A Lonely Quest for Safer Cars

Courtesy LA Times

Thousands are killed or crippled each year in rollover crashes. A former GM engineer says strengthening roofs would save lives, but auto makers say he's wrong.

By MYRON LEVIN, TIMES STAFF WRITER

The videotape shows an older gent in a cable-knit sweater and tennis shorts, strapped into the frame of a car that is hanging upside-down from a winch.

The man is Don Friedman, a former General Motors Corp. executive, and his aim is to prove that stronger roofs on cars and trucks would save lives in rollover wrecks. An estimated 26,000 Americans suffer serious or fatal injuries in such accidents each year.

On this Sunday afternoon in 1998, Friedman is in his son's yard in Santa Barbara, sitting in a car with a reinforced roof. It will be dropped from a height of 1 foot, approximating what Friedman says is the typical impact in rollovers. If Friedman is right, the fortified roof will save his neck. An ambulance is standing by, in case he's wrong. Technical snafus delay the test, so Friedman is left hanging for 45 minutes, his south end pointing north. In his frustration, he calls on some of the colorful language he learned in the Navy. Finally, the countdown begins, the car falls, and Friedman emerges--irascible but unharmed.

The tape is just one, albeit the most unorthodox, of the tools Friedman has used in his crusade to force manufacturers to strengthen vehicle roofs.

During the last dozen years of a long and eventful engineering career, Friedman has made "roof crush" his cause. In courtrooms, conferences and technical papers, he has passionately made the case that with a few more pounds of steel, costing an extra $20 to $50 a vehicle, auto makers could prevent thousands of deaths and catastrophic injuries each year.

Friedman also has sought to expose what he and allies say is disinformation--auto makers' contention that there is no cause-and-effect relationship between smashed roofs and severe injuries.

Manufacturers say that vehicle roofs are sufficiently robust and that the safety value of making them stronger would be almost nil. Auto makers and their research scientists contend that people are injured in rollovers because they fall headfirst into the roof as it hits the ground, not because the roof collapses on them.

The final word in the debate rests with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which sets vehicle safety rules. Its current roof safety standard, adopted 31 years ago, was largely shaped by the auto industry.

After years of delay, the agency began a review of the standard last fall. It is not clear when, or whether, it will revise the rule.

In the meantime, a battle of experts is playing out in courtrooms across the country.

Friedman, 74, is the leading authority on the strengthen-the-roofs side of the argument. His passion and erudition are so winning that jurors have been known to ask for his autograph. Even his courtroom adversaries acknowledge his effectiveness. Auto safety advocates view him as an oracle.

"If you look simply at effectiveness in . . . advocating this issue . . . and holding manufacturers accountable through product liability litigation, he is No. 1," said Clarence Ditlow, director of the Center for Auto Safety, a consumer advocacy group in Washington.

The auto industry takes a different view. "Mr. Friedman is a well-known, paid expert for plaintiffs," said Jay Cooney, director of legal communications for GM. His "statements are self-serving and in furtherance of his career."

Rollovers are the most dangerous type of motor vehicle accident, based on the percentage of people killed or badly hurt. Each year, there are about 250,000 rollovers, involving about 350,000 drivers and passengers. About 10,000 die and about 16,000 are seriously injured. The toll has risen gradually as a consequence of America's love affair with sport-utility vehicles and pickups, which are less stable than cars.

Roof Collapse Debated as Cause

In terms of the human cost, the deaths may not be the worst of it. Thousands of rollover victims have suffered brain damage or paralysis, with all of their life-wrecking effects.

Roof failure is not the only culprit. If vehicles, particularly SUVs and pickups, were more stable, there would be fewer rollovers. The number of victims would be reduced if everyone wore seat belts and if the belts fit more snugly.

But roof crush may cause as many as 6,900 serious to fatal rollover injuries each year--26% of the total, according to NHTSA.

Auto makers say that roof collapses are not to blame. Their explanation, sometimes called the "roof dive" theory, goes like this:

When a vehicle flips over, the occupants drop toward the roof. Even when they are wearing seat belts, their heads typically reach the roof because of slack in the belts. So when the roof hits the ground, the head absorbs the impact. The weight of the body pressing down on the neck adds to the force. Whether or not the roof holds up, the damage has been done.

