PART 2 OF 2 (CH. 5 CONT'D.)
Engineer-employees serve their companies in other important activities intended to reduce the scope of conflict between automobile makers and to control the content of government action wherever it cannot be avoided altogether. The principal institution for the industry coordination of decisions concerning the technical issues in vehicle safety is the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE), a tax-exempt organization founded in 1905, which describes itself as follows: "The object of the Society is to promote the Arts, Sciences, Standards and Engineering Practices connected with the design, construction and utilization of self-propelled mechanisms, prime movers, components thereof, and related equipment." The society holds meetings to discuss technical papers and develops engineering standards and recommended practices. SAE reported a gross income in 1963 of $1,549,808, composed mainly of individual membership dues and industry contributions.
The control by the automobile industry of SAE's motor vehicle standards work is so complete that the engineering community does not consider the society as anything more than a ratifier of industry policies and decisions. The Automobile Manufacturers Association is SAE's traffic light.
In the structure and operation of SAE's working committees is seen the impressive connections between SAE and the automobile industry. The automotive council of the SAE technical board is composed of numerous committees and subcommittees dealing with automobile safety. Membership on these committees is held mostly by engineer-employees of the motor vehicle manufacturers. Although membership in SAE is on an individual basis, the corporate employer is always identified alongside the member's name on the committee rosters. The automotive safety committee is composed of eight members-all employees of motor vehicle producers. The same is true of the bumper height technical committee, and over four-fifths of the membership of the body engineering committee is similarly constituted. Other committees, such as the brake committee, include a few representatives from universities, government agencies, and companies who supply the automobile industry.
Apart from numerical dominance, the automobile manufacturers have a practical veto power. SAE Technical Board Rule 8.1 states: "Reports submitted to the Council for approval, in general, should have the unanimous approval of the committee making such a submittal. Where unanimous approval cannot be achieved, reports shall have the approval of at least three-quarters of the members." Rule 8.6 reads: "Councils will strive for unanimous approval, and in no case will they approve a report which has not been approved by three-quarters of their members."
The automobile industry also finances the work leading to the development of standards or recommended practices. It does this by contributing to SAE staff support and by absorbing the time and expenses of its employees who, as SAE members, attend committee meetings and use company testing facilities in the writing of standards. SAE does not undertake work on a new standard or recommended practice unless requested to do so by the industry-dominated SAE technical boards -- which must reflect a consensus of their members. This intricate network of participation and control is a basic reason why no SAE standard, recommended practice, or information report in the motor vehicle field has ever been promulgated without industry endorsement.
SAE's entry into the automobile crash protection area was a late one. The first SAE recommended practice was in 1955, and dealt with specifying a minimum loop strength of three thousand pounds for a two-inch-wide seat belt. Since that year, SAE's work in vehicle safety has dealt either with specifying test procedures or with establishing minimum performance levels for those safety features which had become the subject of legislation or threatened legislation. These include seat belt assemblies and anchorages, passenger car side-door latches, and rear vision in passenger cars. Generally, however, SAE technical positions on vehicle safety are grossly incomplete or nonexistent. Bumper standards are apparently taken care of by SAE Standard J681, concerning bumper heights, which defines heights only for front bumper "dip" and rear bumper "lift" when the vehicle experiences a maximum brake stop at five to ten miles per hour. Another standard, SAE J903, deals with performance requirements of the windshield wiper, but not the area of the windshield to be wiped. SAE J839, the standard for passenger car side-door latches, was written by a subcommittee composed entirely of automobile industry employees. The standard calls for the latch to have a load resistance of 1500 pounds -- an unusually weak level that some automobile manufacturers have recently felt necessary to exceed. The requirements in Standard J839 for testing the latches are even more limited, failing to provide for several kinds of crash stresses.
SAE has never developed, for example, standards or recommended practices for tires, impact criteria for the steering assembly, glare levels, dashboard panel instruments and controls, sun visors, handles, knobs or other load-concentrating projections and passenger compartment crashworthiness. It was not until 1961 that industry representatives allowed the establishment of the Automotive Safety Committee.
