PART 1 OF 2
Chapter 5: The Engineers
Nearly one-half of all the automobiles on the road today will eventually be involved in an injury-producing accident. In 1964, automobiles killed 47,700 people and injured over four million. At present rates, one of every two Americans will be injured or killed in an automobile accident. The number of deaths by automobile is twenty-five per cent greater than it was in 1961; the increase from 1951 to 1961 was only three per cent. In accidents involving all modes of transportation -- motor vehicles, trains, ships, and planes -- the motor vehicle accounts for over ninety-two per cent of the deaths, and ninety-eight per cent of the injuries. This mass trauma represents a breakdown in the relation between the highway transport system and the people who use and control it. From an engineering standpoint, when an accident injury occurs, it is a result of the failure of the technological components of the vehicle and the highway to adapt adequately to the driver's capacities and limitations. This failure is, above all, a challenge to professional engineering, which in its finest work has not hesitated to aim for total safety.
Automatic elevators are the safest transportation system known to man; anyone can use them with the assurance that accidents will be at an absolute minimum. In automobile manufacturing plants, engineers responsible for worker safety have "zero frequency" of accidents as their objective. In the aviation and space fields, the meticulous anticipation of possible breakdowns in man-machine interactions and the development of fail-safe mechanisms are the fundamental orientations. In the space field, waiting to learn from accident reports is an unthinkable procedure; in aviation it is a last resort.
In car manufacturing plants, the production engineers analyze machine design, operation, and work practices so they can anticipate and eliminate accident-injury risks to men working on the production of automobiles. The stated goal of General Motors of "no injury-producing accidents" is attained in a number of their plants each year. This plant safety has produced dividends in the form of greater quantity and consistency in production, less worker training, fewer breakdowns in the production process, and lower insurance costs.
But the dead and injured consumers of automobiles do not interfere with production and sales. They are outside the self- disciplining systems of plant safety, and when it comes to passenger safety the hard-headed empiricism of the production engineer does not apply. Rather, the so-called automotive safety engineer devotes himself to the defense of the automobile created by his colleagues in the styling and marketing departments.
For example, in 1954 a banker in New York who owned a Buick wrote to General Motors suggesting that the dashboards were dangerous in accident conditions. "The other day I had to step quickly on the brake to avoid hitting a little kitten, and in so doing, my son, eight, was thrown against the dash and broke off a front second tooth. If some padding can be applied it will help save faces and maybe lives. This is just a suggestion for safer motoring for all." The letter was given to Mr. Howard Gandelot for reply. As the company's vehicle safety engineer, Mr. Gandelot displayed sympathy with his correspondent's predicament. "Driving with young children in an automobile always presents some problems," he wrote. "As soon as the youngsters get large enough to be able to see out when standing up, that's what they want to do -- and I don't blame them. When this time arrived with both our boys I made it a practice to train them so that at the command 'Hands!' they would immediately place their hands on the instrument panel if standing in the front compartment, or on the back of the front seat if in the rear, to protect themselves against sudden stops. This took a little effort and on a couple of occasions I purposely pumped them a trifle when they didn't respond immediately to the command so that they learned quickly. Even now when either one of them is on the front seat, at the command of 'Hands!' they brace themselves. I frequently give these commands even when there is no occasion to do so, just so we all keep in practice."
Another attitude toward passenger safety was reflected in the observation in 1958 of Dr. Lawrence Hafstad, director of the General Motors research laboratories, who said, "More progress can be made in traffic safety by emphasizing the relation between the driver, the signaling system, and the road, than by undue emphasis on a crash-proof car, which could lead us to a progressive stalemate analogous to the classic conflict between projectile and armor plate."
Dr. Hafstad is a physicist, the former head of the Atomic Energy Commission's reactor development division. In making his political defense of corporate policy, Dr. Hafstad was not speaking as a scientist. Nor was Mr. Gandelot advising as a professional engineer. Both men were behaving as employees, and for them General Motors is more than an employer, it is a faith to which they have committed their occupational, if not their professional efforts. This sort of commitment has been most clearly reflected in the careers of the automotive safety engineers, who have been assigned the task of being the company spokesmen whenever the issue of safe vehicle design is raised at technical meetings or in public forums.
