<VV> Brit Hume,Ralph Nader and The Corvair

[Tony Underwood]

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At 12:35 hours 11/04/2004 -0500, bowtieguy@cox.net wrote:
>Brit Hume Interviewing Ralph Nader 
>
>Introducing Ralph Tuesday evening Brit said," Your career started when you
proved the Chevrolet Corvair was unsafe to drive." This statement is
inaccurate in many ways. First,Ralph's book came out in 1966 during the
same year that GM had planned to stop producing the Corvair due to market
pressure from the Ford Mustang. 


Well...   the Mustang had no connection with whether or not the Corvair was
ever unsafe to drive.    That Corvair safety issue was a bunch of hype that
snowballed because of Naders book, which incidentally was *Highly*
inaccurate on many points and poorly researched in  general.   However, the
Mustang AND the Camaro both contributed to the demise of the Corvair; the
Mustang because it offered the "Pony-Car" performance image to the younger
generation, and the Camaro because it was competing within GMs own Chevy
division against the Corvair and was in fact a derivative of the Corvair
developed specifically to confront the success of the Ford Mustang and
Plymouth Barracuda and Dodge Dart-GT, all of which were outselling the
post-'65 model Corvair.      


By the way:   

More people have been killed in first generation Mustangs due to a design
fault than were ever killed in all Corvair rollover incidents combined,
regardless of cause.     I wonder why Nader didn't go off on THAT one.
In fact, there is actually a petition being circulated today to have the
government look into holding Ford responsible for  unusually high numbers
of deaths of Mustang passengers due to fires caused by a poor gas tank
design as installed in first-generation Mustangs.   


>Second,his book contained one chapter about the Corvair entitled, "Unsafe
at Any Speed.  

Actually, the chapter was titled "The Sporty Corvair" and it gained novelty
because it happened to be the FIRST chapter in Naders book "Unsafe At Any
Speed: The Designed In Dangers Of The American Automobile".   


>Third, so as not to be viewed as being pressured by Mr. Nader the Corvair
was produced three more years till 1969.  Fourth,and finally,the Corvair
was vindicated by the NHTSA in 1972,from Mr. Nader's and many other's
claims. Retractions never loom as large as initial shock headlines.
>
>Please check all of your facts before making inaccurate statements. Any
subject deserves no less.
>
>Bob Vukas


It's also worth mentioning that the Corvair is the ONLY car ever proven to
be safe by a Congressional investigation conducted by the NHTSA.    Yet the
myths of its so-called "safety issues" continue to be perpetuated 35 years
after the last Corvair was produced, in SPITE of solid evidence to the
contrary.  

The Corvair automobile IS indeed as safe or safer to drive as any of its
contemporaries, as demonstrated by exhaustive testing and examination and
evaluation by the government investigation conducted in the early 1970s,
several years *After* the car had already been dropped from production by
GM.    

Everybody seems to remember Naders book (albeit inaccurately) yet nobody
remembers the investigation that cleared the Corvair of all charges Nader
made against it in that same book.     




tony..