BoomerZoo Almanac for September 9-15, 2007: Nadir for autos, zenith for Nader
Like most Boomers, I know the name of Ralph Nader, I have long been vaguely aware that his fame is based on consumer product safety and that the blame for the 2000 election of George W. as president has been laid at his doorstep by more than a few bitter Democrats. But I had forgotten that it was his indictment of the U.S. auto industry in the book Unsafe at Any Speed that led to the passage of the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act, which was signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson on September 9, 1966. But I didn’t need to read any book to know that the Corvair—which he included as one of his more memorable suspects—is a truly unsafe vehicle. How do I know? We owned one.
I’m guessing most Americans have at least one stand-out story of a car they’ve owned. We have a few, but stories about our Corvair sink deepest into the muck. It was a cute car, but if you’ve never been in one, let me start by saying that it had an automatic transmission with no parking gear. Just take a minute to think about that... The gear shift was a switch that went from drive to neutral to reverse. Get it? Does anyone know WHO came up with this idea? Or WHY? Did it just cost more to put the P on the shifter? To add another notch? It’s a puzzler for sure. Here’s the kicker for us: our Corvair, which we bought used, had a parking brake that didn’t work. In other words, it could quite easily be rolled anywhere with just the slightest push, even when the engine was turned off. We had a brick we’d throw under the front tire when we parked on an incline. (We never parked on a hill.) Once, the car rolled over the brick and nearly got away from me. I’d probably have just let it roll back into the pond at the bottom of that parking area, but my 2-year-old son was in the car, and I wanted to keep him.
This car was a two-door, which we now think of as inconvenient, though not necessarily unsafe. Nevertheless, these were definitely unsafe. As many Boomers and their parents may recall, the seat backs on the bucket seats in the two-door vehicles of the day—and that includes the Corvair—had no mechanism to hold them in place. If you stopped too fast, they just flipped forward. In the early 70s, when we owned ours (note that Nader had condemned them in the mid-60s, and we obviously hadn’t got that message), we also didn’t have rules for keeping kids safe in cars—mind, the cars were long, wide and weighed about as much as a tank, giving them the heft to withstand a pretty heavy beating without the passengers feeling too much pain—so kids often sat in the front seat. Our 2-year-old, for example, sat in a car seat that wasn’t much different than the child seat on a shopping cart—a platform with two leg holes and a bar that ran around it at about waist height—but it had two arms to hook it over the seat back. Imagine what happened when you braked suddenly! Well, instead of flipping our son forward through the windshield, I hooked one of the arms of that chair over the driver’s seat back in order to hold it in place. He was practically sitting on my shoulder while I drove. I believe most of us who learned to drive in those days still at least occasionally throw our right arm out to block passengers from pitching forward when we have to hit the brakes.
The other interesting aspect of the Corvair was that the engine was in the back and the trunk was in the front. This actually turned out to be a good thing for us when we had to drive over the mountain roads in the winter. Having the weight in the back was, I’m sure, the only thing that kept us on the road in that vehicle. I believe our Corvair was also a later model (that is, post-1965), meaning it didn’t have some of the suspension problems of the earlier models.
I could go on to tell you about having to crawl underneath the car with a screwdriver, which we used to cross the poles and get it started, because when we owned it, we couldn’t afford to have repairs done--but that wasn’t necessarily a design flaw. Still, the whole “no parking brake/no parking gear” issue did make what might have been a little peccadillo into a daily life-threatening challenge. Good thing we were still young and immortal!
