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8 - Orono Weekly Times Wednesday, April 14, 2010 Basic Black by Arthur Black Accidents will happen Here's a news flash for you: cars aren't safe. Imagine. Hurtling down a stretch of pavement at a mile a minute or more in a container of tin, glass and rubber towards other hurtling containers of tin, glass and rubber may actually be hazardous to your health. How could we have guessed? The headlines all currently finger Toyota as the auto tycoon wearing the black Stetson but that's unfair. All cars are 'unsafe.' Always have been. If it's 'safe' you're after, you need to curl up in a pillow fort on your chesterfield wearing a hockey helmet and watching reruns of Oprah. And praying you house doesn't take a meteor strike. If it's any consolation, cars these days - Toyota included are a helluva lot safer than they used to be. The cars I grew up with had no seat belts, air bags or childproof door locks - some models actually had rear doors that opened backwards. People are vexed because the Toyota's floor mats ride up? My old man carried a ball peen hammer under the driver's seat of his '52 Pontiac. Sometimes the gearshift would jam between second and third. A good hammer smack on the steering column usually took care of it. Worse - those early cars featured running boards that ran along the bottom of the doors between the wheel wells. That's right - auto manufacturers provided ledges to accommodate the feet of passengers wishing to travel outside the car. Ralph Nader changed all that with his book Unsafe at Any Speed, published in 1965. The book contended that General Motor's Corvair, a sporty little number touted as a family car, was actually the equivalent of a rolling hand grenade. Nader and his book might have been relegated to historical asterisks had not GM responded like a paranoid bull moose in a china shop. The corporation hired crooks to tap Nader's telephone and paid hookers to try and entice him into compromising situations. Their actions unwittingly bought Nader several million dollars worth of free publicity. But it got the Corvair off the road and led to a plethora of government regulations aimed at making automobile travelling safer for everyone. Ironically, all those rules and regs may have had the opposite effect. Sceptics argue that by making cars safer, authorities merely encouraged drivers to be less careful and more aggressive on the road. Ultimately, they argue, this resulted in more accidents. They may have a point. Thirty-four Toyota drivers in the U.S. are known to have died when their vehicles accelerated out of control. But in the same time period, 21-thousand others died in accidents involving Toyotas that had nothing to do with automotive flaws. The problem, as the old saying goes, was not with the nuts and bolts of the car; just with the nut behind the wheel. Here at home, Toyota Canada has received, as I write, exactly two complaints about vehicles with sticky gas pedals involved in accidents. In response they are recalling some 270,000 vehicles across the country. Overreaction? Perhaps a tad. And we've been here before. Back in the late '70's the Ford Pinto achieved brief notoriety for its dangerous gas tank. It became known derisively as "the barbecue that seats four." Ford recalled more than 1.5-million Pintos and Bobcats in the U.S. Total number of Pinto drivers or passengers known to have died as a result of faulty gas tanks: 27. Pity other domestic commodities aren't so strictly regulated. Handguns kill 30,000 Americans every year. No recall in the works at Smith & Wesson, Colt, et al. Cigarettes? They nail 400,000 smokers in the States every year, but there's no talk of yanking Marlboros or Camels off the market anytime soon. Here in Canada there are more than 19-million 'light vehicles' (cars, mostly) on our roads somewhere between Haida Gwai and Cape Race. Each vehicle contains some 3,000 parts. The vehicles are capable of moving at speeds in excess of 150-km an hour. They are in the hands of exceedingly fallible creatures who may be ill, drunk, over medicated, talking on their cell phone, suicidal, having a heart attack or just plain clumsy. Accidents will happen.