Unsafe at Any Speed

Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile by Ralph Nader, published in 1965, is a book detailing resistance by car manufacturers to the introduction of safety features, like seat belts, and their general reluctance to spend money on improving safety. It was a pioneering work, openly polemical but containing substantial references and material from industry insiders. It made Nader a household name. Unsafe at Any Speed is often characterized as the book "about the Corvair", though only one of the book's eight chapters covers the Corvair. The theme of tire pressures... chosen for comfort rather than safety is recurrent, and the main theme throughout is the way in which the automobile industry evaded even well-founded and technically informed criticism. Each of the book's chapters covers a different aspect of automotive safety: The subject for which the book is probably most widely known, the rear-engined Chevrolet Corvair, is covered in Chapter 1—"The Sporty Corvair-The One-Car Accident". This relates to the first models that had a swing-axle suspension design which was prone to "tuck under" in certain circumstances.
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