unpack invention myths. So the prince's widow immediately
Speaker 1: becomes certain Thomas Edison stole her husband's invention and her
Speaker 1: husband disappeared around the same time. Can only have been
Speaker 1: eliminated by Thomas Edison, who at the time is arguably
Speaker 1: the most famous person in the West, and look backwards
Speaker 1: to understand technologies that are still in progress. You know
Speaker 1: when people turn around to me and say, oh, why
Speaker 1: would you live on to live forever? Life should rubbish?
Speaker 1: I just think that's a bit sad. I think it's
Speaker 1: worthwhile thing to do, and the thing that really makes
Speaker 1: it with while is the fact that you could make
Speaker 1: it go on forever. So subscribe to Patented from History,
Speaker 1: hit on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts
Speaker 1: to catch new episodes everywhere Wednesday and Sunday,