As the acknowledged national champion of the consumer, Ralph Nader is deluged weekly with letters complaining about a wide variety of goods and services. Because Nader won his early reputation as an auto critic, hundreds of the letters concern defective U.S. and foreign cars. Nader carries on a particularly lively correspondence with owners of lemons—new cars in which everything seems to go wrong. Now he and two associates, Lawyer Lowell Dodge and Engineer Ralf Hotchkiss, have drawn heavily on those letters to write a book, What to do with your bad car / An action manual for lemon owners. The book, which came out last week, is every bit as tart as the title implies.
Only a minority of owners wind up with complete lemons. But much is heard about them because the problems of car owners are being documented as never before. One study in 1969 of 10,000 cars by the Missouri affiliate of the American Automobile Association found that 50% of new autos have "potentially dangerous defects." The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics last year declared that for the first time, auto price increases were not compensated for by improvements in quality. Nor was there much comfort for buyers in the Federal Trade Commission's statement last February that new-car warranties are virtually meaningless. The auto industry has admitted to lapses, though management tends to blame what General Motors Chairman James Roche calls "the effect of employee attitudes toward product quality."
The first lesson from Nader and Co. is how to avoid buying a trouble-plagued car. Nader suggests that the cautious purchaser should steer away from delicate options like automatic speed controls, eyelid headlamp covers, power windows and power antenna—all of which have a high frequency-of-repair record. But heavy-duty suspension, says the book, is "a must, even for urban driving." The buyer should hire an outside mechanic to check over the car before accepting delivery from a dealer.
For the new-car owner already stuck with a defective automobile, Nader suggests several ways to ''creatively seek out points of corporate vulnerability." Among them:
PROTEST. An individual letter of complaint seldom moves a manufacturer to replace a car or refund the purchase price, but a buyer can greatly increase his leverage if he allies himself with other consumers and takes his case to Government agencies or others concerned with consumer protection. Nader suggests that carbon copies of a letter of complaint to a manufacturer should be mailed to the dealer, a lawyer, the President's Committee on Consumer Interests, the buyer's Senators and Congressman, the Federal Trade Commission, the Nader-sponsored Center for Auto Safety in Washington, a local newspaper or radio "action line," the National Automobile Dealers' Association and the state or local dealer-licensing authority.