Next to Ralph Nader, Clarence Ditlow III may be America’s best-known consumer advocate. As executive director of the Washington-based Center for Auto Safety for 20 years, Ditlow has spearheaded such high-profile recall campaigns as the Ford Pinto (fuel-tank fires) and the Firestone 500 tire (which shredded and blew out), coordinated efforts to get state lemon laws enacted and pressed the federal government to mandate passive restraints (air bags) in cars, trucks and vans.
Founded by Nader and Consumers Union, which publishes Consumer Reports, in 1970, the center’s unswerving mission has been to make the auto industry more accountable for the crashworthiness and safety of its products. A secondary role has been to act as an unofficial watchdog over such regulatory agencies as the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
Ditlow says the center has “made enormous strides. One of the things is just to look at the fatality rate. I saw a release from the Department of Transportation saying the fatality rate was 1.7 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles traveled. I believe the number in the ’60s was as high as 5.7. Some of the improvement is due to drunk-driving laws, and some to seat-belt use laws. But a lot of the improvement is due to the vehicle itself.
“The market has never been better for safety,” Ditlow says, who drives a 1996 Geo Prizm. “Safety is important to the consumer. It’s really the second (most important) factor behind price, which is always dominant.”
But “the problem for consumers today is, they can ask about air bags, but they don’t know how safe the vehicle really is that they’re buying. We’d like to see more safety information provided to the consumer in more readable fashion.” Ditlow was talking about the ratings on NHTSA-conducted crash tests.
There are some in the auto industry who think Ditlow and the center have become too strident in their demands for more regulations. Others, however, grudgingly credit Ditlow with maintaining a consistent vision and focus on safety in his tenure at the center.
Jason Vines, manager of safety an environmental public relations at Chrysler, worked frequently with Ditlow when Vines headed the automaker’s Washington P.R. office.
“With Clarence, you don’t always agree with him, but you always know where he is coming from,” Vines says. “The same can’t be said for some of the people who have surrounded him.”
Asked to assess the center’s greatest auto-safety achievement for consumers, Ditlow says: “It’s hard to single out one thing, but I’d have to say air bags. That’s been the biggest safety innovation in the industry.
“Would they (the auto companies) have moved into it on their own? Perhaps at a later date and on selective models. One thing about Lee Iacocca, he was an honest salesman. He recognized what sells, and he was smart enough to say, hey, I made a mistake (on air bags).” (Iacocca is widely credited with saying, in his Ford years, that safety doesn’t sell.)
Born Jan. 26, 1944, in Augusta, Ga., Ditlow graduated from Lehigh University with a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering and received law degrees from Harvard (Ll.M.) and Georgetown (J.D.).
A staff attorney for Nader’s Public Interest Research Group in Washington from 1971 through 1975, he assumed the reins at Center for Auto Safety in January 1976, when Nader left to found Public Citizen, with which he is still affiliated.
“When I graduated from Lehigh, I saw some of the environmental problems on the (auto) manufacturing side, and that pushed me twoard law school,” recalls Ditlow, who is not married. “I thought I could help solve some of those problems in the industry.
“I started as an environmental attorney with Nader’s group, working on open (automotive) tailpipe emissions and moved from there into auto safety.
“Ralph still sends us all his consumer complaints,” Ditlows says. “When we were first founded, about three-quarters of our complaints, maybe 90 percent, (were funneled through) Nader. Today, only about 10 to 20 percent come from Nader. The rest come directly to us.”
The nadir, so to speak, of the safety movement in the last 20 years came during the Reagan administration, said Ditlow.
“It was just anti-regulation. It had a knee-jerk reaction to regulation. All one has to do is look at what they first did. Their first agenda was to try to roll back standards. After all, they revoked the passive-restraint standard; they revoked the 5-mile-per-hour bumper standard; they revoked tire-quality grading; they tried to gut the recall laws; and they killed any number of proposed rulemakings.
“One of the reasons why light trucks and vans lack so much in safety standards as opposed to passenger cars is because of the Reagan administration.
“The fact is that with air bags, we could have had them in cars 10 years earlier. Tragically, that’s probably 75,000 lives lost (over 10 years). That’s attributable to the Reagan administration.
“The Clinton administration clearly has a greater concern for vehicle safety,” he says, “but they haven’t seized the opportunity to move forward on the congressional mandates under the Surface Transportation Act (of 1991, including a directive to NHTSA to make rules covering rollover and head injuries).”
Ditlow says, “I can’t find any other safety initiatives (on the part of the Clinton administration). I think they’re flubbing the issue of air bags and children. The administration should move as quickly as possible to require proximity sensors on air bags (which regulate air-bag deployment speed according to the speed of the crash and how fast the seat occupant is moving). Suppliers for at least two years have been saying they’re ready. But the industry is not going to do anything voluntarily, with the exception of the upscale Europeans.”
As for the center’s goals for the next five years, he says: “Provide higher crash-survivable speeds for vehicles. In other words, if 208, the frontal crash-protection standard, applies at 30 (m.p.h.), we’d like see it go all the way to 50. And you can do that with smarter air bags, ones that have variable inflation rates and different shapes of the air bag itself (and) better structure of the vehicle.
“We’d also like to see advances in pedestrian protection. We have no regulations whatsoever. Pedestrian protection is almost the last frontier of auto safety. One could eliminate about 25 percent of all pedestrian fatalities by improving the front of the vehicle–the slope of the hood and so on.
“I’d like to see more progress on (reducing) head injuries in side impacts and rollovers. The rollover rate is simply too high for the sport-utility vehicles and some other lightweight small cars.
“The one concern that I have about safety for the future,” he adds, “is that some of the improvements that we need to make in cars, like better head-injury protection or better rollover stability–they’re hard to see. You can sell an air bag because you can say this car has an air bag and everyone understands that. But not everyone understands what better head-injury protection is because that padded A-pillar (windshield pillar) looks just like the non-padded one.”
Referring to the auto companies’ safety record, Ditlow says, “I don’t know that you can ever totally change the industry’s posture on safety. I’m thinking in terms of things like rollover stability (where) I don’t think the industry has the incentive to build as much safety into the vehicle as what should and could be done.”
Regulation is still necessary, he maintains.
“When you look at safety, fuel economy, emissions, all the things that make a socially acceptable vehicle, the technology has never been better. And you have some companies bringing some of this new technology aboard. But without regulation, it’s going to be brought in slower, and not on all models. Why shouldn’t someone who buys a Ford Escort (be able to) get side-impact air bags? If the industry can develop technology for one car, they can develop it for all cars.”
Ditlow hopes the Big Three no longer support the industry adage that “safety doesn’t sell.”
“We have never really believed that (Detroit) was right in the first instance. At least we don’t think that they really tried to sell safety.
“We started seeing the success of the drunk-driving laws,” he says. “We saw the success of the child passenger seat laws. We saw the success of the air bags.
“The one thing that has been a driving force in the center over time has been the belief that once you begin to get air bags in cars, that they will become such a success story that they’ll give safety a good name. And they did exactly that.”