Friedman contends that people almost never fall to the roof with enough force to get badly injured. That's the point he sought to make with his 1998 video, which he has played in court. He contends that it takes the additional impact from the roof collapse to cause serious harm.

Owlish-looking under tufts of white hair, Friedman is paid $400 an hour as an expert witness for plaintiffs. But he is comfortable financially and says it's not about the money.

Friedman has helped numerous plaintiffs in rollover cases win sizable settlements or jury awards. But he is determined to see the federal standard toughened. In his view, litigation is at best an after-the-fact remedy--helping only when people already have lost loved ones, or the use of their arms and legs.

Exhibit A is John Hess, who was a passenger in a Ford pickup that flipped on Christmas Day 1988. The roof collapsed. The Castaic resident, who had been a construction worker, a motorcycle rider and a bouncer in a country and western bar, at 28 became a guy in a wheelchair, with no bladder control.

Hess sued Ford. Friedman testified on his behalf, and Hess won $12.5 million in damages. But the case is still on appeal, and after 13 years, Hess hasn't seen a dime of the award.

With such victims in mind, Friedman at times has made his campaign personal, as in a recent letter to a principal author of GM-sponsored studies that support the industry's position on roof safety.

"I hope you have no problem," Friedman wrote, "living with the thought that you were responsible for perpetrating this deception and its horrendous social cost."

Designed Missile Guidance System

When Friedman joined the executive ranks of GM at age 33, he already had begun to make his mark. In 1953, while still in his 20s and working for a defense contractor, he designed the guidance system for the Sidewinder heat-seeking missile.

He was lured to GM in 1960, to run a division of the company's research lab in Santa Barbara. During the next eight years, Friedman and his team did the conceptual design of the lunar rover vehicle that the Apollo astronauts took to the moon. They patented the electric drive system used in many electric cars today. Under a contract with the Department of Transportation, Friedman also designed the experimental, gas-stingy "minicar."

But Friedman, a restless and creative thinker, grew tired of GM. When GM turned down the government's request to build a prototype of the minicar, Friedman saw his chance. He left the company, took the federal contract with him and founded Minicars Inc.

Friedman soon became a leading research and development contractor for NHTSA. He did research on air bags, interior padding and protection from frontal, side and rear collisions. He designed and built experimental vehicles to demonstrate enhanced safety features.

This work proved particularly entertaining for Friedman's growing family. Susie Bozzini, one of his daughters, remembers hanging around the test site to watch cars getting battered to bits. While her dad and his crew set up crash tests, "me and my sisters would play with the dummies," she said. Then "we'd all line up on the dock--plugging our ears, of course--and . . . they would run the car into the wall."

Friedman eventually tired of government work. In the mid-1980s, he turned over Minicars to his engineer son Keith and went into the expert witness business.

Government Adopts Safety Standard

At the time, roof strength was becoming a more pressing issue than ever before.

Up to then, pickups and vans had been used mainly as work and cargo vehicles and only rarely to carry people. As a result, many of the federal government's vehicle safety standards did not apply to them. By the late 1980s, that was changing. By 2001, Americans were buying more light trucks--a category that consists of SUVs, pickups and minivans--than cars. Because of their higher road clearance and top-heavy design, light trucks flip more often than cars do.

Within the industry, the roof safety rule is known as Standard 216. Its origin illustrates how industries sometimes heavily influence regulations meant to protect the public. The nation's auto safety standards stem from an act of Congress in 1966. NHTSA got the task of writing the standards. The fledgling agency lacked manpower and experience and relied heavily on the industry.

Developing a reliable test of roof strength was no easy task. Simply staging rollovers would not work, because no two are completely alike. A roof that collapsed in one rollover might survive another. The trick was to create a test on a motionless vehicle that would reflect the real world. And the auto makers were more than glad to help.

Manufacturers had long been interested in how their roofs held up in accidents. As early as 1933, GM was rolling vehicles down hills and dumping them off ramps to see what happened to the roofs, according to an internal company report produced in court.

A Ford Motor Co. engineer asserted in the 1960s that roof strength definitely mattered. "People are injured by roof collapse," the engineer, John R. Weaver, said in a memo. "The total number of nationwide deaths and injuries cannot be estimated, but it is a significant number."

