WASHINGTON: Clarence M. Ditlow III, the consumer advocate who in the 1970s drove the Firestone Tire & Rubber Co. to the financial brink, has died.
Ditlow was executive director of the Center for Auto Safety and died of colon cancer at George Washington University Hospital on Thursday, the center said. He was 72.
Originally with Ralph Nader’s consumer advocacy group, the CAS became independent, and under Ditlow forced the auto and tire industry to accept safety standards and make such improvements as airbags.
Ditlow joined the center, founded by Nader, in the early 1970s. His work there helped lead to the passage of the federal “lemon law” empowering consumers to force automakers to take back faulty vehicles. He told a conference on legal empowerment this year that before the law, the auto industry was taking back about 500 cars a year. Today, it takes back 100,000 a year, he said, creating an incentive for automakers to improve quality.
Ditlow also played major roles in dozens of safety recalls, from 1.5 million Ford Pintos with exploding gas tanks in the late 1970s to Fiat Chrysler jeeps with a similar problem more recently. One of his most important and hard-fought battles was to get air bags installed in every car, which the center finally won in 1994 after taking its case against the Reagan administration to court a decade earlier.
Ditlow’s role in the recall of the Firestone Steel Belted Radial 500 tire began with his allegations in 1978 that five people had died in car accidents due to premature failure of the tire.
The National Highway Transportation Administration and a U.S. House investigative committee both opened investigations, and the company argued that the failures were due to customers not keeping the tires properly inflated.
Ditlow charged that tire dealers were repairing or replacing one of every 13 500s under warranty, signaling a “serious problem.”
The investigations were stuck on the inflation issue when a source delivered to the Akron Beacon Journal internal documents that confirmed Firestone knew the tires were failing at an unusual rate in the company’s own tests. Those documents resulted in subpoenas and an eventual replacement of 8.6 million tires.
Over the next few years, the company closed factories and eliminated 11,000 jobs — more than 1,000 in Akron — to maintain financial stability in an industry that already was struggling with union agreements, old factories and a flood of quality imports.