6/28/00 9:00 a.m.
“Saint Ralph's” Original Sin
He built an empire on a shaky factual foundation.

By Ronald Bailey, science correspondent for Reason

n 1965, as a brash and energetic young lawyer, Ralph Nader famously charged that American automakers, in the blind pursuit of corporate profits, were knowingly manufacturing cars that endangered public safety. According to the canonical version of the story, Nader exposed this alleged corporate infamy in his book Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile. His "poster child" for hazardous vehicles was GM's sporty Corvair. Breaking with long standing American tradition, GM engineers had emulated European competitors, Porsche and Volkswagen, by putting the Corvair's engine in the rear. The car was a big hit with the public. Nader, however, saw perfidy and claimed that the design was flawed, causing the Corvair to fishtail easily and to roll over when cornering sharply.

Nader's wild charges might have been lost to history except that half-witted GM executives hired private detectives to pry into Nader's personal and financial life. The GM executives even schemed to compromise Nader by trying to tempt him with hookers. Of course, these underhanded activities, when they were revealed in The New Republic, lent immediate credence to Nader's claims. An outraged Senator Abraham Ribicoff held hearings on auto safety that eventually resulted in legislation creating the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) in the U.S. Department of Transportation. Nader has been a leftist icon ever since. The New Republic later went so far as to dub him "Saint Ralph."

There's one problem with this little morality tale of the activist David vs. the corporate Goliath: David's data were false.

Seven years after the publication of Unsafe at Any Speed, a definitive study by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration — the very agency Nader's book conjured into existence — concluded, in July 1972, that contrary to Nader's charges, the '60-'63 Chevrolet Corvair models were at least as safe as comparable models of other cars sold in the same period. The study also found, after extensive tests of the '63 Corvair and five other compact cars of various makes, that Corvair's handling in sharp turns was no more dangerous that that of other cars and did not result in abnormal potential loss of control. NHTSA concluded that the available accident data indicated that the rollover rate of the '60-63 Corvair was comparable to those of other light domestic cars.

Never mind: Being wrong on the Corvair hasn't hurt Nader's career one bit. Since the Corvair fiasco, Nader has created a vast empire of interlocking special-interest groups that terrorize the business community almost as effectively as the trial lawyers do. Nader, like so many other movement leaders on the Left, got his start by scaremongering the public with bogus facts. He should feel right at home in the Green Party.