Life After Cars: Freeing Ourselves From the Tyranny of the Automobile
by Sarah Goodyear, Doug Gordon and Aaron Naparstek · 21 Oct 2025 · 330pp · 85,349 words
automobile has brought death, injury, and the most inestimable sorrow and deprivation to millions of people.” So wrote Ralph Nader in his 1965 bombshell book, Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile. It would only get worse, he predicted: “A 1959 Department of Commerce report projected that 51,000
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by the cold, hard statistics of automobile-induced injury and fatality are difficult to comprehend. So we mostly don’t try. Toward the beginning of Unsafe at Any Speed, Ralph Nader quoted a transportation specialist named Wilfred Owen, who wrote way back in 1946, “There is little question that the public will not tolerate
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news to the people in power. Doctors, politicians, and carmakers have all known about the disastrous effects of automobile pollution for generations. When Nader wrote Unsafe at Any Speed, air pollution was so extreme that it was literally causing crashes: “Emissions have frequently curtailed highway visibility to the point where freeways have been temporarily
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/asia/driver-arrested-pigeon-japan.html. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Chapter Five: Cars Are Killing Us “A 1959 Department of Commerce”: Ralph Nader, Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile (Grossman, 1965), vii. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT By 1966, the number of Americans killed: National
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, 2020, news.ucr.edu/articles/2020/01/13/clearing-air-inside-your-car. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “the problem of reduced visibility”: Nader, Unsafe at Any Speed, 149. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT The automakers knew: David R. Jones, “Auto Men Testify on Smog Devices,” New York Times, April 8, 1965
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: Shattering the Delusion That Science Underlies Our Transportation System. Island Press, 2024. Mumford, Lewis. The Highway and the City. Harcourt, Brace & World, 1963. Nader, Ralph. Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile. Grossman, 1965. Norton, Peter D. Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City
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of Colorado, 41 University of Michigan, 58 University of Nebraska–Lincoln, 41 University of South Florida, 40 University of Virginia, 8 University of Washington, 81 Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile (Nader), 95, 99, 103 urban decline, 117, 148–49 urban design gender and, 149–52 for increased
The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure
by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt · 14 Jun 2018 · 531pp · 125,069 words
. As a result of class action lawsuits, efforts by investigative journalists and consumer advocates (such as Ralph Nader and his exposé of the auto industry, Unsafe at Any Speed), and common sense, dangerous products and practices became less prevalent. Between 1978 and 1985, all fifty states passed laws making the use of car seats
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Northern Colorado, 205–6 University of Oregon, 92 University of Pennsylvania, 107, 108 University of Virginia, 12, 188, 223–27 University of West Alabama, 202 Unsafe at Any Speed (Nader), 24 us versus them; good people versus evil, 3–4, 14, 53–77, 85, 90, 92, 119–20, 132, 177, 206, 243–44, 247
How to Fix the Future: Staying Human in the Digital Age
by Andrew Keen · 1 Mar 2018 · 308pp · 85,880 words
arrive at More’s Law, but in his attempt to reinvent both himself and the internet, he has become a valuable player on Team Human. Unsafe at Any Speed At Europe’s most prestigious tech gathering, the Digital Life Design (DLD) Conference in Munich—that same event, you’ll remember, where the EU antitrust
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to be the year’s most influential work of nonfiction, but also changed an entire global industry. Written by Ralph Nader, the book was called Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile, and just as Rachel Carson’s 1962 bestseller Silent Spring dramatically raised public consciousness about the dangers
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-Hames, the co-CEO of Cliqz, the new internet browser and search engine. Al-Hames’s speech, borrowing from Nader’s 1965 bestseller, was titled “Unsafe at Any Speed.” The first slide Al-Hames showed to the DLD audience was of a brand-new two-door convertible red Corvair, a car manufactured by the
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was designed to be a combination of the Chevrolet’s iconic Corvette and Bel Air models. “That problem,” Al-Hames explained, “is that it was unsafe at any speed.” In the mid-fifties, the big three American automakers, Ford, GM, and Chrysler, controlled 96 percent of the American market. As competition grew more intense