The only other private standardizing organization that has dealt with aspects of the automobile is the major standards group in the United States -- the American Standards Association (ASA). (It has approved standards for automobile safety glass, glare and reflection levels, and vehicle inspection criteria.) ASA is a national federation of 140 technical societies and trade organizations, and has some 2200 company members. ASA does not initiate or write standards; it considers standards for approval only on the request of a responsible organization or group. [1]
As a result, ASA bas reflected the desire of the automotive industry to have SAE standards dominate the motor vehicle field. This important domination is made possible by the consensus principle that is crucial to the way ASA works. An ASA standard can be approved only if there is a consensus among all groups which are substantially concerned with its subject matter. This gives the automobile industry another veto on all proposals dealing with automobiles for, as an ASA statement reads, "Votes are weighed rather than counted." An objection by the automobile industry, or even a major automobile company, would be enough to outweigh all opposing votes.
Both SAE and ASA standards are advisory only. Their use by anyone engaged in industry or trade is voluntary, but since they are approved by the majority, they are used by the majority. In the motor vehicle safety field, these standards form the substance of a unified industry policy on particular technical issues. And the consensus principle makes almost certain that the lowest common denominator of performance requirements is adopted.
The typical pattern followed in SAE automotive safety standards or recommended practices is to state only a single minimum performance value -- such as the load to be withstood by door latch and striker assemblies -- without any accompanying technical reasoning or explanation. The committees work in secret, and there is no release of proposed standards or recommended practices for technical comment or criticism by SAE membership or the scientific and engineering community at large. The first time an SAE member sees the standard is after it has been formally promulgated. Once a standard is announced, the automobile industry can then say to the outside world that its products meet the standards set by the Society of Automotive Engineers -- which, in the words of a former SAE president, James Zeder, "serves no selfish interest."
The industry has found more ambitious objectives for SAE standards when it comes to translating those standards into public law. Their policy runs in this pattern: since standards inform the buyer of what he has a right to expect from the seller, the industry, as seller, recognizes the importance of getting SAE standards incorporated into laws and regulations which define the level of safety that must be assured to the consumer. As public pressure for safety legislation increases, activity of SAE commit tees will also increase to make sure that lawmakers will have industry-approved criteria to put into the new laws.
There is ample precedent for this approach. Automobile Manufacturers Association "field representatives" routinely advocate -- with success -- that state legislation employ an SAE standard as its yardstick. Seat belt laws in many states explicitly include SAE standards, for example. Brake fluid legislation in over twenty-five states is written on the basis of SAE standards. AMA lobbyists usually have little difficulty. Since state lawmakers have no alter native recognized source of technical standards, whatever is available is adopted. Should there be any skeptics, the prestige and standing of SAE is emphasized by citing its formal participation in the work of the ASA, the Highway Research Board of the National Academy of Sciences, the Interstate Commerce Commission's advisory committees, the National Committee on Uniform Traffic Laws and Ordinances, the National Highway Users' Conference and the National Safety Council. Such prestige and power makes almost irresistible the casting of SAE into the role of ad hoc legislator.
The Automobile Manufacturers Association is also alert to any threat of an independent standards-setting capability being set up in government. In 1960, the AMA suggested an amendment to H.B. 1341 (the original House bill directing the General Services Administration to set safety standards for government-procured vehicles). The proposed amendment read: "Such standards shall conform to nationally recognized standards such as those published by the American Standards Association and the Society of Automotive Engineers [and shall] be revised from time to time to revisions in said nationally recognized standards." This language was not adopted in the bill which finally became law (called the Roberts law) on August 30, 1964. The automobile makers simply shifted gears and tried to achieve the same objective through their industry advisory committee to the GSA officials who were administering the Roberts law. At the specification development conferences, the duet of William Sherman of the AMA and George Gaudaen of the SAE (who was formerly Sherman's assistant at AMA) sang a similar tune: if we don't already have the standards and test procedures for you, we'll have them soon.
