One of the main figures behind the idea of consumer rights is Ralph Nader, who is a political activist. He is a lawyer who has campaigned for consumer rights, as well as feminism and the environment. He has also run for President on three occasions, and is running again this year.
In 1965 Nader published a book called Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-in Dangers of the American Automobile, which revealed that a lot of the cars on the American market were fundamentally dangerous - they had shocking safety problems. Nader starts out by saying that cars have brought death, injury and sorrow to millions of people. He calls them automotive time bombs.
The automotive industry constantly restyles cars in order to stimulate demand and make people buy new models. For example, General Motors hired a designer called Harley Earl as its chief stylist. Harley Earl included features that he knew were going to date very quickly to give people an incentive to buy new ones. He called this "dynamic obsolescence."
This whole system was criticised by Ralph Nader. He demonstrated that the internal mechanics were barely changed when they produced a new model. They just re-styled the external skin. He also discovered that the cost of styling diverts money from the engineering. He estimated that for every car, $700 was spent on styling, and only 23 cents on safety.
Nader was particularly critical of General Motors' Chevrolet Corvair (1960-3), which allegedly had unusual weight distribution that meant it was prone to flipping over on corners, and not necessarily at high speeds. Nader argued that American car design represented style over substance and style over safety.
This made Nader very unpopular with the car industry. General Motors allegedly tried to discredit him by hiring private detectives to tap his phones and investigate his past. It was also claimed that they hired prostitutes to try and seduce him, in order to catch him in compromising situations. They failed to turn up any wrongdoing. When Nader found out what they had been doing, Nader sued General Motors for invasion of privacy and used the $284,000 settlement to expand his consumer rights efforts.
