Airbags and the $65 Car

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.