Ralph Nader
Four years ago, a family in San Diego, California died when the gas pedal in their Lexus got stuck. It wasn't until that crash and a number of other deaths that Toyota finally acknowledged publicly there was a problem and recalled 3.8 million Toyota and Lexus vehicles.
In 2004 car companies set a record when they admitted about 31 million cars had rolled off their assembly lines with various defects.
That record has already been shattered this year and it's only August. In the first half of 2014 alone, over 37 million vehicles had been recalled. A few examples from one three-week stretch earlier this year:
* on March 18th, 886 thousand Honda Odysseys were recalled for a potential fuel leak, increasing the risk of a fire;
* the following week, Nissan announced that almost a million of its vehicles had faulty sensors in the passenger seats, meaning the airbag might not deploy;
* on the same day, GM recalled more than 2 million vehicles for faulty ignition switches;
* on April 9th, Toyota admitted there were different defects in 6.4 million vehicles sold around the world.
Flashback almost 50 years. In 1965, a young, upstart lawyer named Ralph Nader published Unsafe at Any Speed, a book that sparked a revolution in the auto industry. Nader accused car makers of putting aesthetics ahead of safety; he blew the whistle on vehicles that were dangerous to drive (most notably the Chevrolet Corvair); he pressured manufacturers to standardize safety features; and he demanded that government step up and regulate car safety.
Within a year, Congress voted unanimously to pass the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act, which established the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Much has changed in the intervening decades, and much has not.
In April, a subcommittee of Congress grilled General Motors' CEO Mary Barra about the deaths of at least 13 people. This was due to a defective GM ignition switch that would have cost all of 57 cents per car to repair. Politicians accused Barra of cover-up and they expressed outrage that GM was putting "cost culture" over "safety culture".
When Ralph Nader criticized GM five decades ago, the company harassed him and he sued for excessive invasion of privacy. The money from that legal victory helped fund his ongoing battles for consumer rights.
Mr. Nader is the founder of the Center for Study of Responsive Law in Washington, D.C. and the author or co-author of dozens of books. His most recent, Unstoppable: The Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State, will be published at the end of April.