4.4 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 29 November 2016
⏱️ 9 minutes
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In the early 1960s there were virtually no laws covering car safety in the USA. Even seatbelts weren't compulsory. Then a campaigning young lawyer called Ralph Nader came along. He researched car accidents, and safety requirements in other countries. Then he published a book called 'Unsafe at Any Speed' - soon the law changed.
Photo: Ralph Nader (R) examines a wrecked car in a crash test facility. Credit: Reuters.
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0:00.0 | Hello you're listening to the witness podcast from the BBC World Service with me Elizabeth Davis. |
0:06.1 | Today we're going back to the United States in the 1960s when cars had virtually no safety features at all, no proper seat belts, no airbags, no shatter-resistant |
0:15.9 | windshields. I've been talking to Ralph Nader, who as a young lawyer set out to change that |
0:21.5 | in his book, Unsafe at Any Speed. |
0:24.0 | I used to hitchhike a lot. |
0:30.0 | For adventure, for learning purposes, I was bored by public transportation and often the truck drivers |
0:37.8 | pick me up we'd be first at the scene of a crash and sometimes it was a one, but other times it was a total fury. It was like |
0:45.8 | screams and fires and dismembered limbs and destruction everywhere and I began noticing that the car would crush on the |
0:58.5 | occupants as a steering column would ram back into the driver or people would be spilled out of pop open |
1:05.9 | doors or fuel tanks would rupture. |
1:10.8 | When Ralph Nader wasn't hitchhiking around the United States, he was a student at the |
1:18.0 | prestigious Harvard Law School, and so he turned his lawyer's eye to the American car industry and why there were so many |
1:25.0 | many fatal accidents. What he found shocked him. |
1:28.0 | The dash panels were lethal. |
1:30.0 | They were sharp edges. You could split a skull in a 15 mile an hour collision. |
1:34.5 | The steering column was a spear waiting to impale you in a left front collision. |
1:40.5 | The door latches were so absurd that I would say that they built in automatic |
1:46.2 | valets that you'd hit the curb at five miles an hour and the doors would pop open |
1:51.2 | increasing your risk of death many fold if you hit hard pavement. |
1:55.8 | There were no seat belts, no head restraints, of course no airbags. |
1:59.9 | The tires were way behind Europe. |
2:02.2 | We had much more emphasis on styling pornography than engineering |
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