Gaudaen's position was so blatantly attuned to the special interests of the industry that it became embarrassing to his colleagues from the AMA. SAE, after all, is supposed to be a professional association with a suite separate from that of the AMA in the New Center Building in Detroit. But Gaudaen advised GSA, with a mixture of the arbitrariness and authority that is so cl1aracteristic of the SAE, that it should dismiss from its proposed lists of safety features a number of items not considered to be of safety significance. Included in the list were seats to prevent neck injuries, bumper performance and heights, rear window defogger and wiper, and exhaust controls. He then insisted that consideration of five other features on GSA's proposed list be deferred until long-run studies by the SAE and the industry were completed. This group included safer instruments and knobs, handles and window controls, padded roof lining, drive signaling, and the design of instrument panel controls. The remaining items on the list Gaudaen tied to SAE standards and test procedures that were either already established or imminent under the SAE's speeded-up program to serve GSA in its mission.
SAE is no less diligent in protecting the commercial interests of the industry than it has been in defending the political interests of its sponsor. SAE's role as minion is shown in the story of the industry's long-standing practice of rigging odometers -- the devices that record the number of miles traveled.
In 1963 the National Bureau of Standards (Department of Commerce) released the MacKay report, which showed with irrefutable exactness that for American automobiles, a mile is not necessarily a mile. For years, as some alert motorists know, Americans have been driving less than they think they have. The MacKay study showed that automobile odometers over-registered mileage on an average of 3.21 per cent, with some cars registering an error of over 5 per cent.
Complaints about odometers have been registered for years with state agencies and the Federal Trade Commission. But state regulations defining the permissible margin of error were ignored by the industry and not enforced by the state administrators.
Few practices can be more deceptive than tampering with the integrity of a measurement, whether it be miles, pounds, or inches. Few deceptions could serve such a variety of purposes. Car and tire warranties based on mileage run out sooner when odometers are over-set. Gas-mileage-per-gallon claims of manufacturers are overestimated or inflated, making easier the task described by Ford's Ray Pittman: "We fight for fractions of one per cent for fuel economy." A car owner could receive a lower trade-in value because depreciation is estimated partly on total mileage traveled. Over-set odometers tend to make the car owner think his vehicle is ready to trade in sooner, which helps feed the new car turnover. Finally, customers who rent cars pay for miles they did not drive. Based on the estimate of 1.25 billion miles traveled in 1964 by rented passenger cars, a 3.31 per cent overcharge, at the rate of ten cents a mile, would amount to an overcharge of almost four million dollars. An average 3.21 per cent premium on gross sales is a healthy fillip for the large, car-buying rental companies.
The automobile industry learned of the National Bureau of Standards study of odometer performance in 1962. An Automobile Manufacturers Association odometer committee was formed to represent the industry in meetings with bureau officials who were working out new standards for the states so that odometers would have to register an average error nearer to zero. (Because a variety of conditions such as tire size, inflation pressure, weight, and road pavement affect odometer readings, it had been customary to provide for a plus-or-minus error tolerance range around zero.)
The AMA odometer committee did not dispute the National Bureau of Standards findings. It stated that member companies ordered odometers from suppliers according to SAE specifications. SAE recommended practice J678b permits a five per cent over-registration error.
But the AMA knew that the game was over, at least to the extent that it was played, and in December 1964 the Automobile Manufacturers Association informed the National Bureau of Standards that in 1965 manufacturers would install odometers that were set to the new bureau specifications.
The AMA position, so long unquestioned by the public guardians of weights and measures, was wholly untenable from both an engineering and a moral viewpoint It was technically simple to produce more accurate odometers. Yet inquiries about the role of SAE as a ratifying participant in a fraud on consumers still elicit only the stock reply from SAE's New York headquarters that "the speedometer and odometer are designed and manufactured to be as accurate as possible."