Strong roofs would become more important as seat belt use increased, Weaver said. That's because the belts hold people erect during rollovers, putting them at greater risk if the roof fails. "It seems unjust to penalize people wearing effective restraint systems by exposing them to more severe rollover injuries than they might expect with no restraints," he wrote.

In 1966, anticipating the new federal requirements, GM's head of automotive safety engineering, Louis C. Lundstrom, set an ambitious goal of building roofs "strong enough to withstand a 70-mph ground-level rollover" and ordered drop tests, according to an internal document.

But GM and Ford, in separate tests, found vehicle roofs collapsing in drops from various heights, documents show.

Peter Bertelson, a former Ford safety manager who testifies for plaintiffs in accident cases, said that "the first drop tests they did at Ford literally shocked the engineers, and they almost couldn't believe what was happening."

Soon, the auto makers focused on designing "a test that we can pass," Bertelson said.

GM engineers developed a device for testing roof strength--a hydraulic ram that pushed a steel plate down on the front edge of the roof. The company demonstrated the device to other car makers and to NHTSA and recommended its use.

NHTSA agreed to forgo a drop test and instead built Standard 216 around the GM test device and test method.

As a former GM engineer testified in 1996: "This 216 method was actually developed first at GM and presented to the government and . . . adopted by the government as the test method for roof crush resistance."

Friedman, Others Highlight Flaws

The standard required that roofs withstand a force of at least 1.5 times their weight, or 5,000 pounds--whichever was less--without giving way more than 5 inches.

Roofs that easily pass the test can still collapse in rollovers.

Friedman and others point to several defects in the standard--the most basic being that in rollovers, the force applied to the roof often exceeds 1.5 times the vehicle weight.

Other deficiencies have been noted by the industry itself in internal documents produced in court. For example, industry tests have shown that the windshield contributes as much as 30% or more of the roof strength measured in the Standard 216 test. That would be fine if windshields remained in place in rollover wrecks. In fact, experts say, the windshield almost always pops out after the first roll.

Another flaw is that the test applies nearly vertical force to the roof. In real rollovers, there also are strong lateral forces on the roof because vehicles slide as well as fall.

Friedman has performed crush tests on more than a dozen vehicle models but with the windshields removed and force applied at more of an angle. All of the vehicles passed the federal test with room to spare. They all failed Friedman's version.

A similar demonstration by Friedman served as dramatic evidence last year in a roof crush case in New York. The model involved, a Chevrolet Suburban, had withstood more than 10,000 pounds of force in the Standard 216 test. But in a videotape played for the jury, the same model, without windshield, was lowered to the ground at a 36-degree angle--typical, Friedman says, of how a roof touches down. When the weight on the roof reached 4,400 pounds, it had collapsed more than 5 inches.

The jury returned a $5.2-million verdict.

Auto makers have conducted sophisticated research to bolster their contention that worries about roof strength are misguided.

In 1975, Edward A. Moffatt, a GM accident investigator with a doctorate in bioengineering, put forth the theory that people weren't being hurt by roof failures but rather from falling to the roof as it hit the ground.

Several years later, GM sponsored a pair of studies to test the theory. Moffatt, by then a private consultant, worked with GM engineers to stage the most elaborate rollover tests ever performed--then or since. The studies became known as the Malibu series, after the Chevrolet Malibus used.

The studies told what happened when 16 Malibus were subjected to multiple rolls. Eight of the cars had standard roofs, and the other eight had roofs strengthened with roll cages--networks of steel bars. On-board cameras tracked the movements of crash dummies as the cars tumbled. Instruments mounted on the dummies' heads and necks measured the force of impact with the roof.

Both studies counted the number of "potentially injurious impacts" to the dummies.

As expected, the standard roofs suffered extensive damage, whereas the reinforced roofs held up well. Yet the frequency of injurious impacts, according to the studies, was almost the same.

The authors included this disclaimer: "It is not the intent of this paper to state that these levels of impact would cause a particular injury to a person."

Their conclusion: "The results of this work indicate that roof strength is not an important factor in the mechanics of head/neck injuries in rollover collisions."

The auto makers now had a potent weapon to wield in court.

Discovered Studies on Eve of Trial

Friedman encountered the Malibu studies in 1989, as he was preparing to testify in his first roof crush trial. The case had been filed against GM by a New York man whose wife had become a quadriplegic and later killed herself.

