DETROIT - Some of the defenses the auto industry has had against implementing greater vehicle safety "verged on tragic hilarity," Ralph Nader said Thursday as he was inducted into the Automotive Hall of Fame.

"When Volvo put three-point seatbelts in in the 1960s, and I had the auto companies here say three-point seatbelts would be very bad for internal injuries in sudden deceleration, I asked them to demonstrate the difference between the anatomy of the American people and the Swedish people," Nader said in accepting the honor. "Somehow (the seatbelts) worked pretty well for them."

Nader's induction at a ceremony in Detroit came after decades of being a thorn in automakers' sides, but with wide-reaching results such as the addition of seatbelts to vehicles and the creation of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

He was joined by Alan Mulally, former Ford Motor Co. CEO; Roy C. Lunn, an engineer with a hand in several historically important cars such as the Ford GT40; and by Bertha Benz (1849-1944), the late wife and business partner of automobile inventor Carl Benz (1844-1929).

Nader told the audience Thursday that at times he approached basic safety issues in the industry with a kind of naive wonder.

He said that at one point, the head of safety at an automaker would advise parents anticipating a sudden collision to order their children to put their hands on the car's dash panel to brace themselves. "Apparently not knowing that you could be the most powerful boxer in the world, and still not brace yourself against a 15-mile-an-hour collision," Nader said.

Ironically, seatbelts had already been used in World War I to keep American pilots in their fighter planes, he said. And the padded dashboard was used in ancient Roman chariots. "That's a lot of lead time for the auto companies," he said.

If those seem like obvious advancements now, when Nader was a young Harvard Law School graduate going toe-to-toe with the industry in the late 1950s and 1960s they apparently were radical ideas.

Now, the complexities of the automobile and the safety issues they face have only grown alongside technological advancements. And despite engineering progress, the roadways are not any safer, at least in terms of volume. Traffic deaths last year increased by 8 percent to 35,200 fatalities, according to the NHTSA.

And Nader, whose 1965 book "Unsafe at Any Speed" is considered one of the most important pieces of public advocacy journalism in the 20th century, is not relenting his criticism of the auto industry.

He called today's automobile "essentially a super computer on wheels" that is increasingly furnished for entertainment and office work purposes, while drivers are gradually losing control.

Along with the millions of lines of software code, modern cars and trucks are also opened up to more vulnerability in terms of cyber security, but also for calculated abuse by automakers, Nader said.

He pointed to the Volkswagen diesel emission cheating scandal, in which the German automaker deliberately made software that would trick U.S. emissions tests into thinking its diesel-engine cars were more clean-burning than they actually were.

He also alleged people inside Takata Corp., responsible for an unprecedented vehicle recall with explosive airbags linked to at least 13 deaths, and at General Motors, which waded through a massive ignition switch recall that affected 2.4 million vehicles and was blamed for at least 124 deaths, were aware of the defects.

"We've ceased just to see carelessness, ignorance and indifference," Nader said. "These are increasingly criminal acts, not prosecuted, because there's no criminal penalty in the motor vehicle safety law. The corporate lobbyists got that excised in 1966."

Nader implored the audience to think of a broader spectrum of values for motor vehicles to serve, including clean air, efficient use of energy and the saving of life and limb.

Before the ceremony, he paused for a moment to survey a 1960 Chevrolet Corvair that was on display. It was the car featured prominently in "Unsafe of Any Speed," as a "one-car accident." A copy of the book had been put on the dash of the car, and its front vanity plate read "IAMSAFE."

Earlier, MLive asked Nader how it felt to be honored by an industry of which he had long been and adversary.

"It feels strange," he said. "Except that I think they've now incorporated safety into their marketing and advertising, where years ago it would be a taboo, and they would say to us, 'safety doesn't sell, we don't want to scare the motoring public.'

"Well now they realize that families like to protect their children, and themselves, and they like to breathe clean air and they like to get more gasoline mileage per buck," he said. "So I think that's why the door was open."