A design problem in a General Motors car contributes to dozens of automobile crashes and numerous deaths. Charging that the company failed to correct a known defect, lawyers file more than 100 lawsuits against the company. GM responds by hiring investigators to question the motives of its critics. Eventually, as congressional and media scrutiny increased, the head of GM apologizes for the company's behavior. Sound familiar? You may have been reading about such a case over the past month. But actually, this story is from 1965 when Ralph Nader published Unsafe at Any Speed, a book that charged General Motors with knowingly selling unsafe Corvairs and the auto industry as a whole with putting profit above safety. Now almost 50 years later, why is the United States still struggling to ensure that car companies make safe cars? And why must we still question whether regulatory agencies take their mandate to protect public health seriously? In 1966, the emerging consumer movement persuaded Congress to pass the National Highway Safety and Transportation Act to correct some of the abuses Nader had documented. In the decades since, car safety has improved, with the United States motor vehicle death rates falling from 25.9 per 100,000 people in 1966 to 10.8 per 100,000 in 2012. This is a clear indication that regulations save lives. But other nations have done much better. According to the latest report from the International Transport Forum, a body that monitors global road safety, the auto death rate in the United States is more than three times higher than the rate in Sweden, a country that has made auto safety a priority. If the United States had achieved Sweden's rate, in 2011 more than 20,000 U.S. automobile deaths would have been averted. Since its inception, however, the auto industry has resisted regulation, failed to disclose problems, and refused to correct problems when they were detected. In the past few weeks, General Motors has recalled 1.6 million Cobalts and other small cars to repair defective ignition switches that have been associated with at least 12 deaths. The company had first learned of this and other defects a decade agoin 2004 before the first Cobalt was released. On March 17th, Mary Barra, the chief executive of GM, observed, "Something went very wrong in our processes in this instance, and terrible things happened."

In a separate action, General Motors has recalled 1.33 million sports utility vehicles because airbags failed to deploy after crashes. Another review of GM airbag failures from 2003 to 2012 found that they may have contributed to more than 300 deaths. GM is not alone in its safety problems. Toyota recently agreed to pay $1.2 billion to settle federal criminal charges related to the sudden acceleration of its vehicles.

For the past 50 years, too many corporate leaders in the auto industry as well as in the food, pharmaceutical, firearms, and other industries have chosen to follow the playbook written by the tobacco industry. They have challenged the evidence justifying regulation, exaggerated the economic costs of safer products, and used their political and financial clout to defeat public health policies and underfund the agencies charged with enforcement. These behaviors have become so normalized they seem inevitable rather than immoral or criminal.

How do you think the famous Ford Pinto scandal compares with the ongoing news about GM's recall in the wake of ignition failures?

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