General Motors

WHEN DRIVERS and passengers enter automobiles, they want to believe that the manufacturer of that particular vehicle has made it as safe as possible. They know their lives might depend on safety measures such as seat restraints, air bags, shatter-proof windshields, and flexible steering wheels. Few drivers even consider that the way in which a car is designed may save their lives. General Motors (GM) makes billions of dollars a year by selling vehicles, and most consumers trust these purchases.

However, before the consumer movement of the 1960s, GM, like other automobile manufacturers,[Page 353] allowed increased profits to take precedence over consumer safety. Even after federal law forced manufacturer responsibility on the automobile industry, design flaws continued to surface, albeit with less frequency.

The driving force behind the move toward greater automobile manufacturer responsibility began in the 1960s when a young, inexperienced lawyer took on the automobile industry, and changed that industry forever. In 1965, Ralph Nader targeted General Motors in his book, Unsafe at Any Speed, which the San Francisco Chronicle called the Silent Spring (invoking Rachel Carson's ground-breaking environmental work) of the automobile industry. Evidently, GM retaliated by trying to discredit Nader. GM allegedly resorted to setting up seduction schemes that were intended to provide grounds for blackmail. When that failed, GM responded by hiring two detectives to follow Nader around hoping to catch him in some wrongdoing.

Nader responded by suing General Motors for invasion of privacy and emotional distress. He used the $424,000 settlement from Ralph Nader v. General Motors to establish a consumer group that provided “continuous legal monitoring” of the automobile giant. The press had a field day with the coverage, and GM's admission of guilt made the front page of newspapers around the country. A Senate subcommittee forced the president of General Motors to apologize for the behavior.

In Unsafe at Any Speed, Nader pointed out that based on 1965 predictions by the Department of Commerce, 51,000 people would die in automobile accidents in the United States within the next 10 years. Nader set out to investigate particular automobiles that were contributing to the high number of fatalities, and to discover ways to make automobiles as safe as possible. Nader's investigations revealed that the automobile industry was concerned with profits even when company executives were aware that consumers were at risk.