One of these men is Kenneth A. Stonex of General Motors, who has in recent years been the major spokesman and chief researcher for his company on the subject of safety. Mr. Stonex's approach has been obtuse and ingenious-and has consistently avoided confronting the problem of the unsafe vehicle. Although he Is a mathematician and engineer, Stonex has shown greater interest in history. Only with a perspective over the years, he believes, can people appreciate how fortunate they are in having their present-day automobiles. For his point of reference, Stonex borrowed a 1910 Oldsmobile Limited from the museum of the Oldsmobile division and prepared several technical papers comparing it with the 1955, 1960, and 1964 models.
The 1910 model was half a story high, which made getting into it something of a climb and getting out of it a hazard of some significance to elderly people. By contrast, he showed that current automobiles are about two and one-half feet lower and much more difficult to overturn. The 1910 Oldsmobile had a large, flat plate-glass windshield which shattered into sharp pieces when it broke. It had a wooden steering wheel with a cast-aluminum hub and spokes which would break into piercing stubs on light impact It bad acetylene headlamps with no provision for dimming or aiming except by bending the supports. Heavy brass rails for lap-robes were attached to the seat back and presented a collision hazard. The ear bad rear-wheel, external mechanical brakes with linings exposed to water, dust, and dirt. The rear door latch of the 1910 Oldsmobile moved forward to open the door, and the ear had a manual crank and elementary suspension system.
Stonex then compared these features with contemporary designs and concluded that "there has been a great deal of improvement in design over the fifty-four-year period." His basic conclusion cannot be denied, but he might have added that the demands of greatly increased speed and power requirements show that the relative increase in operational safety was far from as large as the absolute increase.
It is true that since the turn of the century the automobile companies have adopted better brakes, the electric self-starter, "safety glass," all steel bodies and roofs, independent front suspension, the automatic transmission, and directional signals, and have attached longer-lasting tires. Manufacturers are producing a car that is more reliable operationally than the vehicle which launched the motor age at the turn of the century. The same luminous comparison can, of course, be made between modern turnpikes and the muddy roads that existed before World War I, or between jet aircraft and a 1910 monoplane. The difference is that the builders of roads and planes do not make a practice of referring to their primitive predecessors as evidence of present progress. The question regularly begged by Stonex as he makes his rounds with his 1910 analogy is, "Why has General Motors not come up with the answers to make the modern car as safe as technology can make it?"
This line of inquiry is a probe against which Stonex has prepared an elaborate defense. The most concise expression of his theory appeared in an article he wrote for the General Motors Engineering Journal in 1963. The journal is aimed at the engineering faculty and students at technical institutes and universities. Stonex set these limits on engineering imagination: "Early post-war impact tests were performed at the [General Motors] Proving Ground by letting a remotely controlled test car coast down a steep grade and collide with a massive concrete barrier. In these tests the impact speeds were approximately 30 mph and deceleration rates on the undeformed part of a car frame were about 30 g. The catastrophic nature of these tests resulted in the belief that the threshold of serious and probably fatal injury is far below normal highway speeds. These tests led to the conclusion that it is impossible to provide secure protection during impacts of this nature by any amount of design modification, or by any restraining devices that the average driver would be willing to use."
In numbers of other technical articles, Stonex has repeated in one form or another this early post-war discovery as though it were an immutable law of nature. Vehicle design for crashworthiness, he told an automobile safety meeting in 1963, is effective protection against injury and death for no more than the "range of present suburban traffic speeds: Five seconds later in the same report he admitted that "little energy-absorption engineering has been done" by the industry; he did concede that this work was the industry's responsibility. Doggedly adhering to his position, Stonex ignored a technical paper presented at the Fifth Stapp Car Crash Conference by two General Motors engineers whose report said that "even in car-to-car collision impacts at 50 mph, cars can be designed so that the crash energy is absorbed and dissipated with little or no damage to, and reduced deceleration in the occupant compartments of the colliding cars."
Stonex's viewpoint about the limits of vehicle design safety puts him in the class of the engineer at the torn of the century who saw no further need for the patent office because every conceivable useful idea had already been patented. He also avoids the fact that the large majority of accidents that produce serious injuries and fatalities occur at impact speeds under forty miles per hour and that even within his arbitrary "low ceiling," a tremendous number of accidents could be prevented with the design of safer vehicle features, such• as braking and control systems and adequate tires.
