Carl F. Thelin

A WELL TIMED BIG BREAK AT CU

I have been a subscriber to Consumer Reports magazine since my college days. Shortly after the media noise about the Senate investigation died down, I spotted an advertisement in that magazine. Consumers Union was seeking an experienced engineer to be the Auto Safety Engineer for Consumer Reports, the magazine that they published. I thought that I had the widest experience range of anybody. I had crashed about 200 vehicles before answering an ad. I think that impressed Bob Knoll, the Head of the Auto Test Divisions. I applied for the job and was immediately accepted.

I was not forced out from CAL. However, everyone knew I was doing CAL a favor by leaving. In September 1972, my CAL friends honored me with a great retirement party. It was a great party. Oops, CAL did not officially allow retirement parties for people who quit taking another job. Nobody complained.

Then my family and I drove to New Haven Connecticut.

I wrote the safety evaluations for all Consumer Reports monthly magazine, as well as features on car safety and car child restraints - “baby seats”. I provided frequent feature analyses of the crash test results of the DOT New Car Assessment Program. There is where I learned to write for an intelligent reader, such as people who bought our magazine. That proved useful much later, working as an expert witness testifying before a trial jury.

Each month, the Auto Test group of five test engineers drove and wrote about three to five new cars. We were the only division that had a piece in every monthly issue, because the auto test reports were immensely popular. The Annual April Auto Issue was devoted almost exclusively to aspects of cars and small trucks. Everyone, even the technicians, was allowed (required actually) to drive a test car home each night. It was more than a treat, it was needed to accumulate the minimum 1000 miles before we considered the car ready for formal testing.

GM to CAL and now to CU

The “Avoidance Maneuver” (AM) was the short hand way of referring to the Accident Avoidance Maneuver first developed by General Motors to demonstrate the superiority of the quick steering response of the Chevrolet Corvair. When I arrived at Cornell Aeronautical Laboratories in Buffalo, the AM followed me to the Vehicle Research Evaluation Facility. I added the rubber bumps made from Uniroyal raw tire treads. Now, at CU, I was dismayed to find that all the evaluations of automobile handling was subjective. I prepared a proposal advocating the AM as one simple-to=perform handling test that would produce time-to-complete numbers. Then I asked CAL to loan CU a few of the rubber bumps, so that the rough road testing could be done in a uniform manner on the test track.

Finally, I wrote a computer program to compile all the numerical and subjective individual assessments into one rating number on the scale of 1 to 5. That involved creating functions for the subjective “rating words” that would result in a weighted sub-rating. That was hard work, using the FORTRAN programming language on the IBM main frame at Yale University. Today, that can be done easily using the Microsoft Excel application.

NCAP

Beginning in 1979, I contributed the safety-related portion of each monthly piece. Later, a separate section would discuss the results of the New Car Assessment Program (NCAP) crash tests performed for the NHTSA. CU was the only organization privileged to receive the test reports from the crash test labs before the official publication. CU needed the data early enough for me to analyze the photos and movie films to be able to write a knowledgeable analysis. These reports were initially discouraging. Unlike the standard 30 mph crash testing done for determining compliance to the FMVSS, these were done at 35 mph and had two belted adult-sized dummies on the front seat. They showed that very few domestic cars had acceptable passenger crash protection. The industry complained that the testing and CU reports were unfair. Nevertheless, we continued to report the tests as soon as they became available. Eventually, after the universal adoption of air bags, all cars became acceptable. The reports slowed to annual updates, and were dropped when it became not-news.

BASHING BUMPERS

It was a privilege to be allowed to design and build at bumper test machine that became well-known as the “Bumper Basher”. I worked with a local consulting mechanical engineer, Andy Grimaldi, to make a machine greatly superior to the design required by the NHTSA FMVSS 215. Our machine was basically a hydraulically powered horizontal ram with a solid steel bumper at the impacting end. We always hit each test vehicle at 5 mph, even after the NHTSA responded to industry pleas to drop the test impact speed to 2 ½ mph. I believe that our reports of the ugly damage done to chrome plated steel (or aluminum) bumpers influenced the industry trend to follow Toyota and Nissan with plastic-covered energy absorbing bumpers. When car bumper testing became like NCAP – not-news - the improved performance of modern bumpers led to the eventual retirement of the Basher.

CHILD CAR SEATS AND CRDs

I felt the best about taking over the responsibility of my predecessor, Joe Ulman, for writing feature stories concerning Car Restraint Devices (CRD) for children. There were several of my reports of CRD crash testing performed for CU at CAL. CU showed that the child seats on the market in 1972 were very poor. They simply positioned the child high in a fragile tube-and-fabric chair hung over the front seatback. The test result galvanized the Juvenile Products Manufacturers Associate to cooperate with CU to design and sell CRDs that would actually protect kids during a car crash. The NHTSA followed up with several steps leading to an effective FMVSS 213. After establishing that well designed CRDs were valuable, I began to advocate state laws called “Child Restraint Use Laws” (CRUL)s. I began by calling the US attention to the pioneering CURL in Australia. I spoke in Nashville and San Francisco about that. The state of Tennessee became the first to do it in the US, followed by all.

As it was with NCAP testing and bumper testing, the reports on CRDs finally dwindled to pieces describing the ease-of-use aspects rather than crash test results.

GOING TO MAKE MONEY ON STROMBOLI

Consumers Union is a not-for-profit organization, supported solely by the sale of the magazine and the associates books. The employees are paid adequately, not close to scale of salaried people from the auto industry. Almost ten years later, I thought it would be good to go back to work in industry. I found what sounded like an ideal job in South Bend IN, using the experience I gain at the GM Engineering Staff. It turned out to be a disaster, where I found myself on the Island of Stromboli, like Pinocchio. Suffice to say that I am forever going to regret leaving CU.

NEXT: Going to South Bend