The Chevrolet Corvair: How Safety Failed Us

The Corvair was Motor Trend’s Car of the Year for 1960, yet the car hit bottom just three years later. In this episode, how battles over safety shaped the future of the Corvair, the car industry, and America itself. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. Hey Eddie here, before we get started, I wanted
you to know that you can listen to Car Show
ad free by becoming a Pushkin Plus subscriber. You'll also
get access to detours, bonus episodes of Car Show, where
we go for extended drives, play outtakes, and more. Fine

(00:37):
Pushkin Plus on the Car Show page in Apple Podcasts,
or at pushkin dot Fm. Is a fun car for
fun lovers for car lovers. Corvet a most unusual car
for people who enjoy the unusual. A most unusual car. Indeed,

(01:05):
the nineteen sixty Chevrolet Corvet didn't look like you're tipical
General Motors car of the era. Its bodywork was naked
of tailfins and excess chrome. It's styling was restrained. It
had a slim wraparound belt line and subtle body surfacing.
And that's just the outside. The Corvette was unusual from

(01:30):
top to bottom, from stem to stern, and it was
poised to put General Motors and maybe the whole American
car business on a more sophisticated, driver oriented path. It
was the vehicle GM would send into battle with the
European cars just starting to hit our shores in the
late nineteen fifties and early sixties. You know it's funny,

(01:52):
is this doesn't look like your typical American sixties car,
does it. There's no chrome everywhere. It's got this beautiful
like ridge to the side. It's almost like a modern
car the way you've got this little bone line and
the bodywork tucks under, super sophisticated for the era, real restraint.
It's a cool face. It looks very European. You know,

(02:14):
it does not look American at all. Pretty nice size interior. Yeah,
you can make out ease here in the car. The
Chevrolet Corvet was one of the most consequential cars of
all time, but maybe not for the reason you think.

(02:38):
It wasn't because the car was America's first real attempt
to beat back the imports. It wasn't even because it
became the target of a huge safety crusade, one we'll
talk about later in the episode. The Corvet was important
because it represents a fork in the road of human accountability.

(03:02):
My name is Eddie Alterman, and I've been editing car
magazines since I was in short pants. This is Car Show,
my pod cast about why we drive what we drive.
The Corvet takes us to an important moment. The question
it posed was Kenny Carmaker trust its customers to learn
how to handle and maintain an unconventional automobile or must

(03:25):
it design for the lowest level of skill and involvement?
And what does that mean for those of us who
love to drive? Right? Yeah? So well this thing is

(03:52):
great love. I love enamel paint. I don't know how
old the paint it actually is. When I got it,
it was, I guess just been painted or something. I'm
in a parking lot in Encino, California, with Brian Morris
and his light yellow nineteen sixty three Corvet convertible. Where
is now? What do you want to do? Start the car?

(04:13):
Probably okay, just turn that to the ride. A vuncular,
self deprecating and clad in a light yellow shirt and
pants to match the car, Brian drove the couple hours

(04:33):
to La from Camarillo to let us drive his Corvet.
Brian bought this car from a family friend. He'd always
wanted a Corvet convertible because his fraternity brother had a
yellow one in nineteen sixty six. Brian is convinced the
car helped his friend woo his future wife and just
looking at it, you can see why this was the

(04:55):
kind of car a dashing ivy leaguer would use to
cruise Princeton at night. No, this has lovely light steering,
rides great. It's really kind of relaxing to drive. I
would say I had put a word to it. I
think it's got enough power. I'd say, the faster you go,

(05:15):
the easier it is draft interesting. I mean, we're going
fifty five thousand an hour. It feels really straight, stable, easy,
and we're not doing any extreme maneuvers. But it's so
mild manner. That was lovely. This sounds great. Well, you

(05:39):
know what this is. This is a go get ice
cream car, sleek trim, not like those other hulking jock
cars the jock kids drove. This was the American car
for the American sophisticate, the person who smoked Nat Sherman cigarettes,

(06:01):
who read the New Yorker, who wore White Bucks, Who
was General Motors answer to the VW's Reyna and Alpha
Romeo's rapidly infiltrating America. A little context is important here.
Up until this point, General Motors, the parent corporation of Chevrolet,

(06:24):
was the apple of mid century America. Utterly dominant, essential
to our way of life. It had an apparent monopoly
on good ideas and seemed capable of achieving the impossible.
Post World War Two, GM led the industry with an
astonishing fifty percent share of the car market. Its mid