Stonex displays such engineering eccentricity about car safety because of the realities he has learned as a thirty-year employee of General Motors. His adjustment has taken the form of convincing his superiors that, as the world's largest car manufacturer, it had nothing to lose and much to gain by devoting some attention to the problem of highway design. As Stonex told a friend, somewhat wistfully, "My interest in improved highway design will probably contribute more to highway safety than anything else I can do."
The case for General Motors taking an interest in highway design delighted the public relations office of the company. The research program was launched with the announcement that the safest highway system in the world was the sixty- five-mile private road system at the General Motors proving grounds in Milford, Michigan. This was supported with accident injury figures which, up to 1958, showed that the proving grounds roads were twenty-live limes safer than public highways.
At that point Stonex expanded his work. He reasoned that the impressive safety record was due primarily to the control of access, one-way traffic, and fewer roadside obstacles. This led him to propose the general elimination of roadside obstructions --stones, boulders, trees, culvert head-walls, sharp ditches and severe slopes, lamps and utility poles, bridge abutments, present types of guard rails, road signs, and other vehicles, whether they were parked or moving in opposing directions or at intersections. This clearing out, Stonex held, would come close to preventing collisions characterized as "ran-off-the-road" and "opposite-direction" types. These kinds of collisions cause, on the average, twelve thousand and six thousand fatalities respectively every year.
One-way highways with controlled access can eliminate opposing traffic collisions; clearing the roadside of obstacles can allow the driver to recover control of his vehicle or simply come to a stop on a gently sloping roadside, instead of smashing into a tree or other impediment. According to Stonex, these ideal road conditions are possible with the "application of well-known engineering technology."
A three-year program ending in 1962 was undertaken at the General Motors proving grounds to put Stonex's ideas into practice. Trees were uprooted, ditch bottoms rounded, slopes graded, dangerous guard-rail constructions replaced with designs made safe for collision. Stonex and his associates designed lamp poles, bridge parapets, and suspended traffic signs to meet the criteria of the no-obstacle highway. As a result of this work, the roadsides at the proving grounds are now clear of obstacles and are safely traversable for almost one hundred feet from the edge of the road pavement. "It would be pretty hard to commit suicide on proving ground roadsides," Stonex observes proudly.
When Stonex looks at the American highway system he is only partly satisfied with the 41,000-mile interstate system scheduled for completion by 1972. Although many of his suggestions were foreseen in 1956 when federal and state officials wrote the standards for this new highway system, Stonex describes the other three and a half million miles of American roads with fervid indignation: "r propose that our highway system design and operating practice is precisely that which we would have built if our objective had been to kill as many people as possible; we have made a game of it by some qualifications, such as 'Drive to the right,' 'Yield to the car on the right at an intersection,' 'Stop at stop signs,' 'Keep your car under control.' This is the real transportation problem that remains to be approached. What we must do is to operate the 90% Or more of our surface streets just as we do our freeways ... [converting] the surface highway and street network to freeway and Proving Ground road and roadside conditions."
Stonex has looked into the urban road problem even from the aerial perspective. On this subject he says, "The passenger who flies over any of our cities is struck by the tremendously large proportion of the surface area which is given over to roof tops; in many areas, the most conspicuous parts of the landscape below are the roof tops and the street surfaces. To conserve this valuable area, there does not seem to be any practical reason why long-term planning cannot arrange that new roads be built over the buildings in commercial districts and heavily congested residential districts so that the road pavement serves as the roof deck. In central business districts, we might even have to think of horizontal tunnels through the buildings to carry automotive traffic, just as we have vertical tunnels to carry elevator traffic."
This summary of General Motors' highway design work comprises the major published output of its crash research during the past ten years. Mr. Stonex blithely ignores that fact. In April 1963 the American Engineer, journal of the National Society of Professional Engineers, opened a critical analysis of the automobile with these words: "It would be hard to imagine anything on such a large scale that seems quite as badly engineered as the American automobile. It is, in fact, probably a classic example of what engineering should not be." Stonex wrote a long rebuttal to the editors in which he cited six technical papers to show the crash research going on at General Motors. Insofar as any technical contributions were concerned, every one of these papers dealt with highway safety design.
