Mobilise! 31 ran an item on a Radio NZ report that Ford Motor Company were using thousands of animals in experiments. NZAVS subsequently learned that the culprits were not Ford, but General Motors.

Apparently since 1956 General Motors have been smashing the skulls and breaking the necks of animals with pneumatic impactors like the ones used on baboons in the notorious Gennarelli laboratory, inflicting head, chest and abdominal injuries on thousands of monkeys, dogs, pigs, rabbits and ferrets in car-crash tests. PeTA News, Fall 1991 reports:

"In 1988 General Motors fed 23 dogs with ethyl alcohol, the animals then had their chests and pericardiums cut open and were hit directly on the exposed heart with an air-pressured impactor."

On 12 January 1992 hundreds of anti-vivisectionists converged on General Motors ' plant in Michigan, USA where they hit world news by chaining themselves to the cars on the assembly line in protest to car-crash experiments being carried out on animals PeTA reports:

"In a typical current General Motors' impact test on pigs, these sensitive, intelligent animals are restrained and hung in a cloth sling to await a crushing blow to the stomach or chest from a pneumatically-driven metal device."

PeTA also reports that the head of General Motors Medical Committee for Automotive Safety, Thomas Langfitt has been inflicting head injuries on animals for 30 years and is an associate of the infamous Thomas Gennarelli, previously working with him bashing the skulls of baboons at the University of Pennsylvania. Langfitt insists that animals be used instead of the sophisticated simulated dummies used by other car firms.

Air bags (which are installed in other makes of car) can do more to reduce the toll of brain trauma than any other available intervention. General Motors had the technology by 1970 to implement air bag production but sacked the project manager for air cushion development. The firm apparently spent the next 20 years making excuses for not installing air bags, the (then) GM Chairman Thomas Murphy estimating that the company saved US$20 million by these delay tactics.

On 16 January 1992 NZAVS contacted Radio NZ News, Independent Radio News, The Dominion and The Evening Post, with details of General Motors' revolting and invalid car-crash tests... and the resultant high death rates of GM cars. None showed the slightest interest.

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