(06:46):
century run was the stuff of epics. GM invented the
automotive design department. It thought harder and better about self
driving cars back in nineteen fifty eight than most autonomous
car hucksters do today. It sent cars to the moon
on Apollo rockets. It built a temple to itself in Warren, Michigan,

(07:10):
designed by Aero Saarinen, the same guy who built a
TWA terminal at JFK and the Gateway arch in Saint Louis.
GM made trucks, buses, locomotives, home appliances, you name it,
and of course cars, sleek corvettes, extravagant Cadillac Eldorado's chrome

(07:33):
toothed Buick roadmasters. It was oz, but substantial headwinds buffeted
its mid century progress. This administration will continue to undertake
any maker dot Willard sis healthy economic recovery. At the

(07:56):
start of Eisenhower's second presidential term, a recession had many
car buyers reconsidering their lane filling tailfin barges. With their
acres of chrome, European cars like vwzmg's presented new options
for the sporty set or the frugally minded Jeffersonian. In
nineteen fifty four, only about twenty thousand Americans bought small

(08:18):
European cars. Four years later that number was twenty times higher,
almost ten percent of the car market. Critically, the Big
Three had no small Sunan offerings at that time. They
only made them in two sizes back then large and
extra large. Enter the Corvee. It was what happened when

(08:45):
the mightiest car company on Earth set its mind to downsizing.
The Corvee would fuse the engineering ingenuity of those small
European cars to the comfort of a Chevrolet. Its name
revealed GM's intentions. Corvee would have the verve of a
Corvette and the solidity of a bell Air. But despite

(09:10):
the portmanteau, Corvet was unlike anything GM had made before,
from its engine type to its placement in the car,
from its suspension to the design of its bodywork. It
was a car to beat the Europeans at their own
fencing match, using European engineering techniques and sense of style
against them. Underneath its seductive lagdolce vit to bodywork was

(09:34):
what automotive engineers call a rear rear layout. It's very
rarely deployed. It means an engine in the rear of
the car after the rear axle, with power routed to
the rear wheels. It sounds odd as it's the complete
inverse of the front wheel drive front engine sedan norm

(09:54):
we know today, but it's a great formula for a
sporting machine. The original VW Beetle had this layout and
gifted it to the Porsche three fifty six, arguably the
best sports car of its day. Putting the engine in
the back of a rear drive car meant that the
majority of the mass was over the driven wheels, which

(10:14):
gave the car superb traction when accelerating, but having all
that mass back there demanded attention when breaking hard or
taking evasive action. And then there was the car's swing axele,
one of the earliest and most basic independent rear suspension designs,
which further complicated things. Unlike every car today, a swing

(10:38):
axle lacks an outboard hue joint, where each axle meets
the wheel hub, so as the wheels move up and down,
like when you take a corner hard, the hub's position
is fixed. It can't pivot to keep the tires alignment
consistent to the road. This can upset the car's balanced,
but it is not terribly hard to control. Lots of

(11:00):
cars from the thirties through the fifties had swing axles.
Back with Brian Morris in the Corvet were applying in
the concept. So when you're exercising the car and you're
unloading the rear and there's less weight on the rear,
and the rear of it lifts up, like if you're

(11:21):
charging into a turn really hot and you've got the
front end kind of planted in, the back end lifts up.
Swing axles will droop down. They sort of tuck under,
and it can take you by surprise if you're not
ready for it. But you know, in every car I've

(11:41):
driven with swing axles, the car really tells you what
it's doing. It doesn't come as a surprise. And what
you do in that situation, and this is really counterintuitive,
you have to give it more gas, not less, like
in a regular car. Things get squirrely you just lift

(12:02):
off the gas pedal and everything rights itself. But in
a car with swing axles and a rear engine, you
need to settle the rear by accelerating and shifting a
load of the thing and the mass backwards so the
wheels could pull out of right exactly right. So to

(12:22):
avoid the droop, you have to do something that feels unnatural.
But once you learn how to drive a car with
those kinds of axels, like a beetle or a three
fifty six or a going it's really fun and it's natural.
It's a skill that you have to develop. But once
you do, it's pretty gratifying to drive a car like this.

