Charting a safer future in autos.(Have You Heard?)

In 1947 we wrote, "The Studebaker Champion has considerably less than the usual amount of rear wheel traction under adverse road conditions. You will need to put on chains sooner in wintertime, and CU suggests also a wariness about getting into places from which you must back out upgrade on a lowfriction surface." Doesn't sound like the car we'd expect to be driven by R. David Pittle, Consumers Union's recently retired senior vice president for technical policy and a contributor to many consumer-safety advances in the U.S. But that Studebaker was in fact his first set of wheels.

When David drove away from CU's offices on a Friday afternoon in January to start his retirement, it was in a very different car, one whose safety belts and air bags could help him if he had an accident and, better yet, whose electronic stability control and antilock brakes could help him avoid an accident in the first place.

A vital--and vibrant--part of CU for 22 years, David was instrumental in a number of auto-safety campaigns. For years David hounded the government to initiate a dynamic rollover test. Time was when the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration assessed a vehicle's rollover propensity using a "static" calculation based on the vehicle's width and center of gravity. Since you can't drive a calculation, we were pleased when in 2004 NHTSA also began "dynamic" rollover tests, taking vehicles through a series of sharp turns at various speeds to measure performance in an emergency maneuver.

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