EVER SINCE THE CORVAIR was introduced, General Motors’ official reaction to criticisms has been silence. The handling hazards of Corvairs did not proceed from engineering mysteries or the prevalence of one technical “school of thought” over another. The Corvair was a tragedy, not a blunder. The tragedy was overwhelmingly the fault of cutting corners to shave costs. This happens all the time in the automobile industry, but with the Corvair it happened in a big way. What was there for General Motors to say?
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Ralph Nader, circa. 2000. Photograph by Dion Ogust.
The tragedy of the Corvair did not begin that thirtieth day of September in 1959 when it went on display in dealer showrooms. Nor did it begin when Ford test drivers got hold of 2 Corvairs somewhat prematurely from a dealer in early September and lost control of them at the company's test track. It began with the conception and development of the Corvair by leading GM engineers—Edward Cole, Harry Barr, Robert Schilling, Kai Hansen and Frank Winchell.
Cole, now a General Motors executive vice-president, provided the managerial ignition. He was an old devotee of rear-engined cars and right after World War II became involved with a short-lived experimental Cadillac having a rear engine. A prototype, ponderously bedecked with dual tires at the rear for stability, was soon shelved. To Cole, however, the idea of a rear-engined car remained attractive and he carried it over with him to Chevrolet and developed a project proposal as he rose in that division's hierarchy. In 1955, as chief engineer of Chevrolet, Cole saw a market for a small, “compact” car. Already an unpretentious import with a rear, air-cooled engine and independent suspension was “pre-testing” the American market with rising commercial success. But Cole and his associates were not in any mind merely to produce an American stereotype of the Volkswagen. This was to be a brand new kind of car utilizing the lessons of past models and the advances of the latest automotive technology. When he rose to head Chevrolet division in the summer of 1956, Cole put some of his finest engineering talent to work on preliminary design work. In the spring of 1957, Barr, Schilling, and Hansen made formal presentations before the top-level GM engineering policy committee and the executive committee. It was then that the official go-ahead to build the Corvair was given to Chevrolet. Kai Hansen was made head of the project.
A small, light car project naturally would look to the European experience. This is what Hansen and his associates did before coming up with the Corvair design. To aid in such an evaluation, they had the benefit of one of GM's most creative engineers, Maurice Olley. Originally hailing from Rolls Royce, Olley was a prolific inventor with over twenty-five US patents issued in his name and assigned to General Motors. His field of specialization was automobile handling behavior. In 1953 Olley delivered a technical paper, “European Postwar Cars,” containing a sharp critique of rear-engined automobiles with swing-axle suspension systems. He called such vehicles “a poor bargain, at least in the form in which they are at present built,” adding that they could not handle safely in a wind even at moderate speeds, despite tire pressure differential between and front and rear. Olley went further, depicting the forward fuel tank as “a collision risk, as is the mass of the engine in the rear.” Unmistakably, he had notified colleagues of the hurdles which had to be overcome.
Hansen's group was familiar with the risks of its appointed task. Its members knew well the kinds of priorities which would force them to dilute their engineering standards. First, the new automobile had to sell well and make a “target rate of return” on investment, according to GM's unique and well-established policy of guaranteed profits. The way to do this, General Motors’ management decided, was to make a small, lighter car, with fuel economy, which would seat 6 passengers comfortably and give a ride comparable to a standard Chevrolet passenger sedan. Given the goal of designing a much lighter vehicle, this was no routine task. If these objectives could be achieved, the quest for profit maximization would have reached new frontiers. An automobile representing a reduction of 1332 pounds of material, or more than one-third the weight of a standard 1960 Chevrolet, that could sell for only about $200 less than standard models would constitute a marvel of production cost efficiency and sales ingenuity.
In January 1960, Hansen told a meeting of the Society of Automotive Engineers: “Our first objective, once the decision was made to design a smaller, lighter car, was to attain good styling proportions. Merely shortening the wheel base and front and rear overhang was not acceptable. To permit lower overall height and to accommodate six adult passengers, the floor hump for the drive shaft had to go. Eliminating the conventional drive shaft made it essential then that the car have either rear-engine, rear-drive or front-engine, front-drive. Before making a decision, all types of European cars were studied, including front-engine, front-drive designs. None measured up to our standards of road performance.”