(12:48):
But if you didn't develop those skills, well, that's where
the trouble came in the acquire Ralph Nader, a legal
advisor to the United States Senate Inquiry, has just published
a book called Unsafe at Any Speed. In an interview
with Warner Troyer, Ralph Nader took aim at the corveer
in Unsafe at Any Speech, alleging that GM withheld critical

(13:11):
safety equipment in the engineering of the car. You say
that the cor of air for three or four years, yes,
was an unsafe vehicle to drive. Isn't that a pretty
wild exaggeration. No. I think the core are models nineteen
sixty to sixty three, and to some extent sixty four

(13:34):
had a rear axle which is called technically a swing
axle rear suspension system which, under certain predictable conditions of driving,
the car would suddenly unexpectedly go out of control. He
thought GM should have put an anti roll bar in
the rear suspension to tame the car's handling. His argument

(13:57):
was based on some one hundred lawsuits against GM filed
by drivers who lost control of the car more than
a statistical anomaly. GM would settle most of these suits
out of court. In his book, Nader did not hold
back from Unsafe's first sentence. Nader was often running for

(14:22):
over half a century. He wrote, the automobile has brought death, injury,
and the most inestimable sorrow and deprivation to millions of people.
Ralph Nader was not a fun lover like our friend
Brian Morris with a yellow corvet or your humble narrator.
Nader was all business. He went to Princeton for undergrad

(14:46):
and then Harvard Law School. After that, his best friends
were books. He did not play Hackey Sack in the quad,
nor did he rip Narley bongtoakes with the brost Sigma Kai.
I would say he was monk like, but he was
way more self righteous than any monk. Either it's cheer,
callousness or indifference, or they don't bother to find out

(15:08):
how they're card behave. Nater took aim at the largest
corporation in the world, arguing that the corvet was a lethal,
unpredictable viper of a car ready to bite without provocation.
That's simply not true. The car could be a handful,

(15:30):
but it was predictable if you understood how it worked,
also if you understood how to maintain it. In the
corverre's case, maintaining balancing control depended a lot on setting
the tire pressures properly. It required a conscientious approach to
vehicle maintenance. But gas station attendance at the time had

(15:50):
a saying twenty four pounds all around and did not
care about keeping the corvert's tires at the right inflations.
Those inflations, if we're getting technical, were eighteen pounds per
square inch in front to give the tire a fatter
footprint and thirty pounds of pressure at the rear. Even
more stability he would be afforded by an anti roll

(16:10):
bar in the chassis, which GM would put in the
second generation of the car in nineteen sixty five. You
had to take care of it. Most people did not.
Though the Corvee was an above average car aimed at
an above average driver, that's not necessarily who ended up

(16:32):
buying it. Plenty of people in the nineteen sixties looking
for a small, affordable sedan walked into a Chevrolet dealership
and drove out in a corvee. The buyer for the
car was probably more of a small sedan buyer, and
so you had to apply that kind of sports car
care to this car, which a lot of them probably

(16:54):
didn't do. So a buyer of a three fifty six
knows what he or she is getting into a little
bit more, whereas maybe the buyer of the corvee was like, Oh,
it's just like you know, the bell Air, except a
little bit smaller, getting sportier, and I can afford it. Yeah,
and I can afford it, and you know, I don't
have to buy one of those imports. I think General

(17:16):
Motors was saying we're just as good as those sporting
imports from Germany, and we're gonna create a car that
might challenge you a little bit. And I don't know
if the average buyer was prepared for it. But also,
there's nothing diabolical or crazy about this card. It's comfortable,

(17:38):
you know, cor this thing tracks great. You know when
in the Blues Brothers when Jake and Ellwood go into
Ray Charles Ponshaw and need to buy some instruments, and
you don't remember that I don't, and he quotes in
this ridiculous price on a Rhodes piano, and he goes,

(18:00):
that's crazy for this thing. It's all beat up, and
Charles goes, excuse me, I don't think there's anything wrong
with the action on this piano. And that's kind of
how I feel about this. Whether all of this, it's great.

(18:24):
He just got an auto to play it, He got
an aw to drive it. Cheated death yet again, pocket
signing nator Nader would have been unconvinced and unsafe at
any speed. He suggests that the issue was an owner

(18:47):
maintenance or driving behavior. The issue was that Chevrolet was
too cheap that it chose to forego an anti roll
bar in the rear suspension because it added cost. Nader wrote,
an automobile representing a reduction of one thousand, three hundred
and thirty two pounds of material, or more than one

(19:09):
third the weight of a standard nineteen sixty Chevrolet that
could sell for only about two hundred dollars less than
standard models, would constitute a marvel of production cost efficiency
and sales ingenuity. If the Corvee was such a miracle
of profitability with so much economic headroom, why would GM

