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.

The seven papers contained in this report describe various aspects of the small car safety problem and suggest some solutions. The small car safety problem is illustrated by the fatality projection chart on the report cover. This chart shows that large increases in deaths of subcompact car occupants may be expected if current trends continue. The first three papers in this report deal with trends in small car design, market penetration, and safety. The last four papers deal with solutions available to mitigate the small car safety problem. These solutions include actions the consumer can take to improve the safety of small car operation. They also include actions the Government has taken to develop and test vehicles with higher levels of safety and to develop information about automobile safety for the consumer. Although research conducted to date indicates that improved crash performance of small cars is easily possible and that a large variation exists in the crash test results of different small cars on the market, no solution is offered to individual consumers who desire higher levels of safety in their cars. Suggested actions to improve small car safety include (1) more perfect safety standards which insure that the worst cars perform as well as the best ones; (2) improved consumer information to allow consumers to select the level of safety they desire, and (3) continued research in safety improvements to determine the safety features which are most effective and to advise the consumer and the Government on the levels of safety which are feasible through advanced technology. (Author).

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