Despite all the facts, SAE apparently does not consider its position any more incongruous than the fact that it held shares in Hertz Corporation during the period of the odometer investigation. [2]
Another service performed by SAE for the automobile industry is public relations. For example, since a company brochure on the safety of its automobiles cannot avoid a partisanship that would call its objectivity into question, it is far more effective to have the "message" relayed to the public under the auspices of SAE. Indeed, anyone who writes to one of the "big three" automobile companies for printed matter on safety is likely to receive a thirty-seven-page paper entitled "The Safety the Motorist Gets," with the SAE emblem prominently displayed in the upper left hand comer. 'This booklet is a detailed attempt to show that the automobile manufacturers give the motorist "all the safety that can be built in without destroying the utility of his vehicle." The pamphlet has five sections, including contributions by all the domestic automobile makers; it ends with a section of full-page maps of all the companies' proving grounds and the assurance that safer automobiles have probably been the greatest contribution toward keeping the casualty rate down.
"The Safety the Motorist Gets" was published as SAE paper SP-165 in June 1959 and is still being circulated, suggesting that vehicle safety developments since that year have not diminished its enduring currency. It is an argumentative brief for the industry's commercial practices and policies in automotive safety. One of the instances in which the pamphlet was used occurred when the House subcommittee on health and safety began its hearings in 1959. One of the issues it was considering was whether new safety devices should be standard equipment or extra-cost options. The SAE paper, a copy of which had been dispatched to the committee by SAE General Manager John Warner, explained that proven safety devices fall into two categories: those devices whose "immediate application on all cars is considered virtually imperative, such as sealed-beam head lamps," and those which are "clearly an aid to safe driving, but something less than a vital necessity." The pamphlet went on to explain that safety equipment in the second category is first introduced as an option and only adopted as standard equipment "when public demand becomes substantial enough." As examples of items that had passed this test of the marketplace, the pamphlet cited windshield wipers and directional signals. As current examples of devices which the industry felt should first be put through this test, the paper listed power windows, power seats, reclining seats, head rests -- and seat belts!
"The Safety the Motorist Gets" discusses and defends controversial issues of design and industry policy which have no connection whatever with the stated purpose of SAE to advance the state of the art of automotive engineering. The SAE constitution said, "Matters relating to politics or purely to trade shall not be discussed at a meeting of this Society or be included in its publications." But "The Safety the Motorist Gets" is sprinkled with dozens of references to "industry" or "manufacturers" in the general context of praising the high industry standards, the rigorous testing and inspection, and the millions of miles of durability runs on the industry proving grounds.
Three months before SP-165 was released, Lloyd Withrow, head of the General Motors fuels and lubricants department, expressed his concern that SAE ought to publish better technical papers. He wrote: "I have talked with people who believe that SAE performs more like a trade association than a professional engineering society. These people say that the society appears to be more concerned with the production, sale and distribution of automotive products than either the development of new engineering knowledge or the application of sound engineering principles to the design of new automotive equipment." Few of SAE's 25,000 members would be surprised at Withrow's observations.
Only one member formally challenged the propriety of "The Safety the Motorist Gets" before the SAE's National Council. The council unanimously rejected the challenge, but SAE president Leonard Raymond wrote in the March 1960 issue of the SAE journal that "there may have been departures from best practice in connection with the paper in question ... and we intend to see to it that they are not repeated in the future." But Mr. Raymond did not request the automobile makers' public relations offices to cease distributing the paper.
The SAE automotive council and its committees are rarely called on to confront challenges or dissent. By planning the subject matter for the technical meetings, and by arranging for the papers to be delivered, SAE leaders have made certain that not a single paper devoted to engineering criticism of contemporary vehicle safety design has found its way into the SAE program. This is quite a record, since almost five hundred technical papers and articles on motor vehicle subjects are delivered each year at SAE gatherings.
