After receiving an award from the Italian car magazine Quattroruote, Ralph Nader used the opportunity to tell the assembled crowd that
Now that Fiat has purchased Chrysler, it has the moral obligation to remedy the deadly fuel tank design in the Jeep Grand Cherokee before more innocent victims are burned today, not only in the United States, but also in Europe,
Nader’s beef according to Automotive News [sub]: the 1993-2004 JGC
“is a modern-day Pinto for soccer moms” because the fuel tank is behind the rear axle below the rear bumper… In addition, the 1993-98 Grand Cherokees are flawed because the filler hose goes through the frame rail and is pulled out of the fuel tank
NHTSA has been investigating the 3m or so Grand Cherokees built with this “design flaw” since August, based on evidence that this issue played a role in 22 “fiery crashes” and 14 deaths. Initial NHTSA reports claim the JGC has no disproportionate risk of fires, but Nader contests the claim, arguing that some 44 crashes involved the “design flaw” which he argues caused some 64 deaths. Given the many problems with NHTSA’s reporting system, it’s tough to tell who has the truth on their side in this conflict, but Chrysler insists that the investigation should end even though
it moved and shielded the fuel tank, starting with 2005 models
I blame the media, personally: Toyota’s story made good copy, but self-immolating Jeeps (or F-150s)? Nah, that’s back of the business section stuff at best.
Good to see Ralph being consistent. You may not agree with the man, but at least he’s on message, up-front and consistent to a degree that many, many people aren’t.
It is like commending on the consistency of delirium from an assylym resident: he says he is not Robocop, not Mao, not Batman, but Napoleon and Napoleon only.
If by “on message” you mean he’s always a total douchebag, then yes, we are in total agreement.
Escaping corporate liability from injury lawsuits isn’s a unique feature of “government-guided” bankruptcy – it’s a feature of all bankruptcies. There is a whole series of companies that declared bankruptcy to escape asbestos liability for example.
Yes, so let’s keep on keeping on and allow more companies to avoid responsibility for the products they make. Brilliant.
Yep, jkross, when the liabilities from the real and potential (IBNR, in insurance terms) lawsuits exceed assets, you are ripe for bankruptcy. What else do you expect to happen??
When I saw the headline, I really hoped that someone had run that lousy self-aggrandizing lying bastard down with a Cherokee. There were 3 million of these GCs sold. The reality is that people die in some percentage of cars. If the overall safety record of the Cherokee falls in a normal range, then let the ambulance chasers starve.
Don’t be too harsh on him, please. The guy is just trying to earn another buck or two, obviously realising that his moment of fame has long been gone – that just makes him try harder.
A big issue with exploding fuel tanks is the impact speed. No vehicle will withstand infinite impact speed, so some limit must be set.
The police Crown Victoria fuel tanks explode when rear-ended at 70 mph. This is a tragedy for those who perished in such accidents, but Ford should not be expected to have designed a car with this failure in mind.
So I wonder what the details are of the Jeep situation.
A standard sedan probably does not have to be designed with resisting 70 mph rear impacts as a major design goal.
Police cars that sit on the side of the road with 75 mph traffic a couple of feet away while using mesmerizing flashing lights should be.
Changing the subject, my suspicion is that these flashing lights on the back of police vehicles will be found in time to cause photosensitive seizures in some people.
http://www.epilepsyfoundation.org/newsroom/upload/Video-Game-Sensitivity.pdf
Can we excuse Ford even more because the basic architecture (position of the gas tank) was done in the late 70’s when the Panther platform was designed?
When one throws enough darts at the wall, some eventually will stick, the ones that stick – that’s what makes headlines. The ones that hit a soft spot and really bury themselves, that’s what results in investigations. With R.N., at least he’s consistent. (EDIT) I remember many, many years ago, young lawyers were waiting in line to work for him, in Washington D.C, at the “astronomical” salary of 5,000 dollars per year! How in the world did they afford to live? Even then, that wansn’t much to write home about. I only cleared around $350.00 a month in the USAF, but my room, board, medical and so on was paid for. All I had to do was keep my avatar fed and watered.
the 5 Gs in 1980, roughly the period I think you’re talking about, was roughly 13 Gs in today’s $. But your question still stands, especially if they were paying back the cost of their law school education. Public interest work was penurious in those days.
David: I’m talking about early 1970’s. Still not a great deal of money in D.C.
Chrysler moved the gas tank so they could place the full size spare under the vehicle. The side result was a better rear departure angle for off roading and the ability to package a third row seat for the platform mate Commander.
