The following chapters of the book steadily zoom out to the bigger picture, from specific dangerous features of vehicles, to the systemic issues allowing them to persist, to the case for government intervention.
“The gap between existing design and attainable safety has widened enormously in the post-war period,” Nader wrote in the conclusion. “As these attainable levels of safety rise, so do the moral imperatives to use them.”
Less than a year after the book hit shelves, Nader was there when President Lyndon Johnson signed the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act. That set into motion the creation of new federal agencies, and the first set of Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards.
“Starting with our 1968 models, American and foreign, we are going to assure our citizens that every new car they buy is as safe as modern knowledge knows how to build it,” Johnson said.
The first FMVSS regulations included a variety of rules, such as requiring seat belts and energy-absorbing steering assemblies, which remain the most effective and third most effective regulations in terms of lives saved each year. (Airbags, which came later, is second overall.) Another of those first standards was FMVSS 206, Door Locks and Door Retention Components, which is intended to “minimize the likelihood of occupants being thrown from the vehicle as a result of impact.”
Nader touched on this particular issue briefly in his book. In the chapter titled “The second collision: When man meets car,” he notes research from Cornell University on door latch effectiveness. They found that at least one door sprung open in nearly half of injury-causing accidents before 1956, and that the likelihood for a door being completely torn off in certain makes actually increased from ’56 to ’63.
At the time, the most common cause of death in a rollover accident was occupant ejection, and research found that people were nearly 4 times more likely to die if they were ejected than if they stayed in the vehicle. Further analysis found ejections were most likely to happen through the open door, rather than the window or windshield. Of course, wearing seat belts would be the main way to prevent ejections, but this evidence led researchers to believe that preventing door openings would also save lives even if occupants weren’t buckled in.
Car companies were apparently aware of these issues – and expecting government regulation – so they had already started to improve their designs. The Society of Automotive Engineers increased their force-resistance guidelines months before Nader’s book was published. When FMVSS 206 went into place in 1968, the rules largely adopted the recently updated SAE standards, approximately doubling the loads that latches, hinges and locks needed to withstand.
One of the ways that automakers accomplished this was implementing a stronger striker and latch mechanism that wouldn’t break open when impacted. This amounted to a hardened steel bolt sticking out of the pillar opposite the hinges, which the latch would wrap around. This was a clear improvement over previous designs, which often relied on small metal teeth to latch the door to the striker.
At some point along the way, a slang term for this striker bolt design emerged: the Nader pin.