As he sat on his bed in a New York hotel room and pored over the data, Friedman came to a stunning realization: The studies, he believed, were highly misleading and proved the opposite of their stated conclusions.

Overall, the dummies in the two sets of cars suffered about the same number of injurious hits, as defined by the authors. But, Friedman saw, the average impact sustained by the dummies was much greater in the standard-roof cars than in those with reinforced roofs. And virtually all of the heaviest impacts, most likely to cause severe injury, occurred in the standard-roof cars, the data showed.

"You just cannot look at the data and believe that you're equally safe in a roll-caged vehicle as in a production car," he said.

Friedman tore into the studies when he took the stand. As the jury was reaching its verdict, the family accepted a multimillion-dollar settlement from GM.

After the trial, Friedman attacked the Malibu studies at every opportunity--at engineering conferences, in technical papers and in court. With Carl E. Nash, a former senior NHTSA official, Friedman held workshops for plaintiff's attorneys and experts, prepping them to challenge the Malibu results.

Moffatt said he stands behind the studies, which he described as "the most nit-picked set of crash tests in the history of the world."

He said that, contrary to Friedman's criticism, the researchers did not skew their findings to support the industry's position.

"I have devoted my life to rollover research, because I think it's very, very important," he said. "My research is 100% correct. It's 100% honest . . . and it is all going toward a better understanding of the true mechanics of rollover."

A Believable Witness in Court

Whenever Friedman testifies in a roof crush case, Moffatt or one of his Malibu coauthors is sure to appear for the defense.

These confrontations consist of hours or even days of headache-inducing testimony about delta Vs and translational velocity, cadaver tests and the biofidelity of crash dummies. The technical issues are so complex that only those who are being paid by one side or the other can even pretend to understand them. So being believable is at least as important as being right.

Whether wowed by Friedman's intellect, or charmed by his gruffness and passion, jurors seem to respond well to him.

Friedman is "a fabulous witness," because "it's obvious that he really, really, really believes what he is doing," said Michael Piuze, a Los Angeles plaintiff's lawyer who has won three large roof crush verdicts with Friedman's help.

Friedman's "a dangerous witness," said Warren Platt of Snell & Wilmer, a leading automotive defense firm. "The guy's a zealot, and you can take that as a compliment or criticism. Sometimes, it resonates on the jury."

Expert witnesses are supposed to appear pleasant and unflappable, never rising to the bait, though Friedman must have skipped that page of the manual.

Consider what happened when a defense lawyer, during a lengthy cross-examination, caught him in a mistake. "So you learned something from me," the lawyer said.

"I am learning that you're a very sneaky guy," Friedman replied. Then, in Friedman's version of withdrawing an insult, he said: "I apologize if I stated something derogatory about your character, even though it might be true."

Adversaries complain that Friedman, like many experts, is prone to tailor his research and testimony to suit his clients. They have derided his videotaped drop test as a parlor trick, arguing that in real rollovers, victims take sharper blows to the head and neck than Friedman did, whether or not the roof holds up.

After losing a big roof crush case in which Friedman spent 17 days on the stand, GM lawyer Vincent Galvin blasted the "chameleon-like quality of his opinions."

"I think he honestly believes what he's saying," Galvin said. But cross-examining Friedman, he said, "is like trying to herd cats or push jello around." He "just says what he wants to say."

Despite his passionate involvement in the courtroom wars, Friedman glumly admits that the litigation hasn't made roofs any stronger. What's needed, he maintains, is government action.

In 1994, NHTSA said it was performing research and would soon determine whether Standard 216 should be revised.

Not until last fall did the agency request comments to assist it "in upgrading [the standard] . . . to reduce injuries and fatalities . . . resulting from roof intrusion during rollover crashes."

Friedman and other safety advocates called for a stronger standard. GM and other auto makers, citing the Malibu tests, argued for the status quo.

Larry Coben, an Arizona lawyer who has sued auto makers in roof crush cases, said in his comments to NHTSA that the issue was simple.

"What possible harm can result from strengthening the structure that supports the roof?" Coben wrote. "I submit there is no harm, and if there is a chance that even one life can be saved . . . then a new standard should be adopted."

Until that happens, Friedman will keep pushing. "It's such an egregious situation," he says. "Now I'm at the end, where I want to see something done.

"I'm not giving up. I don't give up easy."