Word: chevrolet
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Skimming through the voluminous stacks of mail that reach him in Washington, Ralph Nader last summer began picking up an unusual pattern of complaints about some products made by his old antagonist, G.M.'s Chevrolet Motor Division. Scores of engines on Chevies made from 1965 to 1969, the letters indicated, were twisting loose from car frames, sometimes with the frightening result that the auto's accelerator pedal was pulled all the way down to the floor and the brakes failed. At roughly the same time, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration was looking into similar complaints. Last week...
...cars shrink? To find out, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, a research group financed by auto insurers, ran a series of head-on test crashes at 40 to 50 m.p.h. Each collision pitted a small car against a larger model produced by the same U.S. manufacturer: a Chevrolet Vega against an Impala, a Ford Pinto against a Galaxie, a Dodge Colt against a Plymouth Fury, an American Motors Gremlin against an Ambassador...
...Safety program. They might badly shake many buyers of small new cars, which now account for one-third of sales. In some crashes, the small car was smashed into a pile of twisted junk barely recognizable as an auto, while the bigger car sustained relatively moderate damage. In the Chevrolet crash, a dummy placed in the Impala only struck its head against the dashboard, but the dummy in the Vega was beheaded by a section of the hood that was hurled back through the windshield...
...papers but stirred up organized protest only in Portland. There the Auto Dealers Association decided to withdraw, for 30 days, their classified ads in the Newhouse-owned Oregonian and its sister paper, the Oregon Journal. "Not that we were trying to intimidate or look for power," explained Chevrolet Dealer Ron Tonkin. "We just wanted to be heard...
...week's end the dealers were beginning to act a little sheepish about the whole affair. One of their colleagues, Chevrolet Dealer Lyman Slack, called the boycott "as poor a display of business judgment as I've seen in many a year...