Car Safety Wars

Car Safety Wars is a concise history of the hundred-year struggle for safer cars and highways, involving at least six presidents, reluctant congresses, a fiercely resisting automobile industry, unsung heroes, and GM detectives.

Car Safety Wars is a gripping history of the hundred-year struggle to improve the safety of American automobiles and save lives on the highways. Described as the “equivalent of war” by the Supreme Court, the battle involved the automobile industry, unsung and long-forgotten safety heroes, at least six US Presidents, a reluctant Congress, new auto technologies, and, most of all, the mindset of the American public: would they demand and be willing to pay for safer cars? The “Car Safety Wars” were at first won by consumers and safety advocates. The major victory was the enactment in 1966 of a ground breaking federal safety law. The safety act was pushed through Congress over the bitter objections of car manufacturers by a major scandal involving General Motors, its private detectives, Ralph Nader, and a gutty cigar-chomping old politician. The act is a success story for government safety regulation. It has cut highway death and injury rates by over seventy percent in the years since its enactment, saving more than two million lives and billions of taxpayer dollars. But the car safety wars have never ended. GM has recently been charged with covering up deadly defects resulting in multiple ignition switch shut offs. Toyota has been fined for not reporting fatal unintended acceleration in many models. Honda and other companies have—for years—sold cars incorporating defective air bags. These current events, suggesting a failure of safety regulation, may serve to warn us that safety laws and agencies created with good intentions can be corrupted and strangled over time. This book suggests ways to avoid this result, but shows that safer cars and highways are a hard road to travel. We are only part of the way home.

Combining superb investigative reporting with incisive analysis, Jerry Mashaw and David Harfst provide a compelling account of the attempt to regulate auto safety in America. Their penetrating look inside the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) spans two decades and reveals the complexities of regulating risk in a free society. Hoping to stem the tide of rising automobile deaths and injuries, Congress passed the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act in 1966. From that point on, automakers would build cars under the watchful eyes of the federal regulators at NHTSA. Curiously, however, the agency abandoned its safety mission of setting, monitoring, and enforcing performance standards in favor of the largely symbolic act of recalling defective autos. Mashaw and Harfst argue that the regulatory shift from rules to recalls was neither a response to a new vision of the public interest nor a result of pressure by the auto industry or other interest groups. Instead, the culprit was the legal environment surrounding NHTSA and other regulatory agencies such as the EPA, OSHA, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission. The authors show how NHTSA's decisions as well as its organization, processes, and personnel were reoriented in order to comply with the demands of a legal culture that proved surprisingly resistant to regulatory pressures. This broad-gauged view of NHTSA has much to say about political idealism and personal ambition, scientific commitment and professional competition, long-range vision and political opportunism. A fascinating illustration of America's ambivalence over whether government is a source of--or solution to--social ills, The Struggle for Auto Safety offers important lessons about the design and management of effective health and safety regulatory agencies today.

Account of how and why cars kill, and why the automobile manufacturers have failed to make cars safe.

"Don't be a Dummy" is a primer on automotive safety. It is "Auto Safety 101." What every driver or passenger should know because it May Save Your Life; or a loved one. The author uses personal experience and crash dummies to explain the consequences of not following the laws of Physics and not utilizing the safety features that are available to both drivers and passengers of automotive vehicles. The focus of this book is driver-responsibility and the need to educate the public about common hazards and vehicle misuse. Large car versus small car data analysis warns about vehicle incompatibility and the need for purchasers to consider the serious consequences of selecting a vehicle to buy based only on fuel economy and low cost. Federal safety standards are discussed and what the "Five (5) Star Rating System" really means. ● The quest for "fuel economy" may risk your family's life or result in serious injury! ● Fuel economy may be false economy! ● The size and weight of your vehicle can mean life or death or serious injury! ● Protect loved ones and save the children. Always use the proper child restraint! ● Speed, Alcohol and Drugs are killers. Don't be a Dummy!

"Buying the safest car for your family shouldn't be up for debate. Yet for decades, car safety advocates, manufacturers, and lawmakers in the United States have clashed over whether to make automobiles safer. All sides armed themselves with data in the hopes of winning the great car safety debates. In this way, crash statistics and the analysts who studied them made history. But data was always in the backseat, merely supporting different points of view. That is, until now. "With car safety, it's the value we place on every human life that counts.""--

NHTSA programs: vehicle safety standards, 55 mph speed limits, motorcycle helmet laws, public information.

America has struggled for 30 years to resolve controversy about the use of occupant restraint systems in motor vehicles. The book uses the differing perspectives of conflicting interests, democratic pluralism, to explain why it was so difficult to resolve the dispute and how the breakthrough toward resolution was ultimately achieved. Principles governing policymaking and corporate influences are explained and insights are provided for policymakers, corporate executives, lobbyists, consumer activists, attorneys and judges, and legislators who are participants in regulatory processes. America has struggled for thirty years to resolve controversy about the use of occupant restraint systems in motor vehicles. The book uses the differing perspectives of conflicting interests, democratic pluralism, to explain why it was so difficult to resolve the dispute and how the breakthrough toward resolution was ultimately achieved. Principles governing policymaking and corporate influences are explained and insights are provided for policymakers, corporate executives, lobbyists, consumer activists, attorneys and judges, and legislators who are participants in regulatory processes.