There is also a clear, demonstrated relationship between the cost of alcohol and the number of drunk-driving deaths. Research has shown that raising social awareness around drunk driving—as groups like Mothers Against Drunk Driving have done—is not enough. In most Western European countries, the sales tax on alcohol ranges between sixteen and twenty-five per cent. In the United States, it is somewhere between one-half and a third of the European rate—and because the federal excise is a flat amount (not a percentage of the sales price) it falls every year with inflation.

“There are extremely negative outcomes that are responsive to the price of alcohol, like highway fatalities,” the economist Philip J. Cook, who has written extensively on the subject, says. “I estimated that the tax increase associated with the 1991 excise tax saved sixty-five hundred lives the first year from trauma-related accidents of various kinds. It was an extraordinarily effective measure from the public-safety perspective. What is distressing to me is that it has been allowed to erode. And there is a large segment in Congress seeking to repeal the 1991 increase entirely.”

In the United States, issues like taxes or speed cameras tend to be framed in political terms—as matters of individual liberty or economic freedom. But Evans’s point is that we have overlooked the fact that these issues are essentially about public safety. Would the people of Oregon have voted so overwhelmingly in favor of an anti-tax ballot measure if they had realized that they were condemning thousands of their fellow-citizens to death?

“I was in a different place then.” Facebook

Twitter

Email

Shopping

The number of deaths associated with drinking and speeding obviously dwarfs the number associated with the kind of auto-safety controversies that grab our attention. The N.H.T.S.A.’s conclusion was that, in the first seven years that the Pinto and its later companion model the Bobcat were on the road, two dozen of their occupants were killed by fires from rear collisions. The number of deaths linked to the Toyota sudden-acceleration complaints was about the same. The deaths associated with G.M.’s ignition-switch malfunction have so far totalled around fifty. More people died in an average year in Oregon as a result of too few traffic police than died in all three of those controversies combined. And those are just the fatalities that resulted from a single variation in one factor in one small state in one twenty-five-year period.

The other obvious fact is that the variables that really matter have to do with the driver, not the car. The public approach to auto safety is preoccupied with what might go wrong mechanically with the vehicles we drive. But the chief factor is not what we drive; it is how we drive. Richard Schmidt, who is perhaps the world’s leading expert on pedal error, says that the Toyota sudden-acceleration controversy ought to have triggered a national discussion about safer driving. He argues for overturning the deeply held—and, in his view, irrational—proscription against two-foot driving. If drivers used one foot for the accelerator and the other foot for the brake, he says, they would be far less likely to mistake one pedal for the other. Accidents could be prevented; lives could be saved. But in order to talk about solving the pedal-error problem you have to accept the fact that, when it comes to saving lives, things like the number of police on the road, and the price of alcohol, and the techniques we use to drive our cars are vastly more important than where a car’s gas tank is mounted.

“I would argue that our nation has a low tolerance for fatalities associated with airplanes,” the N.H.T.S.A.’s David Friedman told me, when we spoke late last year. “In part because of that, fatalities are very, very low from aircraft. Also in part because of that, the F.A.A. has close to fifty thousand employees—an order of magnitude more employees than we do. We have six hundred. To deal with ten thousand people who are dying from drunk driving or ten thousand dying because they didn’t wear a seat belt, or the three thousand dying from distracted driving, or the four thousand dying because they are pedestrians or bicyclists and they are hit by a car. That’s why the Administration has been asking Congress for more resources for us. With more resources, we could save more lives. And each time the answer from Congress has been no. Zero.”

When he said that, Friedman was fresh off another excruciating appearance before Congress, to answer questions about the Honda air-bag recall. He didn’t belabor the point. He didn’t have to. Here he was, charged with reducing one of the greatest sources of preventable death and injury in the United States, and he was being instructed to direct the energies of his tiny, underfunded agency toward a problem so small that it barely showed up in the traffic-fatality statistics. Engineers have a grievance. They think we should think more like them. They are not wrong.

The 1973 file with the photos stapled front and back got Denny Gioia’s attention. He later went to the chamber of horrors, and he saw the problem firsthand: a burned-out Pinto carcass. “You have to imagine what it’s like. Have you ever seen a burned-out—not a Pinto but anything?” he said. “It’s awful. It’s just awful. Especially if you use your imagination and remember that people were in it when it turned into that state. Everything’s melted. All the plastic, and there’s a lot of plastic. All of the wiring. Steering wheel is warped. I mean, it starts to rust in days. It’s repulsive to see that kind of thing.”

Did he have traceable cause? He did later, when he learned about the internal test results. But all he had in the beginning was what the engineer assigned to the case said: “He told me, ‘I spent all day on this damn car. I went over it with a fine-tooth comb. Other than that, it’s a tin can.’ What does that mean? He meant that it was a two-thousand-pound car on the road with four-thousand-pound cars. It got hit. It lit up. What do you expect?” It didn’t look like a defect. It looked like simple physics.

Nor did Gioia see a pattern of failure. This was a rare subset of a rare subset of traffic accident. “Usually, just to put something on the docket, I’ve got to have twenty cases, pointing to a similar component that was failing,” Gioia said. “The whole time I managed the Pinto file, I never got above five.” He held out his hand, his finger and thumb separated by a sliver. “In that context of everything else that’s going on, it’s that big.”

In the meantime, he and his colleagues in the recall office were juggling problems, trying to figure out which ones would pass muster with the executives upstairs. “Sometimes we’d look at something and say, ‘It’s not worth putting forth, because there’s no way they’re going to recall this trivial problem,’ ” he said. “And we didn’t want to lose credibility. And, remember, on a personal level, I’m the guy who has a reputation as a bleeding-heart liberal. Gioia will vote to recall anything. So I had to rein myself in a little bit. And you can’t recall everything. You just can’t. You know? You want to recall everything that looks like it might be a problem? Guess what, you just put the company out of business.”

“Damn it, Flopsy, you’ve cost me another bust.” Facebook

Twitter

Email

Shopping

Gioia now chairs the department of management and organization at Penn State’s business school. Some years ago, he put together a study of his role in the Pinto case, and presented it to students. It didn’t go well. “It opened me up to all kinds of criticism,” he said. “People finger-wagging, saying, ‘You’re a bad actor,’ taking me to task for killing people.” He could not explain to a group of students deep in the world of university life how it was to think like an engineer deep in the world of a car company. Now that he is no longer an engineer, even he finds it easy to criticize his former self. “I think I could have made a huge difference if I had just gotten on the horn and started making calls,” he said. “What do you know? What’s going on here? Here’s the pattern I’m seeing from here, what can you tell me about this?” He thinks he could have brought the Pinto case to the attention of Ford’s management earlier; he could have lessened the crisis that followed. Then he remembered what it was like in the recall office, the flood of cases, the complexity and the ambiguity of those cases. If he didn’t rely on the numbers, how would he know what to care about? “I had bigger fish to fry,” he said. “Bigger, more immediate problems to take care of.”

He went back to the office from the chamber of horrors and put the case on the docket. It was a symbolic stand. “I practically got laughed out of the office,” Gioia said. He re-created the dialogue from decades earlier:

Well, come on, Den. We’re going to go in front of the executive panel with this evidence? What do you got? Two or three field reports? Why are we even discussing this_?_

Well, I just came back from the depot. You should see what I saw.

Den. Come to your senses.

“So I came to my senses,” he said. “I realized, O.K., first of all, I’d done what I trained myself not to do, make decisions on the basis of emotion. And, second, I realized, I had to prove it, and I couldn’t prove it.”

The Pinto case was put to a vote. It lost, 5–0. Gioia voted against it himself. ♦