He’s Still Around . . .

Ralph Nader is not only still alive – proof that the saying about only the good dying young is true – he’s still a “crusader for auto safety and other causes.”

Except he’s not that at all. Nor has he ever been.

Nader has always been a busybody type who figured out that busybody-ism could be empowered by using the government to impose it on people – in the name of “auto safety.” That is not “crusading.” It is coercing. The trick worked. It continues to work – because when most people hear “safety” they automatically submit. It works very much in the same way that “racism” works to pre-empt any questioning of such things as Black History Month or African American Studies.

It works even better when it is backed by the force of government, which is what Nader and his proteges (including the queen of all the “safety” termagants, Joan Claybrook) relied on from the get go.

Nader’s obnoxious but unadmitted-to premise has always been his contempt for what he sees as the the stupidity of other people. Which for him takes the form of not being in agreement with Nader, who hates cars because he hates the freedom of movement and freedom of choice they embody.

Instead of saying that, he says that anyone who bought a Chevrolet Corvair, for instance, was too stupid to understand the car was “unsafe.” What the car actually was, was different. It was very sensitive to tire inflation pressure and (unlike all the other American cars of the era) the recommended inflation pressures were different for the front and rear tires, because the car was rear-engined and so was weight-biased toward the rear. Just like a VW Beetle. Just like an early Porsche 911. Both those cars also had similar rear suspensions and handled differently than the typical front-engined/rear-wheel-drive American car of the time.

So why was the Corvair alone deemed “unsafe”?

It could not have been on account of the  Corvair’s specifically different front-to-rear air pressure specifications or its rear suspension layout. It was that unlike the VW Beetle, the Corvair had six rather than four cylinders and more than twice the power.

And that it cost much less than a Porsche.

It was thus within the means of people who could afford a Beetle – but not a 911. Consider the implicatoons.

People who could afford a 911 were generally people who were familiar with the different handling characteristics of powerful, rear-engined European sports cars – particularly when they were driven fast in the curves. The cost of entry largely precluded those unfamiliar with the handling characteristics of rear-engined sports cars from driving them – and getting into trouble in them. The 911 was not “unsafe.” It was different.

The VW Beetle was also different – in a different way. It took comparatively forever to get going and was difficult to get it going too fast; this provided a kind of built-in safety net for the inexperienced driver. It was a forgiving car because it was a slow car.

The Corvair, on the other hand, was both powerful (relative to a Beetle) and affordable (relative to a Porsche) and that was also different. This was its weakness, if you want to call it that. Lots of people unfamiliar with rear-engined, rear-biased cars that are sensitive to front-rear tire pressure differences bought Corvairs and drove them as if they were no different than than the front-engined/rear-drive American cars they were used to. Many inflated the front and rear tires to the same pressure, because they just assumed that was the proper thing to do.

Was this the Corvair’s fault?

If it was, then the Beetle and 911 had the same faults – and yet Nader never said they were “unsafe at an speed.” He targeted the Corvair – some say because he’d been paid (under the table) to do so by VW, which was alarmed by the Corvair because it was basically a superior Beetle; it was larger and had ample power and working heat and it cost about the same as the Beetle.

It sold really well when it came out in late 1959 as a new 1960 model.

What’s for-sure is that the Corvair was no more “unsafe” than a Beetle – or a 911 – if driven with respect for its different layout and with the tires correctly inflated (in this regard, the more recent -’90s-era – fiasco with the Ford Explorer was also chiefly caused by improperly inflated tires and idiot drivers rather than because the Explorer was “unsafe”).

Nader’s true goal was never “safety.”

It was always control – using “safety” as the pretext. His attack on the Corvair was a precursor to the use of government power to force people to buy (and later, inevitably, wear) seatbelts and then to pay for air bags in their cars, whether they wanted them being an irrelevance. The “consumer advocate” always believed – but never said – that “consumers” (an aptly contemptuous word, suggestive of hogs rather than customers) were too stupid to know what was “best” for them and needed Nader and his like to tell then what it was, with government making sure they got it.

If the Corvair – if any car – has a defect that makes it unsafe irrespective of proper handling, it is a matter that can be remedied by the courts. This having the great virtue of not empowering busybodies such as Nader. In court, it would be the burden of the plaintiff to prove the car was defective rather than different.

And it would require standing – something Nader has always presumed he has but does not because he’s never been the victim of the “unsafe” things he excoriates. The man never owned or even drove a Corvair. He presumes to represent abstract “victims” who never asked him to. In this, he is like our  “representatives” (sic) in Congress, who pretend that we granted them proxy power to act on our behalf. They both wear a false cloak of legitimacy.

The time’s long since past that it be roughly taken off – by us.

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