Why Does the Auto Industry Oppose Safety Improvements? Part 2: How They Killed Speed Governors in 1923

This is Part 2 of a multi-part series on the history of the Auto Industry’s opposition to safety improvements for vehicles. If you haven’t already, read Part 1.

After California State Senator Scott Wiener addressed the Assembly Transportation Committee on June 17 to introduce his Senate Bill 961, which would require passive speed governors on new cars manufactured in the state by 2028, it was his opposition’s turn to speak.  

In a 52-second video that was viewed more than 500,000 times on X (f.k.a. Twitter), representatives from the California Chamber of Commerce, Mercedes Benz, and other auto industry groups take their turns at the podium, quickly voicing their opposition before the next industry mouthpiece steps up to do the same.

Viewers also noted that one lobbyist, Kasha Hunt of Nossaman, seemed to check her notes to verify that she was, in fact, there to represent the Motorcycle Industry Council. (Hunt had only been on the Motorcycle Industry Council’s payroll for one month when she rose to oppose SB 961, so perhaps she can be forgiven for double-checking). 

What were all these auto industry organizations opposing? Nothing so sinister as your car gently reminding you that you’re speeding — with significant exceptions, and not until model year 2030, and, of course, you’re free to ignore the alert.

Wiener’s initial bill proposed active speed governors, which use well-tested, existing technology to physically prevent drivers from speeding. As Melanie Curry points out at Streetsblog, New York City tested active speed governors on a fleet of municipal vehicles and found that the cars using the tech drove 133,400 miles and successfully traveled within speed limit parameters 99% of the time. Most importantly, the use of speed-governing technology accounted for a 36% reduction in “hard-braking events,” which are often an indicator of unsafe driving.

After SB 961’s opposition had its first turn at the bill, the “active” speed governor had become passive — undoubtedly “a real bummer,” as Curry put it, but still an opportunity to use available technology to limit dangerous driving. 

So why does the auto industry oppose something as anodyne as a “ding” notification to alert you that you’re breaking the law? Because this has always been the industry’s mindset: if we give the public an inch, they’ll take a mile — and then they’ll tell us how to drive that mile. 

Better to blame the driver or the pedestrian than the almighty auto, a playbook the auto industry has been using for the last 100 years. 

Speed Kills — Especially in the Roaring ‘20s

In 1924, Herbert Hoover, then the Secretary of Commerce, called for the first of two national conferences on street and highway safety, as Ralph Nader details in Unsafe at Any Speed, his seminal 1965 book on the auto industry. That year, according to Nader, the United States’ “approach to highway safety was launched — to become later an ideology guarded and perpetuated by a network of trade associations, tax-exempt organizations, and other groups professing an interest in traffic safety.” 

The loudest voices at the first two conferences, held in 1924 and ’26, belonged to business leaders, and their prevailing opinion was that “the problems of highway safety were considered essentially to be the result of the driver’s behavior.” 

The emphasis on the driver — and the removal of all accountability for the car and its manufacturer — was part of a larger auto industry effort to combat growing public protest over the rising number of auto fatalities on American streets.

Auto fatalities were rising due to the increasing number of cars on the road, yes, but also because, as Joseph Stromberg writes in Vox, before the 1920s, city streets “looked dramatically different than they do today. They were considered to be a public space: a place for pedestrians, pushcart vendors, horse-drawn vehicles, streetcars, and children at play.”

The shocking amount of death being doled out by these “pleasure cars,” which were seen as luxury playthings for the rich, was covered extensively by American newspapers. The news depicted cars as “violent intruders,” according to Stromberg, who empathized with pedestrians being struck by these murderous invaders. 

The November 23, 1924 cover of the New York Times, which announced Hoover’s upcoming national conference on street and highway safety, was headlined “Nation Roused Against Motor Killings” and depicted a menacing, massive automobile that filled up the page, barreling toward the reader with the Grim Reaper behind the wheel.  

The automobile was not only being blamed in the media; the onus was also on the car in the eyes of the law. “Before formal traffic laws were put in place, judges typically ruled that in any collision, the larger vehicle — that is, the car — was to blame,” Stromberg writes. “In most pedestrian deaths, drivers were charged with manslaughter regardless of the circumstances of the accident.”

Speed Governors were First Proposed and Killed in the 1920s

The auto crisis got so bad in the 1920s that publications like Illustrated World had some radical suggestions that may sound familiar: “Every car should be equipped with a device that would hold the speed down to whatever number of miles stipulated for the city in which its owner lived,” the author wrote in the piece, titled “What Shall Be the Cure for Automobile Speed Mania?”

In 1923, 43,000 Cincinnati residents — more than 10% of the city’s population, according to the 1920 census — had had enough of auto fatalities, and they signed a petition “that would require all cars to have a governor limiting them to 25 miles per hour,” Stromberg writes. 

The measure was ultimately defeated, thanks in part to a campaign by local auto dealers to send each car owner in the city a letter denouncing the proposed law. The close call in Cincinnati demonstrated to the automakers that they needed to be proactive, and, by the time of Hoover’s 1924 traffic safety summit, they’d settled on a company line: human error was to blame for the rising violence on our roads. 

Before the national conversation about “traffic safety” had even begun, the auto industry had set the terms of the discussion, and the government had happily ceded the regulatory reins to the people responsible for all the death and mayhem in the first place. 

“I think everyone’s had enough time, and I think enough people have died.”

Will We Learn from History?

Now, 100 years later, we can see where a safety system written and molded by the automakers has landed us: having the same debates and hearing the same excuses. We need more time. This requires further study. We should wait for the federal government. 

During the debate about SB 961, the auto industry’s supporters have trotted out these same hoary arguments about patience and study: those opposed to SB 961 asked the State Senate to wait for the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration to rule on speed governors — not before many more years to study, propose regulations, get feedback and input from stakeholders, cut any unpleasant language, water down what they don’t like, and then decide what regulations to issue, if any at all.

I think everyone’s had enough time, and I think enough people have died.  

Undoubtedly, the auto industry will continue working behind the scenes to kill SB 961. They will continue to oppose it as it travels its last remaining steps. But where they will be working the hardest is with the governor of California—using their massive wealth to try and convince him to wait for the Federal Government to study it more. They will once again trumpet how we shouldn’t require safety features because of “human error,” their playbook for the last 100 years. 

Keep an eye out for Parts 3 and 4 of this series, which will examine other instances where the auto industry has fought hard against required safety features like safety belts, airbags, and anti-lock breaks. We will also explore Southern California’s particularly large role in cultivating the car-crazy culture that has kept our streets deadly and drivers happy. 

Our series will conclude with what we need to do, a call to action, a call for life-saving vehicle improvements despite the well-funded opposition of the auto industry. SB 961 will live or die on the backs of you and me and many individuals demanding that Governor Newsom prioritize safety over the false arguments of an industry that has cared more about money than the lives of people for well over 100 years.