<VV> Ralph Nader and The Evils of the Corvair

[Bill Elliott]

I don't remember seeing this posted before... sorry if it's a dupe since it's so old.. pretty much sums up why 
I named my domain as I did...   I stumbled across it looking for one of the pictures of Nader sitting in a 
Corvair at the DC convention. Anyone have a link handy?

Bill Elliott
Urbana,MD

Ralph Nader and The Evils of the Corvair 
By Brian Carnell
Thursday, July 27, 2000

Ronald Bailey has a brief summary ("Saint Ralph's" Original Sin) of how Ralph Nader got started in the 
consumer protection racket -- an attack on General Motors' Corvair. An attack that, Bailey points out, was 
completely unjustified. Nader claimed in his (in)famous book, Unsafe At Any Speed, that the Corvair had a 
tendency of fishtailing because GM placed the engine in the rear in an attempt to go after the trendy sports 
car market then (and still) dominated by cars like the Porsche.

The rest is history -- GM committed one boneheaded mistake after another (even hiring prostitutes at 
one point to lure Nader into a compromising position), and the result was the creation of the National 
Highway Traffic Safety Administration. The only problem was that the NHTSA itself concluded that the 
Corvair models Nader spent an entire book lambasting were in fact just as safe as other models of car 
made during the early 1960s (in fact today the Corvair has a relatively large following among sports car 
enthusiasts). Nader's assertions that GM knew the Corvair was more prone to rollover accidents than other 
models was directly contradicted by NHTSA data which showed that the Corvair was no more likely to be 
involved in rollover accidents than comparable models.

The real hit and run accident was Nader's rise to fame thanks to GM's screw ups and his never ending 
quest for a paternalistic state of lawyer-kings.