Concentrating on highway design rather than vehicle design serves two important purposes of General Motors management. First, it is extraordinarily cheap. The work keeps three or four engineers busy at the proving ground crashing a few cars against some guard rails and bridge parapets for the benefit of visiting delegations and provides the company with the material for endlessly repetitive papers at technical meetings. Second, there are no tooling costs implicit in highway design suggestions. Safer highways, obviously, are paid for by the public, not by General Motors.
Stonex's work is a useful contribution to the standards already employed in building the new interstate system. But raising the other ninety-nine per cent of the highway system to New York Thruway standards would amount to the largest public works project in history. Changing over a nation's three and a half million miles of highways in this way would take thirty to thirty-five years and would cost hundreds of billions of dollars.
But the cars on the road today -- their average age is six years -- can be changed over in a much shorter time and at an immeasurably lower cost. It hardly seems the most logical route to traffic safety for the largest producer of automobiles in the country to devote the bulk of its staff and resources in crash safety research to the area where it has no implementing power, rather than to put its talents to work on vehicle design, where it has full power and control.
The work of Stonex as chief "automotive safety engineer" for General Motors has been devoted almost exclusively to an ambitious project to remake the road system of America, a proposal that only diverts attention and concern away from the vehicles that must negotiate those roads.
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Alex Haynes is the Ford Motor Company's executive engineer in charge of safety. In this capacity he has represented his company before the Roberts House subcommittee on traffic safety, and in 1964 and 1965 he was Ford's representative at the industry conferences with the General Services Administration, the agency charged with establishing safety standards for federally purchased passenger vehicles.
Haynes pursues company directives with a persistence that subdues any critical capacity he may have as a professional automotive safety engineer. As the Ford spokesman, Haynes has been the most intransigent participant in the discussions leading to the preparation of GSA standards. At formal conferences, in personal meetings with GSA officials, and in frantic last-minute telephone calls from Detroit, he waged a battle to narrow the number of safety features for GSA consideration and, later, to water down the proposed standards prior to their final revision in June 1965. His fervor surprised even his counterparts at Chrysler, General Motors, and American Motors. One of them explained Haynes's behavior as being the result of the pressure he was under from top management at Ford because of problems of certain Ford models in meeting the originally proposed standards.
Whatever the reason, Ford, represented by Haynes, was the only vehicle manufacturer which advised GSA not to consider any standards dealing with bumpers, rearward displacement of the steering column, and exhaust emission controls.
At the first meeting with GSA, in November 1964, Haynes was particularly adamant about bumpers. He did not see what was so essential about them "from a safety standpoint." Dr. Floyd Van Atta, of the Department of Labor, asked which of the two functions, decoration or energy-absorption, the current automobile bumper was intended to perform. Haynes seemed incapable of separating the two points, finally conceding only that "our business includes styling" as a "very necessary thing." It was left for Chrysler's Roy Haeusler to put an end to the fencing: "I think today's bumpers serve primarily as a parking guard.... The bumper is not playing a major role in the total job of absorbing collision energy when these collisions are of greater magnitude than simply rough parking."
Other manufacturers agreed to an innocuous bumper height standard, but Haynes fought until the end against even the principle of including the bumper under any safety standard. Haynes's engineering background must have taught him the great potential in safer bumpers for the significant energy absorption of impact forces. Prior to 1958, his engineering associates at Ford had worked on such safety bumpers. But this background obviously receded before Ford management's desire to defend the unfettered flexibility of company stylists. For their part, the stylists seem dedicated to the proposition that the function of the bumper is to look nice -- and to protect the bumper. (Ford's engineering skills labored under no such inhibitions in its work on energy-absorptive mechanisms for the aerospace field. Its aeronutronic division developed in 1962 and 1963 an "impact limiter" for the Ranger project, designed to modify the tremendous landing forces to levels that protect the most delicate instruments in the lunar-landing spacecraft.)
Another position which Haynes presented to GSA was the highly exaggerated claim that three to four years advance notice must be given to his company before it could adopt the standards in its vehicles. In May 1965 he told GSA that it was too late to change the location of the ignition key (for safety purposes) in the 1967 models. He favored talking about 1969 models when considering safety features for instrument panels.
