Carl F. Thelin

DRAGONS

 “I fight Dragons for a living – once in a while I win.”

           

 “What do you mean by that?” 

Dragons are big shot defense lawyers working for billion dollar Detroit car companies. My side is suing them for causing serious injuries to car crash victims. They are mean people and they can fight dirty.

Chrysler, Ford and General Motors were big, mean, and nasty dragons. For twenty five years I fought them working with trial lawyers representing plaintiffs – people injured by defects in automobiles.

In 1965, I began working with the General Motors Legal Staff to assist in defense of lawsuits alleging that the Chevrolet Corvair automobile was “Unsafe at Any Speed”. That was the title of the popular book authored by Ralph Nader, who was proclaimed as a consumer advocate. Trial lawyers seeking to win large compensation for persons injured by defective automobiles were invigorated by the Nader book. They formed the group then called ATLA – the American Trial Lawyers Association.

By 1967, I became convinced that I was doing the wrong thing.

1983-1976=16 years

After nearly twenty years I had gained enough expertise to qualify to assist the trial lawyers.

 like Ralph Nader. Sometimes, not often, we won.

I didn’t hate them; I hated what they didn’t do.

Dragons are very-highly-paid executives who were infected by the NIH factor - Not Invented Here. Dragons hire expensive lawyers and lobbyists to avoid being told to make cars with needed safety features. Dragons and their industry association stymied the US government; resisting safety features like seat belts, head restraints and airbags until the trial lawyers and I made it too expensive to continue to stall. They asked for delays in government regulations claiming that the added cost of safety equipment would raise the price of new cars so much that used car sales would boom. French and Italian car makers dragged their feet even more, but most European and Japanese went along enthusiastically. Soon the Asians were leading the domestic car makers, who have yet to catch up.

How dumb could the big three be? Today, every car offers airbags – most have six or more because buyers want them along with other neat stuff.

I was a hot-shot design engineer at GM who knew that we made cars with handling flaws that allowed drivers to lose control and crash. Most cars had crappy brakes. Original tires were two sizes too small, so smart buyers forked over a premium for right-sized ones. Almost all our cars contained dangerous styling elements such as meat-cleaver shapes in the dash board. Some cars had column-mounted gear shift levers with sharp conical ends seemingly designed to impale the front passenger during a crash. The instrument panel had many similar pointed knobs ready to poke a hole in someone’s head. These flashy things caused crash injuries to be more severe than they should have been.

I recall, as a young engineer, telling my boss about these dangers. He told me “We don’t design cars to have accidents. If anyone gets hurt in an accident, they deserve to get hurt because they are stupid.” What an attitude. Dragons ignored their own pioneering car-safety engineers who were sequestered at the remote proving grounds.

I remained a design engineer of GM experimental cars until I volunteered to assist their legal staff. In 1965, trial lawyers deluged GM with cases saying that the Chevrolet Corvair was “Unsafe at Any Speed.” That little car had its air-cooled engine in the rear, like a grown up Volkswagen Beetle. It also had an independent rear suspension. The new 1965 front wheel drive Toronado was another novel GM product. Oldsmobile based that car on the XP-784 which I designed. So I agreed help GM lawyers to trick other lawyers with unethical practices because we had “to defend the right of engineers to innovate without restriction.” That motto persuaded me to help defend the company.

My job was to read stuff written by our enemies. I was a good writer, so I prepared rebuttals for that stuff to put in attaché cases we gave to the GM witnesses. Sneaky stuff – these lawyer-designated “expert witnesses” for the defense, were indeed qualified engineers. They had not worked on the Corvair itself, so they could not reveal anything about the development. Guys who knew what really went on were transferred to remote places. Opponents were told that GM, “…looked in all the usual and customary places for ___, and none were found.”

As an insider, I read that engineers at the GM Proving Ground and the Tech Center had advised the Chevrolet chief engineer to delay the introduction of that car until it could be redesigned to eliminate the dangerous handling qualities.

After letting this sink in, I mentioned these things to friends at a Christmas party. Two of my cases persuaded me that if the victims had been in any other kind of car, they would have survived. I said, in earshot of my bosses, that I wouldn’t mind if we lost those cases. Despite having a recent pay raise I was then declared “surplus” and transferred to a drafting room. That was humiliating and nasty, so I quit.