Carl F. Thelin

CORNELL AERONAUTICAL LABORATORY

            CAL

            During my time as a chassis engineer at General Motors  I got to know of genuine research into automobile handling, tire characteristics and auto safety at a place in Buffalo, New York called Cornell Aeronautical Laboratories. Everyone called it CAL. Most of their research involved the control and stability of jet aircraft and helicopters. These engineers were driving European sports cars that they discovered overseas.  Beginning in 1950, several of the former WW II aviators had pioneering ideas and decided to apply their expertise in vehicle dynamics to automobiles. I knew those guys! They had banded together to do contract work for General Motors to help them understand vehicle dynamics as a science more than an art.

            CAL is a contract research lab that did most of its work for the Department of Defense and the airline industry. During the Vietnam War, some of the more radical students from the Cornell campus in Ithaca, NY came to picket and protest the work CAL was doing for the Department of Defense. They were upset that CAL was doing research for “better ways of killing people.”  There were armed guards who told the kids that they would shoot them if they came through the fence.

            Initially, I worked as an engineer on government sponsored projects concerning automobile handling. My office-mate was responsible for developing a million-dollar tire test machine for the government and industry. I worked with Dick mostly on the procurement of the 67 inch diameter steel drive drums (used at Uniroyal for indoor tire testing) and a thin stainless steel moving roadway. Dick was also working on high speed trains for the Urban Mass Transit Authority. Both were fun projects.

            However, the engineers of my Vehicle Dynamics department never was able to persuade themselves or the Department of Transportation to sponsor any of our handling research. There was no realistic way of developing safety standards to improve automobile handling which would reduce the number of auto accidents. Most academic researchers and the industry agreed that there were no useful objective numerical vehicle- dynamic numbers. None, by themselves, ensured better car handling that could be shown to help drivers avoid a significant number of collisions. In fact, our leader, the famous Bill Milliken, and his friend Frank Winchell, VP of Engineering at GM, had come to that conclusion during their work together during the Corvair legal defense efforts. We insisted that “Task Performance” measures were the only realistic way to appraise handling performance. Task performance metrics were indicative of how well an ordinary driver could make the car do what he intended for it to do. Numbers describing the car’s suspension, steering and springs could not do that, although those numbers could be computed or measured easily.

            There was some (not much, really) logic to having standards for tires and brakes. Good tires and brakes correlated well with auto safety. What else? CAL had a long history of gathering accident statistics for the government and the insurance industry. Much of what they learned supported the ATLA attack on Detroit. Yes indeed, they said that it was clear that collisions were not really accidents, but the result of poor tires, brakes and human performance. We knew that the statistics also affirmed that poor car design would make the resulting occupant injuries worse than they had to be. Poor design? CAL organized the ACIR group 1953 to collect data to substantiate this. I recall that ACIR stood for the government funded Accident Crash Injury Research program, which is now named the Crash Data Research Center.  See their website at http://www.calspan.com/cdrc.htm for more details. That site also describes the Transportation Sciences Center (formerly the Vehicle Research Department) as the leader in high-quality, independent automotive safety testing, research, development, testing, and evaluation using state-of-the art facilities since 1948. That was my group. The DOT agreed that research to improve the survival of crashes was more likely to succeed. Cars could be improved and regulated. That did not mean that we would stop test track work. However, we needed to ramp up quickly with a crash testing program to assess compliance with newly developed crash safety standards. At the same time, CAL was assisting in the development of the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards by the newly formed National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

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