History
A major foundation for modern awareness of the defects found in automobiles was laid when Ralph Nader published his book Unsafe at Any Speed about the Chevrolet Corvair and defects found in other vehicles. A focus of this book was the car manufacturers' intentional choice of saving a few dollars for each car instead of providing safe design and manufacture of their products, as well as avoiding the adding of devices which would protect car occupants from injury.
The Ford Pinto gas tank cases present another instance of saving money at the cost of serious injury to consumers. In Grimshaw v Ford (1981) 119 Cal.App.3d 757, 174 Cal. Rptr. 348, the California Court of Appeal upheld a jury verdict of $2.5 million in compensatory damages and $125 million in punitive damages (reduced to $3.5 million by the trial court as a condition of denying a motion for new trial). The jury found that Ford Motor Company had known about the unsafe design of the gas tank used in the Pinto, and that this design was an intentional choice by Ford which decided to use a cheaper design which knowingly greatly increased the risk of fire in a rear-impact accident, rather than a more expensive design which would have prevented the death of an occupant.
Read more about this topic: Automobile Products Liability
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“A great proportion of the inhabitants of the Cape are always thus abroad about their teaming on some ocean highway or other, and the history of one of their ordinary trips would cast the Argonautic expedition into the shade.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Let it suffice that in the light of these two facts, namely, that the mind is One, and that nature is its correlative, history is to be read and written.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“... all big changes in human history have been arrived at slowly and through many compromises.”
—Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962)