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1966 it had soared to 53,000, a shocking 38 percent increase in just five years. Then Nader, a young attorney at the time, published Unsafe at Any Speed, the most influential book ever written about car safety. “A great problem of contemporary life,” Nader wrote, “is how to control the power of economic
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an annual $8.3 billion (the equivalent of more than $66 billion today) in property damage, medical expenses, lost wages, and insurance overhead expenses.14 Unsafe at Any Speed was a public relations catastrophe for an American car industry that, in many ways, is only now recovering its mojo with Elon Musk’s electric
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the Corvair, represented the beginning of a fifty-year story that has resulted in a dramatic improvement of car safety in America. In 1965, when Unsafe at Any Speed was published, there were five deaths per hundred million miles traveled. By 2014 this number had dropped to one death15—an astonishing 80 percent decrease
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search engine? The connection, according to Al-Hames’s DLD speech, is that both industries—the American automobile industry and the American internet industry—are “unsafe at any speed.” Of course today’s internet technologies aren’t literally impaling their users. And yet, according to Al-Hames, Silicon Valley is at a stage similar
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used by companies.17 As with the big three American automakers in 1965, it’s increasingly clear that today’s Big Data internet companies are unsafe at any speed. “Nothing, nothing, nothing . . . And then something dramatic,” is how, you’ll remember, Union Square Ventures’s Brad Burnham describes significant economic or technological change. It
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with Ralph Nader is also useful. You’ll remember that it was Nader’s bestselling 1965 book exposing the fatal flaws in the Chevrolet Corvair, Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile, that ultimately undermined the global domination of the US car industry. Fifty years later, Liss-Riordan has
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. Gordon E. Moore, “Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits,” Electronics, April 19, 1965. 14. Ralph Nader, Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-In Dangers of American Automobiles (Simon & Schuster, 1965), vi. 15. Christopher Jensen, “50 Years Ago, ‘Unsafe at Any Speed’ Shook the Auto World,” New York Times, November 26, 2015. 16. Ibid. 17. Lee Rainie, “The State
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, 190, 267 United Kingdom. See Britain United States, education system in, 276. See also education universal income concept, 41, 260–268 Universal Sharing Networks, 171 Unsafe at Any Speed (Nader), 182–188, 191, 250 US Association of National Advertisers (ANA), 178–179 US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), 49 Utopia (More) on education, 283
The Unbanking of America: How the New Middle Class Survives
by Lisa Servon · 10 Jan 2017 · 279pp · 76,796 words
. A Harvard Law School professor at the time, she wrote an article titled “Unsafe at Any Rate,” a reference to Ralph Nader’s 1965 book Unsafe at Any Speed. Warren argued for a government consumer-financial-protection agency akin to the Consumer Product Safety Commission created under President Nixon in 1972. To make her
Reaganland: America's Right Turn 1976-1980
by Rick Perlstein · 17 Aug 2020
by federal legislation.” Pertschuk was sympathetic—but smugly lectured this strange young man why the sort of reforms he had in mind were politically impossible. Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-in Dangers of the American Automobile came out in November 1965. The New York Times acknowledged it in a short item on page
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books that better reflected how Americans thought of their cars—titles like The Gallery of the American Automobile and The Motor Car Lover’s Companion Unsafe at Any Speed sold respectably, and the modest, quiet community of auto safety advocates welcomed Nader into their ranks. This was far less than the author had in
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nut behind the wheel” was a slogan of the industry-captured National Safety Council—even though most injuries, Nader rivetingly explained, were caused by what Unsafe at Any Speed called the “second collision”: knobs that protruded like daggers, steering wheels that shot forward like projectiles, dashboard edges so sharp they might as well be
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was the Senator from Nebraska.” * * * THE BUMPTIOUS GENTLEMAN FROM NEBRASKA was not, it soon arrived, Ralph Nader’s only harasser. While he was working on Unsafe at Any Speed, Nader had complained to friends that strange men were following him. That an attractive woman approached him, seeking his company. That, the night before his
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bill introduced by Senator Magnuson providing for the first mandatory product grading system in the nation’s history (for tires) passed the Senate 79–0. Unsafe at Any Speed began a fourteen-week run on the New York Times bestseller list. The National Highway Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act passed the Senate and