As for shielding on the ’05, it’s plastic, like all other cars unless you pony up for the skid plate package.
With over 3 million units sold, I’m in no rush to convince my mother that her WJ is a fiery death trap.
Odds of dying in a Cherokee fire… 0.000021 (64/3m)
Odds of being killed by lightning in your lifetime 0.00016 (National Weather Svc).
Quit whining Ralph.
The rate for Cherokees is even less, as most of these will probably not be functioning for the equivalent of a “lifetime.” .000021 / 6 = .0000035
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go climb trees in the rain with a big aluminum ladder.
Only in America can a lawyer who made a career of restricting what consumers are permitted to buy call himself a consumer advocate.
Only in America would the leading automaker of the day pay hookers to try to entrap him, and PIs to try to slime him.
Now, to be fair to America and the rest of the western world, in many other countries someone like Ralph Nader would probably have ended up face-down in a ditch because he dared call out the local oligarch.
psar: “Only in America would the leading automaker of the day pay hookers to try to entrap him, and PIs to try to slime him.”
Nah, the commies did the same thing, too.
I really don’t understand the animosity towards Ralph Nader.
Yes, unchecked he’d be a serious problem—and let’s be honest, the sides are basically “All of Corporate America, Most of the Government, Ever Republican and Most Democrats” on one side and “Ralph Nader” on the other, so it’s not like he’s unchecked—but it’s like enthusiasts actively resent his point of view.
He has the gall to think about their sacred cows not in terms of their sexiness, design or cultural impact, but in purely functional terms. Yes, he pissed in the cornflakes of the auto culture of the 1960s: a culture that was perfectly ready to throw safety and reliability under the bus. Yes, he’s relatively extreme, but without Ralph and people like him we’d be waiting an awful long time for “the market” to get around to blessing us with safe, functional products. Oh, they’ll do it eventually, though only once it’s profitable which is well past the “net benefit to society” point.
Amazing. You’ll scream and cry if the government abuses your rights, but it’s perfectly ok for the market to make a buck at the expense of your health and well being. Heck, it’s immoral to even criticize the notion that the power of capital should be limited. Companies should be allowed, nay, encouraged, to sell actively dangerous products. So what if melamine in baby food kills people? Eventually the market will correct it. We can’t restrict choice, oh no.
Nader is a useful foil against that Profit-Über-Alles attitude.
You’re confusing “education” with “compulsion”. I’m not sure if this is just an innocent mistake on your part, or if, since you’re obviously aspiring to be one of my Social Betters ™, you honestly can’t understand doing anything *but* forcing people to make the choices you think are in their best interests.
1) Marginal Benefit: You can admire the work he did the 1960s and 1970s on auto safety. What has he done since then?
2) Ralph Nader vs Ralph Nader INc. Like any celebrity, he has a small corporate empire to feed. They use slave labor (highly underpaid kids) to scam people into $5 or $10 donations. He is more interested in government power and how it is used then consumer benefits. The model he set up (consumer regulation) worked for a bit, but then plateaued. What has Joan Claybrook done recently to actually help auto safety?
3) Ego. Absent Ralph Nader, Al Gore would have been elected. One man’s ego and purity got us a terrorist attack, 2 wars, a trillion dollars of debt and Sarah Palin. Thanks, Ralph. For that alone, you can burn in hell.
In your damn Pinto.
psarhijian: Yes, unchecked he’d be a serious problem—and let’s be honest, the sides are basically “All of Corporate America, Most of the Government, Ever Republican and Most Democrats” on one side and “Ralph Nader” on the other, so it’s not like he’s unchecked—but it’s like enthusiasts actively resent his point of view.
If you believe that he has only limited his comments and criticisms to the domestic auto industry, and allegedly unsafe designs of various cars, you do not have a complete picture of his views or his career.
During the late 1960s, he ranted against a Mercury ad featuring its intermediate muscle cars, claiming that it was “incitement to riot.” Only the blessedly ignorant – or hopelessly stupid – believed that one.
The simple fact is that he has long cast his lot with the “speed kills” crowd and basically taken the attitude that driving is a necessary evil, at best. When Congress repealed the 65 mph speed limit in late 1994, he went off the deep end, saying that it would result in 6,400 additional deaths, and the Congress would have blood on its hands. Which, of course, never happened – the fatality rate per 100 million miles driven actually FELL the next year, and has continued falling ever since. I have yet to hear him say, “I was wrong.”