It has long been routine practice for the automobile companies to talk about the "three year lead-time" needed for planning a particular model-year's automobile. This put off any legislation from going into effect before three years' time and discouraged a number of administrators and legislators from doing anything in the safety field.
Depending on the vehicle component or feature, "lead-time" is a relative concept that can be shortened or lengthened according to the importance attached to prompt change by company management New manufacturing operations are cutting down necessary "lead-time." The so-called "lead-time" for design, tooling, and manufacturing of an entirely new car, like the Corvair or the Mustang, was only two years.
V. D. Kaptur of General Motors has said, "An engineering breakthrough by one of the divisions, or the announcement of new competitive cars, may change the entire concept of a program already under way. As an example, the wedge-roof four-door hardtop on the '59 and '60 cars was a last-minute addition to the line, and tamed out to be one of our best sellers." Chevrolet's Godfrey Burrows described the development of a new frame for the 1955 Chevrolet -- no minor change -- as taking only fourteen months from preliminary design to mass production. In reply to a question in late 1964 about whether the 1967 models were "frozen," a Fisher Body engineer replied, "Nonsense; even the 196s's aren't frozen," and he cited a case where a grill was changed in the middle of the model year. In 1963, Ford stylist Joseph Oros said, "Today it takes two years to get a car out and into production. Technology will soon be cutting six to eight months off that time. It means we will be able to swing better with public whimsy and give cheaper, better products to people."
Alex Haynes was not unaware of these facts of automobile production. But his job was to disguise management reluctance as technological impossibility. In performing that task he served his superiors with unquestioning loyalty and single-mindedness.
Roy Haeusler, Chrysler's leading automotive safety engineer, is the most articulate spokesman on safety in the industry. At times his candor in public forums and safety meetings, though more analytical than blunt, has embarrassed his colleagues. After hearing Haeusler say publicly that there are many ways to make a vehicle safer without increasing costs if only the engineering is done right in the first place, one company engineer said, "There goes honest Roy again; he's the kind of person of whom you don't ask a question unless you can stand the answer."
Haeusler has labored since 1934 with singular ineffectiveness insofar as persuading Chrysler management to produce safer cars. Perhaps a high point in his career occurred at the Eighth Stapp Car Crash Conference. George Gibson, Chrysler's Director of Product Planning, delivered an address (prepared substantially by Haeusler) in which he told an audience composed of hardboiled, independent collision researchers, some of whom had risked personal danger in order to advance the frontiers of collision protection: "Safe car design is one way to keep a customer ... We hope that the public will use the safety features that we do have available. There is nothing that will accelerate progress in safety design more than public demand for the safety features and safety equipment which are available. Public acceptance of available safety features will come only if those in a position to exercise leadership do exercise it. We ourselves are taking the lead in urging all our executives to order available safety options on their own cars."
Haeusler thanked Gibson by saying, "You can be sure that no one appreciated those words more than I." He was not being polite. For Gibson's words represent Haeusler's adjustments to the constraints of corporate reality, while at the same time salvaging some achievements from a frustrating career in automotive safety. Like the good soldier who disagrees with his superior, Haeusler has maintained a strong loyalty to company policy, but has tried to bring about a change through normal channels.
He has chosen to emphasize the element of consumer demand, which, because it votes with dollars, is more likely to catch the ear of the company policy makers who then might be persuaded to "give them more of what they want."
Haeusler has even gone so far as to state that what is needed is "arousing of the public to a greater sense of personal responsibility for making decisions in favor of safety equipment in buying a car, rather than confining attention to wheel covers and whitewall tires. If the motorist were willing to give up these two frills alone, he would then have the money to pay for at least four and maybe six seat belts for his car." To suggest that consumers divert money from style to safety is revolutionary talk in Detroit, and Haeusler is not prone to say it often or publicly. The consequences of following through would be disagreeable to corporate management. For example, Haeusler has said that the consumer's welfare requires that the automobile companies inform them of the difference between function and appearance on an entirely objective basis. This would mean, for example, that Chrysler should inform consumers of the differences in side-impact and roll- over strength between the hard-top convertibles and conventional four-door sedans with upper center posts. But Chrysler does not inform the public of these differences, and neither do any of the other manufacturers.