On only one occasion -- the summer meeting of 1961 -- was the curtain parted briefly to permit the reading of a paper by Dr. William Haddon, a leading accident researcher who is associated with the New York State Department of Health. Dr. Haddon, whose background is in medicine and engineering, made an incisive analysis of the ways the medical and public health professions were approaching the problem of motor vehicle accident injuries, aided by techniques originally developed for the investigation and control of communicable diseases. He characterized both goals -- disease prevention and accident prevention -- as being fundamentally "engineering" problems. That is, concentration on the hostile environment -- the malaria swamp or the interior of a vehicle-is almost invariably more productive than trying to manipulate the behavior of people. He described to his engineering audience the path he saw ahead. "Our two professions," Dr. Haddon said, "have an objective in common which will continue to confront us probably for the remainder of our professional lives. This objective is the prevention, partial or complete, of some forty thousand deaths per year, and the reduction, amelioration or elimination of an additional four million injuries. ... The greatest challenge which you as a profession now face and may ever have faced, is the challenge of designing a vehicle which, under the normal conditions of its daily use, does not, in the accidents which inevitably happen, result in injury and death of substantial numbers of its users ... the success of your profession in the present decade will largely be weighed in terms of its success in handling this overwhelming problem."
Dr. Haddon's powerful appeal to automotive engineers to apply their professional dedication to the safety of their products was received with polite lack of interest. Later, even the politeness vanished. No SAE publication list contains a reference to his address. The heads of SAE did not consider it worthy of publication, and no reason had to be given for the omission, just as no reason had to be given for the inclusion of such items as remote from engineering as The Feminine Mystique in Design.
Actually Dr. Haddon's effort was doomed from the beginning. He was addressing a body that does not exist: the automotive engineering profession. The Society of Automotive Engineers bas no code of ethics, and it subscribes to no code of ethics in the engineering world. This is a serious lapse, ethics are more than slogans meant to fill a plaque to be hung on office walls. Ethics define important social interests which a profession assumes the responsibility to serve, and they require an independence from the erosive or destructive effects of commercial pressures.
For example, the code of ethics of the National Society of Professional Engineers makes clear what the duty of the individual engineer is in regard to safety. Section Two says, "The Engineer will have proper regard for the safety, health and welfare of the public in the performance of his professional duties. If his engineering judgment is overruled by non- technical authority, he will clearly point out the consequences. He will notify the proper authority of any observed conditions which endanger public safety and health.... He will not complete, sign or seal plans and/or specifications that are not of a design safe to the public health and welfare.... If the client or employer insists on such unprofessional conduct, he shall notify the proper authorities and withdraw from further service on the project."
In order concretely to develop the meaning of its code, the National Society of Professional Engineers' board of ethical review comments on actual cases that are brought to its attention. One case involved a company which manufactured a defective automated mass transportation system. The engineer responsible for the project reported to his superiors that the system failed the final tests and, as it was, presented a danger to the public. He was told that to meet contract commitments, the equipment would be shipped to the client-purchaser without notification of the failure of the final tests. Over the objection of the engineer, the shipment was made. Did the engineer have any further ethical duty? The board concluded that he did, stating that he should have brought the danger to the attention of the client and the responsible authorities.
In medicine, law, architecture, and other professions, academic institutions provide nourishment for the perpetuation of professional standards. But only a shadow of a professional discipline in the automotive engineering Held exists at universities. It is decidedly the poorest segment of the engineering curricula. Research on vehicle mechanics, for instance, involves only a half dozen small projects. Automobile collision testing and measurement is limited to UCLA's Institute of Transportation and Traffic Engineering -- and there on only a sporadic basis. Automotive engineering courses -- indeed, even engineering professors specializing in automotive mechanics -- are a rarity, as are graduate students who follow such a course of study. The amount of technical literature flowing from the universities is pitifully small. As the new engineering specialties expand and absorb the better engineering students, the situation in automotive studies and facilities at universities is not likely to improve. It is a condition that goes back many years and has had most unfortunate consequences which Leonard Segel of the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory has described thus:
"Instead of a student and faculty focus on automotive engineering that would generate a 'free' and an 'all-divulging' automotive literature, we have had an industry focus which ... does not develop a professional attitude among most engineers employed within the automotive industry. Both business management and engineering management are willing to take undergraduates, give them test-and-process engineering assignments, and gradually teach them the 'industry way.' It is argued that unless an atmosphere of professionalism surrounds the research worker, his efforts, whether good, bad, or mediocre, will come to no avail."
