On Fri, 09 Apr 2010 18:20:40 +0700, the infamous John
scrawled the following:

On Thu, 08 Apr 2010 07:29:27 -0700, Larry Jaques
wrote:

On Thu, 08 Apr 2010 08:20:07 -0600, the infamous Lewis Hartswick
scrawled the following:

I didn't read the whole tirade but Ralph Nadar
is/was an IDIOT. He lost all credibility when
he wrote " Unsafe at any Speed".
What a load of BS.

Yeah, he castrated GM while allowing the VW to go unpunished, despite
the fact that they had more problems than the Corvair, including the
extreme tendency for several to set themselves on fire almost as an
almost daily practice.

No that is not correct. Nader wrote Unsafe at any Speed, which was
pretty much a hatchet job to the extent that totally incorrect
statements were made and even a sketch of how a swing axle works was
deliberately drawn showing the outside wheel in a turn tipping inward
at the bottom, "tuck under" as Nader preferred to it when in fact it
does exactly the opposite, although if you do not understand how the
suspension works it might appear to be correct.

Although his engineering was wrong and Corvairs were fairly
competitive in SCCA racing, (apparently on the track the suspension
worked perfectly well :-) the public bought the book and the Corvair
was a dead duck.

But corvairs did tend to toggle from understeer to oversteer without
warning, and my friend proved it to me (after fifteen "SLOW DOWN"
warnings) while I necked in the back seat with sweet Carmen. He spun
us a full 360 and sent my convertible into a 50 degree tip against a
small bank directly in line with a telephone pole. If he'd been going
just a few miles per hour faster, it probably would have killed all 4
of us. (Phil Dumbucks, you were a jerk!) Needless to say, he never
drove my vehicles again. I continued to haul ass in my 'Vair, but I
knew her limits.

I had glasspacks on the first one (bright red) and would drive up to
within 30' of friends and pedestrians, shut the key off, then turn the
inition key ON when I got next to them. All the raw gas going into the
cylinder and out into the exhause would cause an explosion within the
mufflers which would scare the hell out of 'em. The Corvair M-80. I
bought it from a CHP officer who had put 100lbs of sand in the trunk
to stabilize it and had really kept her up. She was quieter on the
freeway at 90mph than Mom's '63 Lincoln Continental, though I
preferred borrowing the Lincoln for the drive-in movies. You could put
the front seat all the way back and put your feet up on the dash (for
warmups), and it was wide enough to lay all the way down in. 4 kids
could horizontally bop in one. Ah, to be 19 again...



Nader then wrote a book about the Volkswagen Bug using much the same
tactics that had been so successful in the first book. However, this
time Road and Track, and probably other main line car magazines wrote
rebuttals. I read the Road and Tack article and it demonstrated that
Nader's engineering was faulty, his many quotes, mainly taken from
N.Y. State Police reports, were either taken out of context, cherry
picked for effect or partially quoted, and in fact little in his book
was accurate of true. In short they did to Nader what Nader did to
the Corvair.

g I hadn't heard about the VW book.


Since then I haven't heard much about Nader, but of course I haven't
been looking to :-)

You don't read the ballot sheets, eh? He ran for the POTUS position.

--
Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace
will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will
blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy,
while cares will drop away from you like the leaves of Autumn.
-- John Muir