My First Published Essay, December 1974
Airbags and the $65 Car
By Roger George
(as published in Autoweek and Competition Press December 21, 1974)
On paper, the air bag seems like a marvelous invention. Just
imagine—you’re sitting on your seatbelt, after cleverly outwitting your
car’s ignition interlock. Some idiot makes a left turn in front of you;
there’s no room to stop or take evasive action. Technology takes over.
And obediently, a filmy plastic bag snuggled in your steering wheel
explodes into action, catches your catapulting form and shoves you back
into your seat. Its mission accomplished, it sigh an instantaneous
deflation and lies spent on your lap. All before you’re even aware of
its presence.
The airbag is touted as a pinnacle product of 2000
years of Western civilization and a space program. The Department of
Transportation and insurance companies sing its praises and act to make
it required equipment.
I’d feel a lot more comfortable about the
prospect if I knew that just one of the airbag’s developers or
promoters had ever owned a $65 car. I did, and I shudder to think of
what could have happened to me had it been airbag-equipped.
“Walter” was a 1948 Chevrolet 4-door sedan. When it was new, the car
was well up among post-war status symbols. When it was built, safety
equipment consisted of four brakes and a lot of sheet metal; Walter was
sold on other attributes, luxury and “performance” chief among them.
It was a Fleetline sedan, with all the options: two-tone paint (pale
green with brown roof), radio, heater, vacuum-assisted manual shift, a
yellow foglamp on the grille and a moveable spotlight on the driver’s
windshield pillar. The engine was Chevrolet’s venerable and
ultra-reliable straight six.
Rear seat passengers had so much
foot and head room that they were virtually isolated from those in the
front; an intercom would have been a useful option. Everything was
oversize—the seats, the steering wheel, the radio and heater … The
dashboard and door moldings were decorated with the imitation
wood-on-metal so popular during that era; the seats were covered with
mohair, and all knobs were of creamy beige plastic. You knew you were
somebody if you drove a car like this, even though it was only a
Chevrolet and not a Cadillac. People could tell you were on the way up.
Even after two decades the car retained some of its original appeal,
even if it now went by the name “funk” rather than “style”. But, as I
inspected the car in my brother-in-law’s back yard, I wasn’t interested
in the car’s image as much as its functionality. I was a college
student just needed a cheap car.
“Does it run?,” I asked
innocently. He climbed in an turned the key. Nothing. I started to
leave, but he lifted the great alligator jaw of a hood and replaced the
battery terminal.
“Okay,” he beamed. “Now watch this. Uh … maybe you better stand back just a bit. In case.”
The engine cranked laboriously and then caught. With a whoop of
triumph, he raced the accelerator. Popping and little-muffled, the
engine finally settled into an idle of sorts. That was all I needed. I
gave him sixty-five bucks and he signed over the title.
Assured of the sale, he then warned me about a few “little things.”
“Be sure to pump the brakes a bit,” he cautioned. “And be careful with
the steering—it’s a bit loose. Oh, and the vacuum shift doesn’t work
too well, especially going to second. Put it in neutral, count to ten,
and slowly feel your way in.”
A bit unsteadily, I drove off into
the night and tried my first shift. “… seven, eight, nine, ten,
shift.” I was rewarded with a terrifying GRAUNCH! I had somehow hit
reverse. The car coasted to a stop. Finding first, I tried again, and
thistime found the right ggear. Proudly cruising in second, my triumph
was cut short by a stop sign. Preoccupied with the transmission, I
noticed the stuttering of the engine too late, and it died.
At that point, I discovered the dead battery. And the rain.
The voltage regulator was faulty, and could not be replaced that night.
While I was cursing in the rain my brother-in-law drove by, oblivious
to my signals for help. I threw a rock at his car, but missed.
I
got Walter home the next night, and began to go to work. I am not a
mechanic. People without much money, though, become surprisingly adept
at keeping old cars running (after a fashion), and I was no exception.
Ineptitude may be the mother of innovation; Walter was kept on the road
by means of frighteningly ingenious repairs.
The car handled
like a boat in rough seas. The shocks were non-functional, allowing the
car to “porpoise” over irregularities in the road, and the steering box
was drastically worn, creating a lag in the steering response. To
execute a turn, one used a bump or the brakes to throw the car’s weight
onto the front wheels and turned the steering wheel in the desired
direction well before the turn. Steering corrections were likewise
anticipated in advance. I was eventually able to tighten up the
steering box somewhat, and new front tires helped. But steering
response was never, in any way, quick.
Next on the list of
improvised repairs was the shift linkage. I found that the linkage
would permit the driver to select either first and reverse, or second
and third, but not to shift from one set of gears to the other while
moving. I tried a variety of makeshift repairs, but the linkage was
simply too worn for conventional solutions. Radical surgery was called
for.
I drilled a hole in the floor and affixed a steel rod to
the part of the transmission tower that controlled the first/second
transition. If that rod was pulled upward in perfect coordination with
the column shift lever, the shift could be effected. To lift the rod,
my wife became a riding mechanic, and we drilled intensively to perfect
the operation.
“Ready?,” I’d ask as we approached the redline for first.
“Ready,” she’d confirm, grasping the rod with both hands.
“Okay. One…two…three…PULL!” By making a lot of second gear starts and
avoiding hills wherever possible, we were able to hold her work to a
minimum.
Which was fortunate. Because the windshield wipers didn’t work, and we live in Seattle. It rains a lot in Seattle.
The solution to this problem was to tie some clothesline to one wiper,
run it through the wing window and across the dash, out the other wing
and tie it to the other wiper. Power was, of course, by wife.
“Can I rest for a bit?,” she’d ask wistfully. My arms are ready to drop.”
“Not yet. Here comes a cop. Wipe, dammit.”
“You don’t really love me,” she muttered as I watched the cop drive by. “You only want me to wipe your windshield.”
“That’s not true,” I bristled. “I need you.”
“For what?,” she demanded.
“Well, for one thing, to downshift. We’ve got a stoplight. Down NOW!”
After awhile, she became a true mechanic, right down to the language.
I learned a lot from Walter. Like the fact that beer cans and sections
of drain pipe can be temporary, although not entirely satisfactory,
cures for a broken exhaust pipe. And how to do a valve job with a jar
of grinding paste and a suction cup on a dowel. But my ingenuity did,
after all, have its limits. Walter won retirement with a simultaneous
brake failure and transmission seizure, graphically demonstrating
Murphy’s famous law: “Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong.”
Which brings me back to airbags. Walter did not belong on the road.
But it was there, as are thousands like it. As long as poor people have
to buy $65 cars to survive in our mobile society, there will be such
cars on the road.
So think of your airbag-equipped Granada in
15 years, with all of the defects of age. Is it reasonable to expect
that a highly-sophisticated device like an airbag will never take the
notion into its little computer to explode in the driver’s face without
cause?
As for me, I think I’ll stick to seatbelts, thank you.