Professor Wolfgang Meyer of Pennsylvania State University is concerned with how the automotive engineering curriculum has neglected engineering problems with immense human welfare implications -- such as vehicle emissions and vehicle safety. Meyer points out that the development of automobile engineering has been overwhelmingly a proving ground, cut-and-try process.
For example, the theoretical study of engines or vehicle handling and braking bas lagged far behind the engineering applications. This deficiency makes empirical findings less complete, reduces their predictive value and limits the advance of automotive engineering.
The creative work published on the theoretical aspects of automotive technology-from tires to engines to vehicle dynamics -- has for many years been far greater at European universities and technical institutes than that coming from American academic institutions or the American automobile industry. The European research has long been the vanguard of the automotive engineering discipline.
The automobile companies have been wary of the possible implications of independent automotive research centers at universities. Such projects could become alternative sources of information about automobile technology, including the performance of contemporary cars, techniques for making them safer, and detailed data from which to prepare standards for government safety regulation. So far, the industry has had little to worry about; there are no such centers. So long as the professors remain "detached" in their pursuit of knowledge, the automobile companies have found that occasional retainers and educators' conferences at their manufacturing plants are enough to form their university relations policy.
Only one professor, James Ryan of the University of Minnesota, has squarely and persistently challenged the automobile manufacturers to build crashworthy vehicles. Ryan's credentials are impressive. They include creative achievements in industry and a thirty-year academic career during which he invented numerous devices, the most famous of which was the flight recorder that is now standard equipment for all jet transports. His distinction is not just one of intellect, but of courage and a professional commitment to engineering responsibility. On many occasions, in spite of frail health, he strapped himself into special deceleration carts and had himself driven into a wall to test his designs for reducing the forces of collisions. For fourteen years, until his retirement in 1963 because of a rheumatic heart condition, Ryan investigated and tested automobiles designed to prevent injuries to occupants during collisions. With a total budget of about $140,000, he developed automatic seat belts, hydraulic shock-absorbing bumpers, a large padded steering post with a short-travel absorber, a retracting steering-wheel rim for the driver, and a dashboard recessed under the windshield in front of the passenger. He tested all these designs in dozens of collision impacts, carefully recording the data from each test. His chief contribution was the energy-absorbing bumper. On November 13, 1957, accompanied by a graduate student, Ryan got into a 1956 Ford car, fitted with this bumper, at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico. The car was driven into a solid crash barricade at twenty miles per hour, with no injuries resulting to the passengers or the vehicle. In March 1961 a volunteer, Peter Schoeck, rode a cart into a wall at twenty-five miles per hour and suffered no injuries. Although a barrier crash at forty miles per hour generates four times more energy than a crash at twenty miles per hour, Ryan was set in his intention to prove that with refinements of his energy-absorbing designs, a collision at the forty-mile speed would result in no more than superficial injury. His funds and his health ran out before he could do so.
The response of automobile company engineers to Ryan's work was either to ignore it, or to scorn and ridicule him. In the classic pose of engineers reflecting corporate policies, they leveled criticisms about his bumper in a pejorative vein not at all characteristic of science. Every engineering authority outside of the automobile industry. considers Ryan's work to be an important contribution to vehicle safety. A Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory document stated in 1965: "Among the various proposed devices for injury attenuation in automobile crashes, the concept of an energy-absorbing front bumper presents the most favorable opportunity for a direct application of analytical and experimental techniques. It is noteworthy that the majority of both verbal and written criticism [there was only one written reference, a one-hundred word memo without data by GM's Kenneth Stonex] of Professor Ryan's experimentation are leveled at faults in his design, rather than at the basic principle of a controlled rate of energy absorption. In fact, it is sometimes claimed, without substantiating proof or evidence, that the sheet metal on modern automobiles is 'equivalent' to Ryan's bumper for the energy absorption function. However, Ryan's experimental results indicate distinct benefits, when compared with the corresponding frontal-collision responses of a 'standard' automobile, in the forms of a reduced peak vehicle deceleration and reduced peak seat-belt loads on the occupants."
