Carl F. Thelin

MY ADVERTISING BLURB…

I tell clients that I am a genuine Automobile Safety Engineer. That expression was in my résumés provided to lawyers. Genuine? Yes, when compared to so many “experts” who were pipe-smoking college professors without design or manufacturing backgrounds. I am a graduate mechanical engineer who was a senior designer of experimental cars at the GM Technical Center. After becoming bored with that, I volunteered to work with GM lawyers who were defending the company from allegations that defects in the design of our cars were responsible for the accidents and the resulting severe injuries. After a while, I realized that many such claims were true and that our defenses were not always honest – and I said that in a meeting. Poof! That was it for my career at GM.

I joined the pioneering auto-safety work at Cornell Aeronautical Laboratories in Buffalo, NY. They put me in charge of their mid-sized auto test track. Then I designed and operated the crash test facility that is still one of the most powerful – able to run cars into the barrier at up to 60 mph.

I crashed about 200 vehicles before answering an ad from Consumers Union seeking an Auto Safety Engineer for CONSUMER REPORTS magazine. I wrote the safety evaluations for all monthly reports, as well as features on car safety and car child restraints - “baby seats”. I provided frequent feature analyses of the DOT New Car (crash) Assessment Program. There I learned to write for an intelligent reader.

With that background, I was a natural to provided assistance to attorneys and insurance companies as an expert witness in written reports and testimony before juries – for over twenty years in almost all state and federal courts. What else? I have been a Gideon speaker in churches in several states most of that time, so you can count on me to promote my book.