The case for (some) regulation, part 2.

• Author: Cook, Gareth G.
• Position: The politics of auto safety regulation - Cover Story

Do you really think the car companies voluntarily installed airbags?

Lee Iacocca didn't know he was being taped. During a secret morning meeting on April 27, 01971, he sat in the Oval Office, next to his boss Henry Ford II, pressing his case on the president. He spoke frankly, unaware the meeting was another of Richard Nixon's famous Memorex moments. "You can see," declared Iacocca, "that safety has really killed all our business."

The Department of Transportation had just issued a rule requiring that new cars be equipped with passive restraint systems, such as automatic seat belts or airbags. The features would save thousands of lives annually, but Iacocca was determined to convince the president that the real national interest lay elsewhere. "What safety is doing to us is gonna make inflation," Iacocca can be heard to say. "The Japs are in the wings, ready to eat us up alive."

Iacocca's plea fell on eager ears. Nixon was deeply suspicious of the consumer-safety "Naderites," as he called them. "They're a group of people who aren't one really damn bit interested in safety," sputtered Nixon. "What they're interested in is destroying the system."

"We have these damn gadgets," the president continued, "and the [unintelligible] light in the seat belt is enough." As the two Ford executives left for lunch, Nixon assured them that he would "review" the situation and that "cost effectiveness is the word."

After the meeting, Nixon sent presidential pit bull John Ehrlichman to have a chat with Transportation Secretary John Volpe--to "slow [him] down, to get him off this business," as Ehrlichman later explained. It worked. In October 1973, Volpe delayed the automatic restraint requirement by two years.

That delay, sadly, was a typical episode in the three-decade Battle of the Bag. As early as the sixties, the automakers were gathering their political and economic muscle to steamroll a regulation that would add, at most, a few hundred dollars to the cost of a new car, while saving thousands of lives each year.

New evidence, like the Nixon transcript, is painting an ever more detailed portrait of the lobbying equivalent of total war. The fight took the car companies' soldiers to all three branches of government--from the Oval Office, to the halls of the Capitol, to the hallowed courtroom of the Supreme Court. Although carmakers have come to embrace--and even profit from--the airbag, the war became, for them, a larger-than-life symbol of government interference in their bottom line, a war they were absolutely determined to win.

When Iacocca made his pitch to President Nixon, car safety standards were still very new. Seat belts weren't even standard equipment until 1968. The safety-consciousness that we take for granted today was, for most of the automobile's history, confined to a few dissidents inside the auto industry and the Department of Transportation. Most Americans simply subscribed to the car companies' routine explanation for the injuries and deaths that resulted from car accidents: "It's the nut behind the wheel."

But in 1965 an obscure young lawyer named Ralph Nader published Unsafe at Any Speed, a detailed description of the dangers of the Chevy Corvair, and the car safety debate went public. Nader showed how little effort went into designing cars that were better able to withstand accidents. Fuel tanks, for example, ruptured easily, and poorly designed steering columns sometimes impaled drivers.

The airbag predates even this decade of activism. The first patent was granted in 1953. By the late sixties, several teams of American engineers had refined the concept. Actually, the airbag's operation is simple. When a sensor detects a front-end collision, tough fabric bags inflate with nitrogen gas in one-tenth of a second, faster than a blink of the eye. The bags provide a soft cushion for the passengers' heads and upper bodies, which would otherwise strike the steering wheel, the dashboard, or even the windshield.

But auto executives didn't like the idea of an upstart consumer activist telling them how to design their cars. So they tried to shut Nader up--Detroit-style. General Motors hired detectives to trail Nader and dig up dirt. "They talked to friends, employers, and my old teachers," he recalls today. "They even had women approach me."

One day, Nader slipped away from a detective in the maze of Capitol building hallways. Frantic, the detective asked one of the guards which way Nader had gone, and the game was up. The guard demanded the hapless detective's identification and reported the incident. When asked by the press whether they had hired the man to tail Nader, all the car companies responded with a firm "No." All, that is, except for GM, which issued a firm "No comment."

As the Iacocca tapes show, most car executives quickly lost sight of the practical issue--whether airbags worked well and saved lives. But Ed Cole, raised in the old school of engineering and then president of GM, was convinced that airbags would work. He promised that GM would install one million airbags in its 1974 model-year cars.

But the generation that succeeded Cole (he retired in 1973) was less-inclined to...