There were 1.8 million Chevrolet Corvairs built from 1960 to 1969; the most famous of them all sits in pride of place in Ralph Nader’s museum. This 1963 car, complete with cherry red paint job and white wall tyres, is the centrepiece of Nader’s American Museum of Tort Law in his hometown of Winsted, Connecticut.
Nader made the Corvair famous while simultaneously destroying its reputation and its sales. According to him and the title of the book he wrote about it (at least in part), General Motors’ boldest car of the 1960s was Unsafe At Any Speed. The book inspired by the Corvair’s supposed shortcomings would go on to be a national bestseller and probably the most famous consumer book in history.
The founder of the modern consumer movement, Nader has been called the nation’s nag and the national nanny. He denounced soft drinks for too much sugar, and hot dogs for their dangerous preservatives. He even criticised women’s high heel shoes as ‘part of the whole tyranny of fashion’. He was four times a presidential candidate (unwittingly helping George W. Bush narrowly beat Al Gore in 2000 by taking a crucial number of votes from the Democrats). In 1999, Time magazine named Nader as one of the 100 most influential Americans of the 20th century.
