IT IS a truism that you can tell a lot about people by the cars they drive. So why have I always resisted the idea? Maybe it’s because my first car was a doggy doo-doo brown 1972 Ford Pinto – the model US consumer advocate Ralph Nader infamously dubbed “unsafe at any speed”.

After several years of lawyering in Hartford and footloose world travelling as a freelance writer, Nader arrived in Washington and began work on a book elaborating on the themes of his Nation article. His rendezvous with history was nearly derailed when he left part of his completed manuscript in a New York City taxicab. With customary determination, however, he rewrote the book in breakneck speed and published Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-in Dangers of the American Automobile (Grossman) in November 1965.

The chief target of the book was General Motors' "sporty" Corvair, whose faulty rear suspension system made it possible to skid violently and roll over. The corporate negligence that had produced the various Corvair defects, said Nader, was "one of the greatest acts of industrial irresponsibility in the present century." More generally, Nader's book documented how Detroit habitually subordinated safety to style and marketing concerns. The main cause of car injuries, Nader demonstrated, was not the "nut behind the wheel" so often blamed by the auto industry, but the inherent engineering and design deficiencies of the motor vehicle that was woefully uncrashworthy. Solutions must focus, accordingly, on the vehicle itself.”.

Okay, Ford did recall the Pinto in 1978 following a campaign by Nader's Center for Auto Safety, but surely that doesn't justify a silly unresearched lie, does it? Am I just being a pedant?

UPDATE: I've just read that Susan M. claims to have "a genetic predisposition for intellectual nitpicking". She'll just have to take my punch on the chin, I suppose.