Chevrolet engineers decided that the best and most “esthetically pleasant” utilization of passenger space dictated the use of a rear-engine, rear-drive design. This decision presented the problem, according to Hansen, of successfully applying the arrangement to a chassis that combines stability with a good ride and easy handling qualities. Hansen's job was to get the various factors working for safer handling—principally, front and rear weight-distribution, tire-pressure differentials and tire design, suspension geometry, and relative dynamic behavior in the front and rear—and still keep a soft ride and maximum cost reduction possible.
Hansen and his fellow engineers could not have been under any misapprehension as to the magnitude of the handling challenge before them. They had to deal with by far the heaviest rear-engined automobile in the western world, having between 60% and 63% of its weight on the rear wheels. This fact alone posed handling problems considerably in excess of those afflicting the smaller and lighter rear-engined European cars. Ocee Ritch describes the consequences of this weight and size difference between rear-engined cars by way of a simple analogy: “If you swing a bucket at the end of a short rope and accidentally hit your brother in the head, is he more apt to suffer a concussion if the bucket is empty or full? Similarly, if you increase the length of the rope and swing it at the same speed, will it cause more damage? Right on both counts. The more weight or longer the arm, the more force is generated. In the case of the automobile, deviating from a straight line is the equivalent of swinging the bucket.”
Automotive engineers will say, in defending their performance, that every car is a compromise with economic and stylistic factors. This statement, if true, is also meaningless. For the significant question is, who authorizes what compromises of engineering safety? Hansen has never publicly revealed what choices he would have preferred to take had he been given more authority against the erosive demands of the professional stylists and the cost department. The secret world of the automobile industry does not encourage free and open engineering discussion of alternative courses of action… .
A leading crash researcher and biophysicist, Dr. Carl Clark of The Martin Co. states: “Instead of the 40 mph barrier collision survival being a ‘spectacular accomplishment,’ it should be a routine requirement of proper car and restraint design. Indeed, without major modifications of car structure and size, by applying what we now know about crash protection, a fixed barrier impact of 45 mph should be experienced without injury, and crashes at higher speeds should be survivable.” (A 45 mph crash into a fixed barrier, like a tree or stone wall, generates, for example, the same forces as a car striking the rear end of a stationary vehicle at more than 75 mph).
Engineers are not noted for making metaphors, but a safety engineer for one of the Big Three companies inadvertently offered an illuminating one to Automotive News (August 30, 1965) in describing his work: “It's like walking into a room in which there are a bunch of ping-pong balls on the floor. Then you throw another ball in the middle and try to keep track of what happens.” That last ping-pong ball was safety. Dr. Donald Huelke, one of the few outsiders to be brought into the inner sanctums of design studios and given the confidence of the 3 or 4 safety engineers at General Motors and Ford reported: “The auto industry has a small, dedicated group of individuals—almost a fifth column—working for car designs of greater safety.”
One ping-pong ball among many presents a low order of probability. A fifth column indicates the activity is subversive of the dominant way.
At the basis of such symptoms and impressions is the unwillingness of the automobile companies to dedicate their engineering and investment energies into the kind of first line research and development that will produce the innovations that can make the automobile responsive to the safety requirements of motorists. Over the past decade in particular, the possibilities for completely new approaches to be translated into mass production hardware are almost programmable given certain allocations of men and resources. The gap between existing design and attainable safety has widened enormously in the postwar period. As these attainable levels of safety rise, so do the moral imperatives to use them. For the tremendous range of opportunity of science-technology—by providing easier and better solutions—serves to clarify ethical choices and to ease the conditions for their exercise by the manufacturers.
There are men in the automobile industry who know both the technical capability and appreciate the moral imperatives. But their timidity and conformity to the rigidities of the corporate bureaucracies have prevailed. When and if the automobile is designed to free millions of human beings from unnecessary mutilation, these men, like their counterparts in universities and government who knew of the suppression of safer automobile development yet remained silent year after year, will look back with shame on the time when common candor was considered courage.