(19:32):
care about the cost of adding a slim piece of
metal to the rear end. Doesn't make a lot of sense.
By the time Nater's book came out in nineteen sixty five,
the Corvee had already evolved from swing axles to a
more advanced and stable type of independent rear suspension. It
was an admission on GM's part that the Corvee had

(19:53):
room for improvement. Though a new suspension is a big alteration,
changes are common in the car industry, and all new
model comes out, its flaws are cataloged by the press
and owners, and the company works to modify it. It
usually takes a few years. Though he wrote damningly that

(20:15):
GM diluted its engineering standards for the Corvet. Nater's book
did not prompt any changes to the car. The ebbs
and flows of the car development process did. That. Nater's
book came out after GM made the change. He himself
noted in the very first chapter that GM had made

(20:35):
these upgrades. Still, despite taking aim at the largest and
richest corporation in America, the book did not make much noise,
at least initially, but it worried GM. The corporation viewed
it as an attack on its sterling reputation, and they
sought to attack Nater in kind. When it became known

(20:58):
that GM had Nater tailed by private investigators, the story
erupted and the book got noticed, another great moment in
the history of unintended sequences. In the wake of the book,
sales of the re engineered Corvete without the swing axle collapsed.

(21:22):
In three years, GM went from selling more than two
hundred thousand Corveres a year to fewer than fifteen thousand,
even as GM modified the car for greater stability. Nater
gets all the credit for this precipitous drop in sales,
but it is also true that the Ford Mustang did
as much as natter to kill the unconventional little Chevy stampede,

(21:46):
a stampede of one hundred thousand Mustangs Ford Mustang in
less than four months. The board Mustang has become the
most talked about, most exciting and fasto selling you've gotten
over twenty years. It seems like just about everyone wants one.
It was the Mustang, after all, that made small American
cars sexied. Five must they call it them two blacktoos.

(22:12):
It seats two upfront and when you pull down the
two bag seats, and there's room for a beach umbrella,
third board and a pheasant underglass. Henry's become quite a gourmet.
So I try to have everything ready for him when
he gets here. Why don't you change your nfe Ford

(22:33):
pitched the staying down the middle of the strike zone
at the largest, best educated, and most affluent generation America
had ever seen, Baby Boomers. It's arrival in nineteen sixty
four coincided with the boomer's first driving years. If the
Ford Model T mobilized the New America, then the Ford

(22:54):
Mustang mobilized a new American entity, the teenager with the
affordable and fun Mustang out on the street. The Corvet
was doomed anyway. Still, the car in the book are
for ever linked. Nater made it so that Corvet's very
name conjureous disaster. It is GM's analog to Ford's Edsel,

(23:19):
And with the book, Nator basically invented what we now
know as consumer advocacy. As the saying goes, consumer advocacy
focuses on fighting baths rather than producing goods. It is
a movement that has given us cleaner air, cleaner water,
and more temperate McDonald's coffee. Unsafe at Any Speed launched

(23:45):
a movement. It was the immediate precursor to the establishment
of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and other government
oversight agencies. Cars, of course, are safer now too. In
the mid sixties, there were roughly five road fatalities for
every one hundred million miles driven. Today it's roughly one

(24:07):
fatality over that same distance and eighty percent improvement. That's
incredible progress, and I find it hard to argue that
Nader's book didn't bring the issue into the mainstream. But
there's one number I can't quite get past. We'll talk

(24:27):
about it after the break, Hey, listeners, while I've got
you for a second. I want to talk to you
about a podcast I've been enjoying that I think you
might like to It's called Patented, and it's all about

(24:50):
history's most impactful inventions, from the airplane to the humble
cup of coffee, and the inventors who claimed these ideas
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stories of Eureka moments and genius loan inventors, but this
reality is often a lot more complicated and interesting. Patented

(25:11):
is hosted by Dallas Campbell, a science presenter who loves
to try to get to the bottom of these messy stories.
They have episodes on everything from how corn flakes were
created on a foundation of some pretty questionable science, why
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and who should really get credit for the first motion
picture spoiler it's not Thomas Edison. Coming up. They have

(25:36):
episodes on cryonics, contactless payment, and plastic surgery. So if
any of that sounds up your ally, you can subscribe
to Patented History of Inventions from our friends over at
History hit on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

(25:59):
Nater's advocacy in the nineteen sixties brought about a new
awareness around automotive safety. But there's one statistic that nags
at me. Before Nater entered the scene, roughly forty thousand
people died per year in car collisions. Today, forty thousand

(26:19):
people per years still die in car collisions. Sure, the
population is larger, so the proportion of deaths is down,
and fatalities per mile is a fraction of what it was.
But forty thousand deaths is still forty thousand deaths. That's
forty thousand real people, mothers, daughters, sons, and fathers. This

(26:46):
in an age of air bags, passenger safety cells, crumple zones,
blind spot warnings, and a host of other safety innovations
that didn't exist sixty five years ago. With all the
advances in automotive and road safety in those intervening six decades,
you think that that number would be much much lower.

