Past is Prologue

I recently read an interesting essay by Alec Nevala-Lee on Slate.com about a vehicle I had never heard of: The Dymaxion Car, which looked a bit like a three-wheeled submarine, designed by inventor Buckminster Fuller. Fuller originally envisioned the Dymaxion as a true car of the future, with a streamlined, ovoid design that he initially believed could be equipped with wings for flight.

In reality, the car was an expensive boondoggle beset by production problems, design flaws and wildly unrealistic claims by its inventor. In the end, the entire project was undone in 1933 by a fatal crash in Chicago caused, in part, by the vehicle’s poor handling. Fuller, however, circulated a story that blamed the crash on another driver, in an effort to minimize his own liability and, perhaps, shield his ego.

The Nevala-Lee piece gives a good account of what actually happened, and there is even more information on Fuller and the Dymaxion in his new book, “Inventor of the Future: The Visionary Life of Buckminster Fuller.” Fuller may be best known for the development of the geodesic dome, but also designed other fanciful constructions including a round Dymaxion house, an offshore floating city, and a method for using bent rebar and spray-on concrete to construct strong concrete domes (and other shapes) on construction sites.

Whether these accidents are caused by technology failures, human error, or a combination of the two, the industry response should be to double down on design improvements that elevate safety.

The Dymaxion story resonated with me as we were preparing this issue on automotive design, because the lessons of its failure are still contemporary. There are echoes of the Dymaxion whenever a crash tamps the brakes on autonomous vehicle development. There have been recent problems with Cruise vehicles in California (including a group of robotaxis blocking an entire street in San Francisco), numerous incidents with Teslas operating in AutoPilot mode, and many others, including several fatalities.

Whether these accidents are caused by technology failures, human error or a combination of the two, the industry response should be to double down on design improvements that elevate safety. Instead, what we have often seen is automakers falling back on Fuller-like obfuscation and finger-pointing.

I recently watched the Netflix series “Trainwreck: Woodstock ‘99,” about how that music festival ended in a horror show, and throughout every episode I saw multiple instances of both musicians and festival organizers throwing up their hands and saying, essentially, “It’s not my fault.” (That was literally almost the first thing out of Limp Bizkit frontman Fred Durst’s mouth when he left the stage.) When autonomous vehicles fail, “It’s not my fault” appears to be the default position of many manufacturers.

But fault is not the point. Safety is the point. In this issue, our writers take a look at the design, simulation and other technologies that are helping automakers create and improve new vehicle designs. I hope that, in the future, automakers can do a better job of owning their failures and leveraging those technologies to make safer vehicles, rather than repeating Fuller’s mistakes.