Who is so uninformed as to still believe that it’s dangerous to drive 80 mph on a limited access highway? It was safe in 1994, and it’s safe today (conditions permitting).
The simple fact is that, if he had limited himself to pushing for safer cars, he would not have engendered the hostility that he does today.
Another problem is that, even when crusading for safer cars, he is can charitably be described as “selective” in his use facts (as well as omissions of other facts) to make his case. And he demonizes anyone who disagrees with him (see his reaction to the speed limit repeal that I highlighted).
Which is normal for him – he is a lawyer by training – but hardly makes him an unbiased source of facts, nor does it mean that everyone who opposes him is a tool of Corporate America.
psarhjinian: Amazing. You’ll scream and cry if the government abuses your rights, but it’s perfectly ok for the market to make a buck at the expense of your health and well being. Heck, it’s immoral to even criticize the notion that the power of capital should be limited. Companies should be allowed, nay, encouraged, to sell actively dangerous products.
Please explain exactly which automotive products sold in the early 1960s – when Nader began his crusade – where “actively dangerous.” “Actively dangerous” means that the vehicle in question takes an affirmative step or action to kill or seriously injure either its users or bystanders.
I’m not aware of any automobiles that did that in the early 1960s.
Nader claimed that the 1960-63 Chevrolet Corvair had a design defect that made its handling treacherous; only problem is that, after the Perini case was settled by GM’s insurance company WITHOUT its permission, plaintiffs basically lost the main Corvair case. This case centered on a fatal accident involving a 16-year-old boy driving a Corvair in California. GM won that case, and the federal government later cleared the car – a finding that was confirmed by independent reviewers.
The simple fact is that domestic cars were not unduly dangerous by the standards of that time. If anything, Detroit was following the desires of customers, who were distinctily uninterested in safety, and preferred not to think about accidents. Ford’s attempt to sell safety belts in 1956 met with a modest response at best. People were more interested in how a Fairlane compared to a Bel Air in 0-60 times.
Which isn’t surprising, as most car buyers in the mid-1950s had lived through World War I, the influenza pandemic of 1918, the Great Depression, World War II, the Korean War and the ever-present fear of polio. Worrying about a car accident seemed silly at best. Note that concerns about safety only really gained traction in the 1980s, when people raised in the comfort, prosperity and relative safety of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s began buying cars in large numbers. For them, car accidents WERE a big deal…because they had lived relatively safe and secure lives, and expected the same for their children.
Second
geeber: Man, that was brilliant!
For the last 2 decades or so, Nader has been telling the willfully ignorant sheep of this society that we’ve moved from a democratic republic to a corpocracy and are heading toward Facism. But the Koch brothers, John Birch Society, and the likes of Limbaugh and Murdoch’s outlets have seemingly won the day by throwing dust in the air confusing a sufficiently large element of voters that voting against their own interest is wise. Somehow they don’t notice the continuing decline in their standard of living, the education of their kids and opportunity for people of working age of all education levels. Our political system is utterly corrupt with rampant bribery called campaign contributions, the most effective of which originate from corporate interests. Jobs and intellectual property continue to flow out of the country increasing corporate profits at least in the short term, and that’s all that seems to matter. Paying attention to what Nader has been saying might require a little thought and action; screw that. Let’s just blow him off and continue the slide down.
Not to get even more political with it, but isn’t Nader costing Gore the election enough to wipe out whatever benefit he has had in defeating the profit-uber-alles bad-gas-tank-placement attitude?
Just saying.
tough call
Ralph turned out to be just as good at keeping Gores out of the White House as Corvairs off the road. I guess when your politically dead you need another issue to be relevant again.
The election of 2000 was so close you could attribute Gore’s loss to any number of causes. A better explanation for the loss in my opinion is Gore’s failure to take his home state. How many candidates are elected president without taking their home state?
Actually late 50’s early 60’s Nadar Unsafe at any speed. There were a series of articles in the Nation mag written by Daniel Patrick Moyahan regarding auto safety.
Chrysler insists that the investigation should end, even though it moved and shielded the fuel tank starting with 2005 models.
If things are anything like they were when Unsafe at Any Speed was published in 1965, Nader may point to this as a “smoking gun.” In other words, the fact that Chrysler revised and improved the original design implies that there was a problem. Rather than applauding the improvement, we’ll paint Chrysler as a bad company for building the original, inferior design…and go even further to suggest that Chrysler is horrible for not recalling every prior vehicle ever built to retrofit them to the current (and safer) design.
