When a young lawyer named Ralph Nader published Unsafe at Any Speed in 1965, the reception was not all warm. The book set out to show how automakers had valued style over safety—particularly in cars like the Chevrolet Corvair—thereby putting consumers at risk. A TIME essay the following year portrayed Nader as a polemicist who was trying to paint auto accidents as solely the fault of the machines, with no account for driver error, and asserted that the book was “an arresting, though one-sided, lawyer’s brief that accuses Detroit of just about everything except starting the Vietnamese war.” But that was nothing compared to what General Motors did.