Wamuwi Mbao
IN the 1950s, cars became a truly indispensable feature of life. They shortened journeys. They made far-off destinations possible. The car symbolised freedom. And if those who used them occasionally bumped into stationary objects, killing or maiming themselves in the process, well, that was just the risk one took.
Ford South Africa is under harsh media scrutiny, and deservedly so. The less than comforting news that a large number of its popular Kuga SUVs are being recalled due to a tendency to catch fire was made more damning by the fact that Ford had to be cudgelled into doing so by the National Consumer Commission.
The idea that companies should consider the wellbeing of the people who use their products is a fairly modern one. For a large part of the 20th century it was accepted that cars, like most things in life, were unsafe, and that they required skill to operate. A car is not a jackhammer or a bulldozer, but an extension of the self. It’s difficult to get people to associate danger with something that is essentially a mobile room.
So while it was becoming increasingly known that these rolling rooms had a nasty tendency to mash, stab or crush the humans inside during an accident, nobody cared much, least of all the manufacturers.
Things changed somewhat in the ’60s, when freeways and highways increased road travel. People began to be less accepting of the notion that a car might simply vomit its occupants onto the unyielding road surface in a minor fender bender, all because the seats were slippery and the door pins were largely ceremonial.
One name always pops up at this point in the story: Ralph Nader. Nader is the person to credit for the fact that your steering wheel doesn’t turn your ribs to powder in an accident.
His book, Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-in Dangers of the American Automobile, pointed out a bunch of things we take for granted today — such as that blinding the driver with illplaced chrome trim is not a very good idea, or that car manufacturers should standardise shift patterns so that you don’t put a car in Reverse because you expected Park to be there.
Although cars stopped being wilfully designed to kill, they weren’t more reliable. Anyone who drove a car between the ’50s and ’70s knows that it was perfectly normal that, occasionally, one of the very many pieces that made a car move would stop moving or break free, or fall out. Cars overheated, they failed to proceed when it rained, and they succumbed to rust with alarming eagerness.
The advent of Japanese cars in the motoring mainstream made people realise that things didn’t have to be this way. It was, it seemed, possible to make a car that worked on Monday and Tuesday, that didn’t drip water on your knees when it rained or need to be overhauled every second Sunday.
And so people’s expectations began to change.
But not all the cars did. With the Kuga immolation story cresting the news wave, many stories invoked the Ford Pinto scandal.
The Pinto was an unremarkable product of Detroit’s decade of discontent. It looked like a pair of bell-bottom pants and it had a design flaw that was to become notorious: the fuel tank was positioned behind the rear axle, close to the rear bumper and directly in what modern cars employ as a crash zone.
So in an accident, the Pinto’s fuel tank would rupture, or be ripped open in ways that allowed petrol to flow into the cabin. Any stray spark (there are many in a car crash) would then likely turn the Pinto into an inferno.
As a small car from one of the world’s largest manufacturers, the Pinto was initially popular, and it took a number of years before reports started proliferating that suggested that Pintos would burn if they were rear-ended.
What happens next is where things get tricky. Internal memos showed that Ford knew about the Pinto issue several years before the National Highway Traffic Safety Association collared it.
It chose not to act for almost a decade, reasoning that paying out individual lawsuits would be cheaper than redesigning the car.
Here, I’ll pause to illustrate a problem. When last did you stub your toe? Can you predict when the next time will be? Probably not. Probability is a tricky thing to factor into the human world. You can predict the possibility that, with thousands of cars on the road, some of them might experience mechanical failure, or drive into one another, but it’s harder to determine how that probability will affect you.
If 19 out of 20 cars explode, how can you be sure if you’re in the 19th car, or the 20th?
This is by way of explaining that, although the Pinto became a byword for callous corporate greed, it wasn’t fundamentally less safe than most other cars from the same period, which would (probably) offer little or no protection in any serious accident. Ford was able to prove this in court in 1978, which is why it won the initial court case. But it left a bad taste in the mouth of the consumer public.
Auto recall scandals can basically be divided into two areas — either there’s a problem that isn’t actually a problem, or there’s a real problem.
But in either case, what we want is to see that the manufacturer cares that its product is potentially dangerous. Downplaying the fears of your customers in order to put out fires isn’t a terribly sound strategy. It just makes people think you don’t care.
Whenever a scandal like this breaks, it’s usually followed by the damning allegation that the company had known about the vehicle’s tendencies for years before the news broke. A headline might read “Company X knew about exploding cupholder problem for five years!”, which is all you need for people to imagine that the company is headed by sociopaths.
Ford’s history of recalls makes for grim reading. The phrase “could cause fire” crops up disturbingly often over a 40-year period.
It’s filled with references to people being burnt beyond recognition or dying because a car they thought was in Park slipped into reverse and rolled away (Ford solved that matter by sending owners a warning sticker that they could place on their dashboards).
The sort of people who drive bakkies voluntarily and eat the same meals every day of the week will tell you that these problems reflect a fundamental misfit between how a car is engineered and what people expect from their car. That engineers think about things like production tolerances and acceptability, rather than a binary “Is it broken? Yes/No” equation.
Ford reasoned that paying out individual lawsuits would be cheaper than redesigning the car
That’s partly true. If you build 1 000 cars, it’s natural (to an engineer) that one in 100 may have faults that don’t register immediately or aren’t serious enough to be rejected. DDB’s iconic “Lemon” Volkswagen advert from the ’60s might have poked fun at the lengths to which a German manufacturer will go to deliver a faultless product, but the reality is different.
The outrage that has accompanied the Ford Kuga scandal is the sort that usually accompanies these kinds of automotive intrigues: not simply that the product is faulty, but that the manufacturer invariably knows that its wheeled wonder has a propensity to fall over, play dead or spontaneously combust.
But of course, assembly faults are one thing, inherent faults quite another.
In the Kuga’s case, a proclivity for overheating (Ford’s explanation) is an unlikely and disingenuous excuse, especially for a car designed to be sold all over the world. As the number of Kuga fires climb and social media spreads disgruntled complaints from Kuga owners, it has all the makings of another Pinto scandal.
Except that Ford was probably hoping that the tried-and-tested method of Not Talking About It would work.
It usually does. When Toyota’s wildly popular Fortuner started popping up in numerous gravel-road accidents, Toyota South Africa deadpanned that there was nothing inherently wrong with the SUV, and then quietly gave it a beltsand-braces facelift. Now nobody talks about it.
Perhaps Ford was hoping for the same solution. But with 15 fires in the past month, it’s not a story that’s going to go away any time soon.
Mbao is an essayist and cultural critic. His short stories have been published in various collections. He lectures at Stellenbosch University on literary and cultural studies and posttransitional South African life. Comment on this: write to tellus@sundaytimes.co.za or SMS us at 33971 www.sundaytimes.co.za