(27:11):
So why is it still so high. Well, one theory
is that, in the wake of nature, we stopped focusing
on driver proficiency and started letting the car assume responsibility
for our safety. Kenneth White wrote a book about that shift,
in the Sack of Detroit. He tells us how it

(27:31):
played out. So it wasn't until the twenties when everybody
had a car and people were using cars a lot
more and the roads were better and they were driving
faster and driving off them faster. That's when traffic safety
became more of an issue. And so Herbert Hoover has
this big confab in the nineteen twenties where he invites

(27:56):
the industry, he invites health authorities, he invites municipal and
state governments and said, you know, we got to do
something about it. Let's pull together all the information we
have about auto safety and come up with a general
approach to the problem. And that's where the Tripoli approach
came from. Triple E. It stands for education, engineering, and enforcement.

(28:23):
Education was about making sure people knew that cars were
dangerous and that they knew how to drive, how to
share the road, and how to maintain their vehicles. Engineering
concerned road design and ensuring that highways were properly marked
and had good sight lines and grading. This led to
the divided highway and much greater levels of highway safety.

(28:46):
An enforcement well you know what that means. But while
the proportion of deaths relative to driven miles was going down,
a huge number of people were still dying in car crashes.
It was the medical community that first said, you know,
maybe triple E isn't everything here. Maybe there's something else

(29:08):
we can do to keep people from getting smashed to
pieces in their automobiles. They were more concerned with what
was called the second collision, which was after the bad
thing on the road had happened, and then driver or
passenger hits the dashboard or goes flying out of the vehicle,

(29:28):
and that's where the whole second collision theory, which was
taken as an alternative to the triple East school, came
into play. In the nineteen fifties. Nader was a second
collision man. He thought the car was the problem, not
the driver. In Unsafe, he called the Corvette an American

(29:52):
car that abruptly decides to do the driving for the driver.
The idea that we had to concentrate now on car
interiors as the leading factor in human carnage was appealing
to the men folks, but it was also appealing to

(30:13):
the tort industry in the US in the fifties, the
tort industry saw an opportunity to use second collision theory
to argue that all traffic accidents were the responsibility of carmakers,
because if carmakers could make a crashproof car, and surely

(30:37):
to God, carmakers, being big and rich and smart and
you know, the world's best engineers, knew how to make
a crashproof car. If they could make a crashproof car
and weren't making a crashproof car, they were liable for
all of those deaths on the road. They have failed
to give people the degree of safety to which they

(31:00):
were entitled. GM had faith in the customer. They figured
that drivers could play up to the Corvette in much
the way an average tennis player improves when hitting with
a great one. Nader argued that that trust was misplaced.
He thought that people shouldn't have to adapt to the car,

(31:20):
and shouldn't have to maintain awareness or tire pressures to
keep the car shiny side up. It was the corporation's
responsibility to protect us from the effects of our own incompetence.
But the irony is that the Corvet didn't require special skills.
It was not a hard car to drive fast, nor

(31:40):
an inherently dangerous one. You just had to learn how
it behaved and how to maintain it. Nader, a legendary autodidact,
did not think other people were capable of such feats.
The density of safety features in our cars today is
generally considered an outgrowth of this thinking. The safety crisis

(32:06):
precipitated by Nator did lead to safer cars. It led
to cars with air bags, with anti breaks, with traction control,
and now with all kinds of driver assist technology. So yeah,
those things came after Nader. Did they really come because

(32:26):
of Nader? I don't think that necessarily follows. I mean
a lot of the things like the traction control were
already operable in some European models before then. You know,
it took time for Detroit to adopt the technology and

(32:48):
put it in cars, but it didn't do so because
the government told it to it did it, did it,
and when it was ready. I would argue that actually
the second Collision view that air bags were the answer
to everything actually set in America back in terms of
public safety and killed more people than would otherwise have

(33:12):
died because the focus on the car and the crash
worthiness of the car detracted entirely from what had been
a fairly steady concern about the driver and what the
driver was doing. Was the driver sober? Was the driver reckless?

