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[From the Dec 1992 issue of Multinational Monitor.  Subscription info below]

GENERAL MOTORS EXPLODING GAS TANKS

GENERAL MOTORS (GM) IS IN DEEP TROUBLE.  Its share of the world
automobile market continues to drop.  In an effort to stave off
disaster, institutional shareholders have forced out older executives
and replaced them with younger ones.

It can only be hoped that one lesson this new, younger management will
learn is that no corporation can succeed for long if it holds its
fellow citizens--workers, consumers, neighbors --in contempt.

General Motors has a dirty track record in this regard.  From its
conviction in 1949 of a criminal conspiracy to destroy the nation's
mass transit system, to its marketing of hazardous automobiles such as
the Corvair, to its unsuccessful public campaign to beat down support
for the lifesaving air bag, to its venal destruction of the Poletown
neighborhood of Detroit, Michigan, GM has ensured a permanent place for
itself in any Corporate Hall of Shame.

Recently unearthed documents reveal a new episode in GM history that
auto safety experts are calling the "Pinto of the 90s."  The Center for
Auto Safety charged earlier this year that GM manufactured and marketed
pickup trucks with hazardous gas tanks which have led to over 300
deaths--a death rate 10 times higher than that of the infamous Ford
Pinto.  The Center claims that GM then covered up the exploding gas tank
problem and the company's decision not to install safety liners which
would have reduced crash fires in the vehicles.

The defect stems from GM's decision to install side-mounted fuel tanks
outside of the frame rails on all "C" and "K" style pickup trucks
manufactured between 1972 and 1987.  The design exposes the tanks to
direct hits and resulting ruptures from impacting vehicles in side
collisions.  Other manufacturers placed their pickup truck fuel tanks
inside protective frame rail structures during the same model years.

A number of consumer groups and newspapers in Texas asked a court in
Fort Worth, Texas to require GM to release crash test films and other
documents showing the company's long-standing knowledge of the defect
and its failure to remedy it.  The documents had been produced by GM in
a subsequently-settled burn death case--Zelenuck v. GM--but were
shielded from public view by a protective order imposed earlier at GM's
request.

Moments before the court began an open hearing on the documents, GM
withdrew its objections to their release, apparently to avoid protracted
publicity about its efforts to keep the documents secret.

The Center for Auto Safety obtained a 67-page index to the collected
papers of Ronald E. Elwell, which the Center calls "a roadmap to GM's
coverup of exploding gas tanks."  Elwell worked for GM for 30 years and
was designated by GM in numerous trials as its employee most knowl-
edgeable about fuel tank safety in 1973-1987 GM pickups.

The index reveals that GM's former president, James McDonald, rejected
a 1978 company task force proposal to Install an inexpensive safety
liner in the fuel tanks.  Installing the liners in the tanks would have
sharply reduced the fire deaths and injuries, auto safety experts
charge.  Had GM put the liners in the pickups, "about 185 of the 248
people burned to death in side impacts of the GM vehicles could have
survived, judging from death rates for such vehicles during the
1981-1986 period," says Ben Kelley, president of the Institute for
Injury Reduction.

The Center for Auto Safety has called on the National Highway Traffic
Administration to order GM to recall the pickups and fix the problem.
"GM knew about this deadly defect for 20 years and rejected a $10 fix
recommended by its own top fuel tank experts," says the Center's
Clarence Ditlow.  "Access to these documents could save hundreds of
people from horrible burn injuries and death by showing these vehicles
could be recalled and repaired by installing tanks with safety liners
that GM's former President James McDonald rejected."

Ditlow points out that GM modified its Chevrolet Corvette to include a
bladder in the gas tank after the Corvette was involved in numerous
low-speed fire crashes in which the tank ruptured much like the tanks in
the C/K series pickups.  Even if the tank ruptures in a crash, the
bladder remains intact and retains gasoline, thus preventing an
explosive crash fire, Ditlow says.  Tests of the 1975 Corvette showed
that its bladder would withstand 41.1 mph rear crashes with no fuel
leakage, meeting a crash standard almost twice as stringent as required
by federal law.

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