The author of Unsafe at Any Speed says a California ballot initiative and a midnight congressional vote are dismantling sixty years of hard-won auto safety law — just as autonomous vehicles take to the streets at scale Sixty years ago, Ralph Nader walked into a fight he was not supposed to win. General Motors hired private detectives to trail him, tried to entrap him with women, and made his life miserable in ways that a Senate subcommittee later found deeply troubling. None of it stopped Unsafe at Any Speed from becoming a bestseller, and none of it stopped Congress from passing the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act of 1966 — the law that gave the federal government the authority to set binding safety standards for every automobile sold in the United States. Now Nader is back in the fight, and the adversary this time is not a Detroit carmaker but a San Francisco technology company that he says is using the same old playbook: lobby, spend, and legislate your way out of accountability before the public figures out what you are doing. On June 4, 2026, Nader released an open letter addressed directly to Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, condemning the company’s coordinated effort to limit legal liability for crashes involving both human rideshare drivers and autonomous vehicles. The letter, published by Consumer Watchdog, takes aim at two specific legal maneuvers: an Uber-backed California ballot initiative targeting attorney fees and litigation access in accident cases, and a federal amendment tucked into a surface transportation bill by Representative Vince Fong of Bakersfield that consumer advocates say would provide sweeping immunity to rideshare companies for crashes caused by their drivers. “Sixty years ago, the publication of Unsafe at Any Speed exposed a simple but consequential truth: when corporations are allowed to