(33:34):
Did the driver bothered to put on his seatbelt? Here's
what we have to wrestle with the set of ideas
nater espoused. Undoubtedly led to cars that better protected us,
But did they make us better? Road fatalities maybe down.
But is that because we're better drivers? Or is it

(33:55):
because the car is shouldering the work? Does the image
American driver today have more mastery of their five thousand
pound car than they did sixty years ago? Or do
we think of it as an appliance, a four wheeled microwave,
not really understanding how it works, never taking it too
or beyond the limits of its capabilities unless we're about

(34:16):
to crash into something? Do we even know what's happening
under our feet? These are, of course all rhetorical questions.
We know what happens when something goes wrong. We're unprepared
for it. We lack the skill to react appropriately. We
crash into stuff, and the air bags and crumpled zones

(34:37):
keep us from dying. We have followed second collision philosophy,
not triple E. Think about the path that begins at
the corvet because some of its buyers didn't understand it,
they didn't properly maintain it, and because that small group
of drivers got into trouble with it, cars began to

(34:59):
be engineered for the lowest level of skill. We began
to blame the car for our bad driving, which led
the carmakers to try to bubble rap every aspect of
their operation, and we became reliant on that safety net.
Thus began a long erosion of skills that led us
to now the age of the no consequences car. Stuff

(35:22):
on new cars meant to help us avoid crashing on
account of our own distraction stuff like lane keeping, blind
spot monitoring, backup cameras. These are all ultimately making us
less attentive drivers. How many of us feel safe to
eat while driving, to grab a quick beer on the

(35:43):
way home from work, to send a really important meme
to our coworker, secure in the knowledge that the traction
control and lane keeping and breaking assist will sort it
all out. Fatalities per mile driven maybe down, but forty
thousand people are still dying on the road every year.

(36:03):
That's where the negligence lies. The loose nut behind the wheel.
The Corvere was a new kind of car from a
high riding General Motors, more sophisticated, more innovative, and more
of a European style sedan than anything the corporation had
produced to that point. The Corvere was General Motors, flexing

(36:25):
its muscles, showing the world that it could out engineer
and outthink the foreign competition. The Corvere tragedy lies in
the car it was trying to be, and how those
aspirations stalled. The Corvere affair cut down an emergent style
of driver oriented American car. It deprived a generation of

(36:48):
car enthusiasts, an American alternative to European sport sedans. But
more than any of that, it may have wounded an
important part of the American spirit. Who knows what might
have happened if the Corvere had succeeded, if we sought
to make drivers safer rather than just the cars. Never know,

(37:11):
Nader let us off the hook. Our independence and self
determination have caveats. Now. We are more reliant than ever
on big corporations to keep us safe. And isn't that
a scarier concept than a swing axle Car show is

(37:41):
written and hosted by me Eddie Alterman. It's produced by
Sam Dingman, Jacob Smith and Amy Gaines. Our editor is
Jen Guero. Original music and mastering by Ben Taliday. Our
executive producer is Mia Lobell. Our show art was designed
by Sean Karney. An airbrush by Greg la Fever. Our

(38:04):
patron Saints are Leetal Mallad and Justine Lange. Special thanks
to my guests Brian Morris and Kenneth White. Check out
Ken's book The Sack of Detroit, all about GM's dominant era.
Car Show is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you
love this show and others from Pushkin Industries, consider subscribing

(38:25):
to Pushkin Plus. Pushkin Plus is a podcast subscription that
offers bonus content and uninterrupted listening for just four ninety
nine a month. Look for Pushkin Plus on Apple podcast subscriptions.
To find more Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Aeroplanes, spacesuits, condoms, coffee, plastic, jury,

(39:09):
warships over on the patented podcast by History Hit. We
bring you the fascinating stories of histories, most impactful inventions,
and the people who claim these ideas as their own.
We uncover exceptional stories behind everyday objects we manage to
put two men on the moon before we put wheels
on suitcases. Unpack invention myths. So the prince's widow immediately

(39:33):
becomes certain Thomas Edison stole her husband's invention and her
husband disappeared around the same time. Can only have been
eliminated by Thomas Edison, who at the time is arguably
the most famous person in the West, and look backwards
to understand technologies that are still in progress. You know
when people turn around to me and say, oh, why
would you live on to live forever? Life should rubbish?

(39:53):
I just think that's a bit sad. I think it's
worthwhile thing to do, and the thing that really makes
it with while is the fact that you could make
it go on forever. So subscribe to Patented from History,
hit on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts
to catch new episodes everywhere Wednesday and Sunday,