President-elect Trump’s team announced that they intend to no longer require companies with self-driving cars to report traffic fatalities to the Department of Transportation. Since almost 90 percent of the already reported fatalities have been Tesla drivers, it’s not hard to figure out what $300 million in campaign contributions can buy you.
Having just finished a three-year investigation of the automobile industry, I would like to explain why this is bad governance and a criminal coverup.
At the beginning of the 20th century, cities’ biggest problem was the number of horses using their streets. For example, in New York City, over a hundred thousand horses roamed downtown daily; every horse left over 23 pounds of manure and 12 gallons of urine.
To make our cities inhabitable again, the car was invented. By 1924, the internal combustion engine dominated American roads, driving steam and electric cars out of the marketplace. The problem with the new engines was getting the gasoline combustion inside the engine right. Cars would often backfire, and the constant knocking and pinging of the engine did not make for a nice, relaxing ride.
Enter the Ethyl Corporation, a newly formed partnership between General Motors and Standard Oil, to produce an anti-knock car additive. The problem was this new additive was lead.
For the next half-century, the Ethyl corporation told the government and the public that it had conducted highly confidential tests in its labs and could assure us there was no correlation between health problems humans might face and the new additive. The company claimed that lead in humans was normal and not at all harmful.
They lied. The result was that during these 50-plus years, almost 900,000 humans died each year from lead poisoning. Since the data was not public, and no journalist or scientist had access to the facts, there was no public outcry or repercussions against those responsible for the deaths.
Lead was finally only taken out of our engines by the tragic Santa Barbara oil spill in 1969. President Nixon visited our oil-soaked beaches and decided to establish the Environmental Protection Agency. A year later, Congress passed the Clean Air Act of 1970. This new law mandated that by 1975, every newly manufactured car must have a catalytic converter built into it. The problem for the Ethyl Corporation was that their lead additive also killed the catalytic converters and caused cars to die at the gas pump. The result was that, finally, unleaded gasoline became what we put in our cars.
The point is that greed will always prevail if you leave the safety and governance of things as ubiquitous as cars to be determined by corporations. The result is massive profit for the companies and massive suffering for the rest of us.