The difficulty with Haeusler's approach is that it shifts the responsibility from the automobile maker -- where it belongs and can be most completely exercised -- to the consumer whose exercise of initiative can only be trivial and agonizingly slow. Fundamental automobile safety is not a matter of attachable devices and features offered as optional extra-cost equipment. It is a matter of building safer designs into the car.
The industry has not recognized the immorality of selling style as part of the basic cost of cars while requiring the buyer to pay extra for safety. For example, padded dashboard panels have been offered as optional equipment for ten years; the consumer purchase of this extra-cost option has been high, yet not until the GSA regulations were imminent did the industry decide to make such padding standard equipment on all 1966 models.
This is consistent with the industry's long practice of not introducing safety features as standard equipment unless there is compulsion or threat of legislation or regulation. Haeusler wants the compulsion of the marketplace instead of the compulsion of the law. The consumer, who is expected to buy more and more products each day, is also expected to exercise a purchasing sophistication that is wholly unrealistic. In 1850, the consumer's day was twenty-four hours long and a purchase was a major event, Today the day is still twenty-four hours long, but purchases come In rapid succession-purchases of much more complex products. To provide controlling guidelines, Haeusler wants the consumer to demand not just "safety," but those limited safety features which the companies decide to reveal to the market This approach would keep consumer safety expectations within bounds and avoid public participation (through government) In corporate safety policies. Then the car makers would determine whether to provide them as options or standard equipment, and at what price.
As a strategy to get his company moving, Haeusler's approach is understandable. But as a belief it is detrimental to the emergence of manufacturing integrity. That Haeusler does, indeed, believe in it is illustrated by his comparison of compelling the customer to take safety as being similar to compelling people to take polio shots. This is analogy by desperation.
The issue is not, as Haeusler would have it, a matter of compulsion, but simply one of value not received. Every year American car buyers are paying, according to a study by Massachusetts Institute of Technology economists, about seven hundred dollars per car for the costs of the annual model change. With such a gigantic billing, it would not be unreasonable to anticipate an annual product improvement that afforded a substantial safety advance.
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The positions taken by Stonex, Haynes, and Haeusler on automotive safety reflect their secondary status in the hierarchy of corporate priorities and budgeting. In the absence of company figures, federal highway safety researchers estimate that the automobile manufacturers allot a total of two million dollars a year to the design and evaluation of crash safety improvements. This amounts to about twenty-three cents for every car sold. This is an estimate that gives a generous benefit of the doubt to the companies. For the research output disclosed by them to the world of engineering and science is so insignificant that it constitutes a mockery. The few technical papers describing their crash tests are heavily repetitive and offer little insight into the development of safer designs. The major studies in collision protection have been done by a handful of university and military researchers -- and even company safety engineers have recognized this fact.
Although the collision safety testing and development programs of the automobile manufacturers have been woefully deficient, there is strong evidence in the form of company-held patents and certain public statements that more is known than is admitted at meetings sum as the ones the industry held with GSA officials. For example, in describing a new impact sled, Stonex told a group of specialists, "This laboratory instrument makes it possible to simulate dynamic tests of complete cars in up to 30 mph head-on crashes, and of components to much higher severity. Test results are confidential, naturally." Statements like this shock physicians who are working with safety problems. Such policies, wrote Dr. C. Hunter Shelden in 1955, if "translated into medicine would be comparable to withholding methods of lifesaving value."
Secrecy in safety data and developments is part of the environment which forces men like Stonex, Haynes, and Haeusler to subordinate whatever initiatives might How from professional dictates in favor of preserving their passive roles as engineer-employees. The 1965 graduating class of Lawrence Institute of Technology heard the message that has shaped the working lives of the automotive safety engineers. Sumner B. Twiss of Chrysler advised the new engineers at commencement exercises that "a prime requisite for getting ahead in industry is identification of your personal objectives with the objectives of the company." Twiss declared that leadership in industry goes to those who believe in the company and what it is doing and feel that its grand schemes reflect their own personal schemes. This attitude, he said, can be more important for advancement than depth of technical knowledge.