Carmageddon: My First (But Not Last) Car by Dean Gloster

                 My first car was a 1972 Ford Pinto with a stick shift. (Currently known as an anti-theft device. Back then it was called a manual transmission.)

 

               I loved that car.

               It was before I got the short guy equivalent of my adolescent growth spurt. Then, as now, most of my height (such as it is) was in my legs. So when I sat in the low driver’s seat, I barely saw over the dashboard, actually looking under the top of the steering wheel.

               I got the car when I was sixteen. Almost two years later, though, the world discovered that the car had a dangerous flaw: When it was hit from behind, even in a low-speed collision, the gas tank would sometimes explode.

 

               Some (not me; budget issues) had their cars defiantly painted in response.

 

       

        Ford, of course, promptly knew about the defect, but their analysis was that it would cost $11-per vehicle to fix it, a nationwide recall effort that would total $137 million. They estimated, though, that the total liability for lawsuits involving exploding Pintos might be less than $50 million, so it was cheaper (and therefore better) to not fix the problem.

Ford’s internal memo

               The magazine Mother Jones (still publishing great investigative journalism today) ran a cover story on the dangerous problem after a six-month-long investigation.

 

               And in one of the lawsuits against Ford, the badly burned plaintiff discovered a copy of Ford’s memo and introduced it as evidence.

 

               Ultimately, just days before the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) was to order a nationwide recall, Ford announced a “voluntary” recall. And fixed the problem.

               Fortunately for me, in the meantime I was never hit from behind while in my Pinto. (I was sixteen. And male. I mostly bumped things with my front bumper and fenders, busy living up to what auto insurance companies expect of new male 16-year-old drivers. Not a surprise.)

               What might surprise you, though, is that a more recent vehicle apparently incinerates its occupants to death at a rate 17 times as high as those pre-fix Pintos from the 1970s.

 

               Yup. The Tesla Clustertuck, also knows as the Incel Camino, Der Wankpanzer, or Deplorean.

               It’s not just 17 kinds of industrial ugly and badly built, recalled seven different times last year. (But not yet recalled for self-immolation.)

 

               The Cybertruck has a battery that burns very hot, and when that happens, sometimes it’s hard to unlock the doors and get out.

               As they did almost 50 years ago for the Pinto, this year Mother Jones published an article about the Cybertruck’s occupant-incineration-problem.  

               Sadly, however, it’s unlikely this time that the article will bring about an NHTSA inquiry, even if the Cybertruck’s problems are 17 times more deadly.

 

               In February of this year, the “DOGE” team associated with Tesla’s CEO and largest shareholder, Elon Musk, imposed targeted layoffs at the NHTSA.

Those layoffs disproportionately cut the team looking at accidents for self-driving vehicles like the Tesla Cybertruck. Then, in April, the NHTSA weakened the reporting requirements for accidents involving self-driving cars.

               It’s part of a successful two-pronged war the current administration is waging on collecting facts and on sharing them with the public: With terrible job numbers coming in, the new person nominated to be in charge of the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced the BLS will indefinitely stop releasing monthly job reports. 

With inflation rising, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has also stopped collecting some of the factual information to calculate inflation in the Consumer Price Index, replacing it with “simulations,” and has eliminated 350 indexes associated with the Producer Price Index. 

With new cuts at the VA after marked improvements in employee morale under Biden, the VA just announced they will not conduct their required annual employee satisfaction survey this year because they’re “confident” most employees support the current direction of the agency.

The administration is even abandoning and destroying multimillion-dollar satellites that collect CO2 data relevant to tracking climate change. 

Hundreds of other federal datasets have disappeared from public access. The world’s largest study on childhood vaccines has again demonstrated no link between vaccines and autism, so alleged HHS Secretary JFK Jr. has (so far, unsuccessfully) demanded that a prestigious medical journal refuse to publish it. 

               I mostly write fiction, but I passionately believe that facts matter and that we should tell the truth. And that sometimes it can make the difference between life and death.

               Last November, the night before Thanksgiving, less than eight miles from my house, four college freshmen in a borrowed Cybertruck crashed. The vehicle caught fire. The doors wouldn’t open. A rescuer broke open one window and pulled out one of the four, but the other three burned alive. Probably none of them knew where to find the (difficult to locate) manual release lever, for when the doors won’t open.

               I’m lucky. My first car wasn’t my last. And back then the NHTSA was still in the business of collecting data and investigating even the well-heeled and well-connected, which coerced Ford into recalling my car and spending $11 to fix its possibly fatal flaw.

                We can get back to that world, but you have to vote for it. I'd love that.

              Good luck to us all.

Dean Gloster is a former stand-up comedian and a former law clerk at the U.S. Supreme Court. His debut YA novel DESSERT FIRST is out from Merit Press/Simon Pulse. His YA short stories “Death’s Adopted Daughter” and "Proof of the Existence of Dog" are in the anthologies Spoon Knife 6: Rest Stop and Spoon Knife 7: Transitions from Autonomous Press. His latest, written with Jay Cherrie, "Numbers Guys" is about the (ahem) CEO of a space venture and electric car company and his run in with the mob. It's in Spoon Knife 9: Numbers, which you can buy from Autonomous Press or (ahem) here.  He is at work on two more YA novels, and the one he's wrapping up now deals with opposing evil. (Which we should all do.) Unlike his driving at 16, however, he is, sadly, a slow reviser. He makes periodic anti-authoritarian posts on Bluesky, where he is @deangloster.bsky.social