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to run the Federal Trade Commission and original Nader’s Raider Joan Claybrook to head the National Transportation Safety Board, the seven-hundred-person agency Unsafe at Any Speed had virtually conjured into existence—were both confirmed to those jobs. Five days before Jimmy Carter’s inauguration, Nader hosted Saturday Night Live, whose hip
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), 490. Nader testified Vogel, Fluctuating Fortunes, 44; Pertschuk, Revolt Against Regulation, 21. “nut behind the wheel” Pertschuk, Revolt Against Regulation, 41. “second collision” Ralph Nader, Unsafe at Any Speed (New York: Dunlop & Grossmans, 1965), Chapter Three. “written almost exclusively” “Statement by Ralph Nader Before the Senate Subcommittee on Executive Reorganization,” Traffic Safety: Examination and
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Mine Workers, 217, 256 United Nations, 99 United Presbyterian Church, 301 universal health insurance, Reagan on, 15 “The Unmaking of the Republican Party” (Ladd), 114 Unsafe at Any Speed (Nader), 194–195, 196, 202 Up in Smoke, 343 Urban League, 834 U.S. Chamber of Commerce, 188, 208, 247, 336–339 U.S. Commission
Driverless: Intelligent Cars and the Road Ahead
by Hod Lipson and Melba Kurman · 22 Sep 2016
were no longer a novelty. Cars and highways had become a practical tool of everyday life. Consumer advocate Ralph Nadar’s instant 1965 classic book Unsafe at Any Speed exposed the shoddy engineering practices at the big auto companies, meticulously detailing the safety problems of the Chevy Corvair and the auto industry’s overemphasis
Death of the Liberal Class
by Chris Hedges · 14 May 2010 · 422pp · 89,770 words
were saved. Other civic movements began to flower. “Ralph Nader came along and did serious journalism. That is what his early stuff was, such as Unsafe at Any Speed,” the investigative journalist David Cay Johnston told me:The big books they put out were serious, first-rate journalism. Corporate America was terrified by this
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who represented the best of our democracy, and the best of the liberal class, was broken with it. As Nader pointed out after he published Unsafe at Any Speed in 1965, it took only nine months for the Federal Government to regulate the auto industry for safety and fuel efficiency. Three years after the
The Quiet Coup: Neoliberalism and the Looting of America
by Mehrsa Baradaran · 7 May 2024 · 470pp · 158,007 words
GM, these “activist shareholders” (before the term was coined) were organized by a group of young lawyers affiliated with Ralph Nader. Nader, whose 1965 book Unsafe at Any Speed accused the automakers of recklessly endangering drivers, was already familiar to the GM leadership, which had been spying on him for a few years, attempting
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, 40, 59, 60, 69, 144, 235 An American Dilemma, 12–13, 32 Monetary Equilibrium, 32 Nabisco, 271 Nader, Ralph, 76–77, 86, 106–8, 113 Unsafe at Any Speed, 76 Naderites, 87, 107 Nader’s Raiders, 76–77 Nakamoto, Satoshi, 333 Nasdaq, 300 National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), 44, 236, 327 National Association
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Chicago Law School, 150, 162 University of Colorado, 88 University of Miami, 159 University of Michigan, 118 University of Rochester, 159 University of Virginia, 222 Unsafe at Any Speed (Nader), 76 “Urban Riots of the 1960s, The” (Greenspan), 3, 4, 9–10 U.S. Court of Appeals, 117–18, 139, 162, 202 U.S
Swindled: the dark history of food fraud, from poisoned candy to counterfeit coffee
by Bee Wilson · 15 Dec 2008 · 384pp · 122,874 words
this malaise. Ralph Nader’s main target, famously, was the automobile industry. From 1965 onwards, Nader had attacked General Motors for producing cars that were “unsafe at any speed.” Since then, his advocacy of consumer causes had widened out to include drug companies, air pollution, and foods that were unsafe in any amount. In
Tailspin: The People and Forces Behind America's Fifty-Year Fall--And Those Fighting to Reverse It
by Steven Brill · 28 May 2018 · 519pp · 155,332 words
at the top and everyone else. Nader had risen to prominence in 1965, with the publication that year of his attack on the automobile industry, Unsafe at Any Speed, which focused on General Motors. He then achieved star status because of media reaction to GM’s clumsy attempts to smear him by hiring private
The Cigarette: A Political History
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Free to Choose: A Personal Statement
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Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity
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Flying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing
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The Armchair Economist: Economics and Everyday Life
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Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right
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Who Stole the American Dream?
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