The Price of Safety and the Environment

Until the middle of the twentieth century, the automobile was spoken of as an almost unconditional good. Freedom of movement, industrial growth, a symbol of prosperity. As we saw in earlier episodes, the car vastly expanded people’s lives and reshaped the very form of society.

But as the 1960s arrived, two shadows that had never been squarely confronted began to surface behind that brilliance. One was ‘accidents’, the other ‘pollution’. In exchange for convenience, were we not losing a staggering number of lives on the roads each year and continuing to foul the skies above our cities? This question pressed a new kind of responsibility upon the automobile industry. And, intriguingly, it was precisely that harsh question that became the driving force pushing technology to its next stage.

A single book that changed how we thought about safety

One turning point was a book. In 1965, a young American lawyer named Ralph Nader published ‘Unsafe at Any Speed’. In it, he charged that the American auto industry had been reluctant to invest in safety devices and kept selling cars that carried defects.

At the time, traffic accidents were often dismissed as a matter of ‘driver carelessness’. Nader challenged that conventional wisdom. Even if accidents could not be avoided, he argued, manufacturers should think far more seriously about designs that protect occupants when a collision does occur, that is, about the safety of the car itself. He is reported to have pointed in particular to problems in the design of General Motors’ compact car, the Chevrolet Corvair.

Around this accusation, it later came to light that GM had Nader’s private life investigated, which is said to have drawn even more attention to his arguments. Driven by rising public opinion, the United States enacted laws in the late 1960s to set automobile safety standards, and the installation of seatbelts and other measures was gradually made mandatory. One lawyer’s question moved the very premises of an entire industry.

From seatbelts to airbags: the evolution of protective technology

The technology of safety continued to advance afterward, quietly but steadily.

First, the seatbelt was improved into the ‘three-point’ type that restrains both the shoulder and the waist. This mechanism is said to have been devised by a Swedish manufacturer and to have spread worldwide because the company opened up its patent broadly, and it could effectively support an occupant’s body in a collision.

Then came the idea of absorbing the very shock of impact. This was the concept of the ‘crushable structure’, in which the front and rear of the body are deliberately designed to crumple while the central cabin is kept rigid. It was a reversal of thinking: that the car breaking when it hits something is itself what protects the occupants. And the airbag, which inflates at the instant of collision to catch the occupant, was put into practical use through the latter half of the twentieth century and eventually became standard equipment on many cars. Technologies that assist the act of driving itself, such as anti-lock brakes (ABS), were added as well.

There is also a view that much of this equipment spread not because the market demanded it from the start, but rather because it was pushed by regulation and the requests of society. What is safety, and who guarantees it? The shadow of accidents quietly rewrote the priorities of carmaking.

Exhaust that darkened the sky: another price

Alongside accidents, another grave shadow rose up. Air pollution.

As motorization advanced and cities filled with cars, automobile exhaust began to foul the air. In Los Angeles, in the American state of California in particular, ‘photochemical smog’, produced when components in the exhaust react with sunlight, grew serious and became a social problem. The price of the freedom the car brought began to show in the very air people breathed.

Here a new force appeared: regulation. In 1970, a major amendment to the Clean Air Act was passed in the United States. Also called the ‘Muskie Act’ after the senator who proposed it, this law required harmful components in automobile exhaust to be cut to one-tenth of their previous levels within a few years.

This goal was considered difficult to achieve with the technology of the time, and is said to have been called ‘impossible’. Many automakers asked for the deadline to be extended. The regulation greatly outran the realities of the industry.

How the ‘impossible’ gave birth to technology

And yet this goal, deemed too severe, ended up spurring a leap in technology.

In 1972, Japan’s Honda announced an engine with a combustion method called ‘CVCC’. This was a mechanism that suppressed harmful components by cleanly burning a lean fuel-air mixture, and the company positions the car carrying this engine as the first mass-produced vehicle to meet the standards of the Muskie Act. Rather than relying on a device to treat exhaust after the fact, the idea was to refine the very way the fuel was burned.

In parallel, the technology of the ‘catalyst’, placed in the path of the exhaust to convert harmful components into harmless ones, also advanced. The ‘three-way catalyst’, which treats three kinds of harmful components at once, in particular became the central technology of later exhaust countermeasures. Refinements on the engine side, and devices that purify the exhaust. Through these two wheels, the level once called ‘impossible’ gradually became reality.

What tests trust: the mechanism of the recall

As interest in safety and the environment grew, another important mechanism took root in society. The ‘recall’, a system in which a manufacturer collects and repairs free of charge a product whose defect comes to light after shipment.

An automobile is a complex industrial product made of tens of thousands of parts, and finding problems at the design or manufacturing stage was something that could happen to any maker. What matters is whether, when a defect comes to light, the maker can avoid concealing it and promptly disclose and respond. The recall was the last line of defense protecting consumer safety, and at the same time a mechanism that tested a maker’s honesty and trustworthiness.

Looking back over history, automakers in every country have experienced recalls large and small. Among them, there are reported cases in which delays in response or the manner of disclosure were questioned and sparked social debate. Yet the assessment differs case by case depending on the circumstances, and it is difficult to discuss them in sweeping terms. What is certain is that the very fact that the recall system was broadly established shows that the automobile industry changed into something that does not end at the point of sale, but bears responsibility for as long as the car keeps running.

In the latter half of the twentieth century, the automobile was forced to confront head-on the two shadows of accidents and pollution. And in answering those harsh questions, both safety devices and low-pollution technology advanced greatly. The vast industry, maturing as it paid its price, would eventually grow too large to fit within a single nation, and be drawn into a vortex of reorganization that crossed national borders.