Clarence Ditlow, the long-time head of the Center for Auto Safety, died last week at the age of 72. His passing triggered an outpouring of tributes from colleagues, friends and others, including these:
Ben Kelley, board member of the Center for Auto Safety:
There are very few activists who deserve the appellation “sui generis,” meaning “one of a kind, unique.” Clarence Ditlow, who died on November 10 in Washington after a months-long battle with cancer, was just such an activist.
For more than 40 years Ditlow headed the Center for Auto Safety where, for long hours and on a tiny budget, he worked unremittingly to prod car companies and safety regulators into placing the highest priority on keeping vehicles free of deadly hazards. As a member of the Center’s board of directors, I was privileged to know and work with Ditlow in achieving the Center’s crucially important consumer-protection mission.
Clarence Ditlow was personally self-effacing yet professionally unremitting in his dedication to the cause of protecting consumers from unsafe vehicles. Nor did he flinch from publicly calling out safety regulators for their cozy relations with the industry and their failure to establish and enforce tough auto safety standards, operate transparently, and put the public’s health above industry profits.
A few months before his death, in a USA Today commentary, Ditlow sharply criticized the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration for its failure to develop binding safety standards for driverless vehicles. “In its zeal to advance driverless vehicles,” he wrote, “NHTSA has forgotten its mission is to ensure safety, not promote gee-whiz vehicle technology to increase sales.“
Ensuring the safety of self-drive cars was just the most recent of Ditlow’s concerns. Announcing his death, the center noted that these included safety recalls of tens of millions of vehicles that saved untold thousands of lives, and passage of lemon laws in all 50 states.
On September 29, as his illness worsened, Ditlow was singled out for special praise in a Congressional Record statement by Sens. Ed Markey, D-Mass., and Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn. “A tireless champion for consumers, his work has resulted in better government oversight of automakers, the installation of key safety features, and the exposure of safety defects in millions of cars, SUVs and other trucks,” it noted.
Clarence Ditlow is survived by his wife, Marilyn Herman, his beloved long-time companion. They were married in a bedside ceremony at George Washington Hospital a few weeks before his death. He is also survived by countless motorists who, through his efforts on behalf of auto safety, are alive today.