At least that was the logic that allowed the Corvair’s assassination to gain traction. However, as psarhjinian points out, Nader would have likely been long forgotten had GM not hired prostitutes and private investigators to entrap and discredit him.
A colleague of mine drives to work 3 days a week in a 1st generation Corvair coupe. He always wondered why VW and Porsche didn’t get painted with the same brush back in the 60s with their rear engine air cooled designs. I told him I didn’t know but it sure did help him get a deal on a used car.
Ralph Nader wasn’t motivated by destroying the livelihoods and freedoms of Germans.
There was a novel by Elmore Leonard that had a “Nader-like” character in it that the main character (a shady PI) had been hired by GM to smear. Leonard actually treated the lawyer very sympathetically, which I thought was unusual for a guy who has been called “Dickens of Detroit.” Danged if I can remember the name of the novel now though, I’ve been trying to find another copy for years so I could reread it. I haven’t read it since I lived in Southfield, MI back in 2001.
For years I owned a first generation Corvair convertible, although it was not my daily driver. I still have quite a bit of literature on the topic, and if you’ll permit me I’ll share my opinions as to why the Corvair took the brunt of Nader’s assault:
1. First off, the VW was tarred with the same brush as the Corvair in Unsafe at Any Speed, as was Mercedes-Benz. Nader makes it clear that the swing axle design used at the time by these automobiles had tendencies that were unfamiliar to many U.S. drivers.
2. GM was a better target for Nader, as it was far larger. In turn, this created more sensational headlines.
3. The Corvair was more powerful than the VW; more power made it easier to send the Corvair around corners at a faster speed, and thus more prone to oversteer and eventually into the “pendulum effect” where the tail of the car swings around.
4. GM marketed the Corvair as being somewhat sporty. That’s not necessarily a sin on GM’s part, but it could be argued that this made the Corvair more appealing to more sporting (read: more aggressive) driver. The VW didn’t make such claims; it was marketed as basic, no-nonsense transportation.
5. Finally, as psarhjinian noted, GM hired prostitutes and private investigators to entrap and discredit him; VW did not. The ensuing publicity caused a black eye for GM, and kept the story in the media that much longer.
@ “Educator” Dan — if you read “Unsafe at Any Speed”, you’d notice VW and others were also singled out for their swing axle designs that contribute to roll-over accidents. To GM’s credit, they responded quicker to these criticisms than VW and added a leaf-sway-bar thing to the ’64 Corvairs to solve the problem, and a fully-independent suspension redesign in ’65. I liked Corvairs, and had a few, but see Ralph’s point. If GM hadn’t tried the smear and so on, they could have come out a lot better than they did, the book would probably have been a footnote in automotive history.
The Beetle had leaf springs.
It was the use of coil springs that made the Corvair so dangerous – as Nader explains in detail in his book.
I hope Ralph at least had a happy ending with the aforementioned prostitutes, never let a crisis (or a trick) go to waste.
Oh God…please don’t plant mental images in my head. I just had dinner.
Brings new meaning to the title Unsafe at Any Speed.
I thought the issue with the Pinto was the use of the petrol tank as a floor.
This presented few problems on the sedan, but on the wagon, when there was a rear ender (the most common crash), the fuel tank would rupture and fuel vapour would enter the cabin (and everyone smoked in 1973).
The sister car of the Pinto, the Ford Cortina, had the same fuel/axle layout, but had few problems (that sort of problem anyway).
In fact, this layout was pretty well standard on cars outside North America until well into the 1990s.
The Pinto’s problems were a fuel tank placed very close to the rear bumper bolts (which would be driven into the tank in a severe crash), and a fuel filler pipe that was too easily ripped loose in a crash.
The 1971-76 sedans and hatchbacks were subject to a recall by the federal government in the late 1970s; not one of the wagons were recalled. They didn’t have these problems.
I thought the issue with the Pinto was the use of the petrol tank as a floor.
Some (or perhaps all) early Mustangs and Falcons used the top of the fuel tank as the trunk floor. I’m not sure if the same applies to Mercury Cougars and Comets of the same era.
The Maverick and Pinto had trunk floors, at least the seven or eight examples that my family owned during the 1970s. One thing the Pinto improved upon was the location of the fuel filler neck. On previous Ford compacts it was in the far back of the trunk and exited between the taillights; on the Pinto it exited high on the rear quarter panel. Not was it less vulnerable in rear-end collisions, it eliminated an awkward obstacle in the middle rear of the trunk.