ELECTROCUTION IN THE CAR

A bird perching on a power line is not electrocuted because the resistance of its body is incomparably larger than that of the wire between its feet (not to mention the fact that there is not much voltage from one foot to the other).

But this, as near as I was able to ascertain (it is not easy to get an authoritative statement on this), is no longer necessarily true. It is well known that many parts of a car, such as the doors and its inside panel, are now often made of plastic, an electric insulator. Less well known is the fact that the remaining metal parts, such as the chassis and some parts of the body, may not be electrically interconnected. In one of the L.A. cases, the driver apparently had his elbow on the window, touching the outer door frame, and the other on a metal gear shift stick when a wire snapped and a live 3,000 V line hit his car. Clearly his body must have completed some unfortunate kind of circuit due to the metal parts of the car not being interconnected as they used to be.

That would explain the technological aspect of the two accidents. It is also credible that the city would spend billions on the remedy. California is the state whose Supreme Court ruled that the phone company shared some liability for a driver's injuries when his car swerved off the freeway into a telephone pole; this apparently rests on the impeccable logic that if the pole hadn't been there, it would have swerved on, maybe into the waiting room of a dog psychiatrist, and he would then have been liable for damages to compensate the driver, an innocent victim of the societal environment. Under this judicial system any price is cheaper than being sued for damages.

What is surprising in these freak accidents, though, is the inactivity of both the Naderites and the Detroit corporations.

One would have expected Joan Claybrook (of Nader's auto safety theater) to proclaim the threat of genocide by automobile electrocution and to lobby for the 1991 models to be equipped with $10,000 worth of safety nets on their roofs. And the Detroit crowd, true to the guts they have shown in the Corvette, Pinto, and all other cases, would fall on their knees begging them to reduce that to $7,000, while their flacks would wage a lavish PR campaign about how they save $3,000 of consumers' money.

In reality these cases of potential electrocution, for which LA is about to spend billions, are freak accidents (two in many years of L.A.'s mindboggling freeway traffic!) that can be avoided by connecting the metal parts of a car electrically at a cost of (I would guess) under $20.

The fact that both Claybrook and Detroit have overlooked this potential gold mine of PR grandstanding seems to indicate that neither party is very competent.

Methinks the two deserve each other.