In the Public Interest

By Ralph Nader

Once again, General Motors Corp. shows how it can go backward into the future. Its average new motor vehicle fuel inefficiency has been getting worse in recent years. Now it wants to unbundle many of its vehicles by dropping standard equipment side air bags and antilock braking systems (ABS) and charging its customers more for these lifesaving devices as options.

So the new G.M. is like the old G.M., which charged customers extra for seat belts and airbags in the 1960s and '70s, respectively, until federal law required or induced their standard installation.

Unless car buyers change G.M.'s mind by showing their displeasure and moving away from G.M. to another manufacturer that builds these safety systems as standard equipment, G.M.'s directive will have the following consequences:

1. Car buyers who choose the options will have to pay two to three times as much. Once a feature ceases to be standard equipment, it costs more to manufacture in more limited quantities. Also carmakers routinely overcharge consumers on options to begin with.

2. More lives will be lost because these features will not be on all cars. To those rigid ideologues from the right who would leave such matters up to choice, I would ask if they would include seat belts, doors, and padded dash panels under their ideology.

The whole principle behind mandatory safety standards is to put a safety net under all vehicles sold, just like a good fire code does for building construction.

3. G.M. is exposing itself to losing more product liability lawsuits. Actively removing a safety feature from standard equipment straightens the argument by innocent, injured motorists that G.M. knew better and acted recklessly by deleting a clearly feasible "crashworthy" safety feature.

According to a USA Today report, G.M. expects to save about $100 million a year with this move from standard to optional for ABS and side airbags. Last year G.M. grossed more than $177 billion, by comparison. What will the cost of this ill-advised decision be to motorists, in lives and injuries, and eventually, in dollars, to G.M.?

USA Today seemed to lay this decision at the feet of G.M. product chief Robert Lutz, instead of the usual bean counters. I hope this is not the case.

Lutz is a freethinking former Chrysler executive recently brought in by G.M. bosses to shake up the staid or stagnant corporate culture and put exciting engineering functions and designs on the road. I held a joint press conference with Lutz about a decade ago to celebrate Chrysler's winning our celebrity-buyer race by being the first to place air bags as standard equipment in automobile models affordable to middle-class buyers. Celebrities such as Phil Donahue, Paul Newman, Dear Abby, Steve Allen, and Bill Murray had pledged to buy such a vehicle and did.

It remains to be seen what the National Highway Safety Agency will say about what Clarence Ditlow, the director of the Center for Auto Safety (www.autosafety.org), called a "retreat from safety." It also remains to be seen whether G.M. will start a race to the bottom by other auto manufacturers who see greed and callousness in their "strategic planning" process.

Consumers can vote with their feet and send a signal to these companies not to follow G.M. into the pits. In the meantime, any citizen interested in safer roadways can convey his or her displeasure by writing to G.M. at General Motors headquarters, 300 Renaissance Center, Detroit, Mich. 48243 or by logging on to the company's Web site at www.gm.com.