The reception the industry gave Ryan's work illustrates how futile it is to expect that engineering contributions to recognized problems in collision safety will affect the automobile makers' product policy. Ernest Cunningham, editor of Design News, made the relevant distinction in 1960: "I do not question the ability of automotive designers. They can improve design safety. I question the moral honesty of the executive management responsible for policy direction, which year after year ignores design safety."
The lesson of many years is plain. The liberation of the engineering imagination for automotive safety cannot take place within the automobile industry. Nor, apparently, can it be stimulated to overcome internal corporate resistance by such outside contributions as Professor Ryan's. The remaining alternative is the creation of an independent technical capability outside the industry which sees vehicle safety as an engineering problem to be solved by engineering solutions, unfettered by industry constraints, secrecy, and sophistry.
Because of the efforts of New York State Senator Edward Speno and his automotive consultant, Henry Wakeland, the first positive step toward this objective has been taken. Their efforts resulted in an overwhelming vote by the New York legislature for the passage of a bill authorizing a feasibility study of a prototype safety car program. The bill, with a $100,000 appropriation, was signed by Governor Rockefeller on July 15, 1965.
Should the feasibility study result in the launching of the safety car program in 1966, it will be the first attempt to bring automotive safety technology within the mainstream of the modem systems analysis that has been used with such success In attaining aerospace missions. It is this level of technological capability which makes the disingenuous efforts of the automobile industry in safety appear so old-fashioned. As the achievements of space and defense technology reveal, missions today need only to be defined and financed in order to be performed. Now for the first time a state government is considering the purchase of such a performed mission in order to exercise its responsibility of applying the most effective measures to reduce casualties on the highway.
The Speno-Wakeland program will cost three to five million dollars-about the price of the latest jet fighter plane. For this modest expenditure three primary goals are anticipated: (1) the research, design, construction, and testing of several prototype cars embodying all feasible safety features and suitable for mass production, (2) a complete set of performance requirements and tests supported by full technical rationale on the basis of which the legislature can adopt safety standards and (3) complete public disclosure of design drawings, construction specifications, and knowledge, together with tooling requirements and cost analysis for limited mass production.
Two longer-range objectives of the program are the establishment of clear performance criteria that will enable motorists to judge the relative safety levels of the cars they purchase, and the provision of detailed data and designs for any manufacturer to utilize. It is hoped that competition for safety, so long avoided by the giant automobile companies acting jointly, will be stimulated in this manner.
The noble attainments which Wakeland, as director of the New York State Safety Car Project, has set for himself recall the comment of Dr. J. Douglas Brown, dean of the faculty at Princeton University: "The central attribute of a learned profession is responsibility, not for a segmented detail of a total problem, but for an effective solution of the total problem. This means for the profession of engineering that the days are past when each specialist can withdraw into his specialty and become a servant of someone else's grand design.... If engineers can design space ships to go to the moon, why can't they design a safer automobile?"
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NOTES:
1. ASA estimates its own prestige in this way: ''There is general understanding that ASA operates in the public interest. An example will illustrate the significance of this impartiality. Years ago, an association had difficulty in getting its safety standard accepted by a number of states as the basis for state safety regulations. The standard was technically sound. But apparently it was considered a special-interest group pursuing its own commercial motives. The standard was then submitted to ASA and was subsequently approved without changes as an American Standard. As such, it was accepted by the states without objection."
2. SAE also owns shares in several petroleum and tire manufacturing companies whose products are obviously integral to the automobile over which the society exercises its standardizing functions.