Announcing the new Pinto three-door runabout. Pure Pinto back to back.
Pinto is built to go and go and go see the new Pinto three-door runabout at your
Ford dealer. Packs more fun, packs more fun, packs more fun, packs more fun
than any little import.
The Pinto, also known as the "Widow maker",
is one of the most infamous vehicles ever produced. With over 200 fatalities,
the Pinto proved to be the perfect example of failed engineering, corporate
greed and unethical business practices all wrapped into one. The company
responsible for the sudden loss of confidence in the American auto industry
was Ford Motor Company.First we need to head back 50 years: to 1968.
By then an invasion of foreign-made goods began dominating the US auto
industry. Detroit was in a panic as the Japanese began to gobble up more and
more of the subcompact auto market. Meet the companies then President Lee Iacocca.
Lee was a calculating intelligent ambitious and ruthless executive.
Okay, I read the research. You know what I think? I think America's getting an
inferiority complex about Japan. Now that's gotta stop. The truth is we've got
advantages over the Japanese in every car we make, but nobody knows. We've got
more performance cars or more four-wheel drives and more turbos! And who's done
more about safety than we have? That statement still haunts Lee Iacocca till
this very day. He pushed for the board to green-light the Pinto program and by
August 1968 it was under way. The Pinto, also known as Lee's car, would have
aggressive targets. Lee demanded it be no more than 2,000 pounds
not a penny over $2,000 and rushed the delivery deadline to just 25 months.
As the combination of fast and cheap rarely results in perfection, the Pinto emerged
after an accelerated two-year development cycle deeply flawed. In order
to create more interior room, the Pinto used a steel fuel tank located behind
the rear axle and in front of the rear bumper. There were pros and cons to this
design. The pro: the Pinto's gas tank was far less likely to intrude into the cabin
space in the event of a rear collision. The con: the fuel tank of the Pinto would
rupture and rear collisions involving speeds as low as 25 miles per hpur.
In a crash, the rear axle housing would make contact with the fuel tank.
Combined with the fuel filler neck design, this would lead to fuel spillage
both inside and outside the cabin and ultimately fire. The first high-profile
accident highlighting this fatal design flaw occurred in May 1972 when a Pinto
carrying Lily gray and her 13-year old neighbor
Richard Grimshaw were struck from behind at an estimated speed of 30 miles per hpur.
Upon collision, its fuel tank ruptured killing gray and leaving
Grimshaw with third-degree burns over 90% of his body. Miraculously, the boy
survived but his injuries required over 60 surgeries. Unfortunately, the carnage
does not stop there. On the afternoon of August 10th 1978, outside of Elkhart
Indiana, three teen girls stopped for gas on their way to a volleyball game.
The driver was Judy yours and her cousin Donna
and her younger sister Lynn were also passengers. They were in a 1973 Pinto.
At the gas station the girls accidentally left the gas cap on the roof of their
car and after a mile or so was slipped off and rolled across the road Judy
decided to slow down there was a high curb alongside the highway so pulling
off the road was impossible she got out and she put on her emergency flashers
coming down the road behind them was a van driven by a 21 year old man named
Robert Duggar as they reached for another cigarette he took his eyes off
the road when he looked up the Pinto was 10 feet in front of him he could not
stop in time a Pinto exploded massive fire pit shards of glass
scattered in every direction the car spun around and around stopping a
hundred and fifty feet from the point of impact the fire almost reached 1,300
degrees melting the sunglasses around lens eyes you see where the fats burned
see polyester shirt very modern our Lynn and Donna were killed instantly judy lay
in the grass with burns over 95% of her body the last words help me please help
me she died eight hours later
needless to say the results were not encouraging in both accidents Fort was
brought to trial and in both cases was found not criminally liable for the
deaths further ex aspirating the problem was a 1977 article of Mother Jones an
article that was published called Pinto madness the piece referred to Pinto as a
firetrap and a lethal car and cited 500 to 900 fatal Pinto fires the report
exposed forth internal documents stated all the way back to 1970 proving that
the company knew about the potential problem the company knew that the fuel
tank created a serious risk of fire so engineering teams proposed solutions one
was to borrow a design Ford use in its Capri a tank that said above the axle
and out of the way management's attitude was to get the product out of the door
as fast as possible so Ford did a cost-benefit analysis to fix the
problems it would cost an additional $11 per vehicle and Ford weighed at $11
against the projected injury claims for severe burns repair costs claim rate and
mortality including the engineering the production delays and the parts for 10
thousands of cars the total would have been approximately 113 million dollars
Ford value to human life at about $200,000 but damage payouts were only
cost 49 million so Ford said fuck it and the fix was next and the pin
when the production that year of September 1974 years no one thought to
verify if any of the sensationalistic data on Pinto crashes was true but in
November 1990 Gary T Swartz a professor at the UCLA School of Law published an
article titled the myth of the Ford Pinto case perhaps the most illuminating
data comes from the NHTSA fatality rates per million vehicles for 1975 and 1976
in the published chart the Pinto is responsible for 298 deaths per million
cars in 1975 making it on par with the Chevrolet Vega that had 288 deaths and
the Datsun 510 that had 294 deaths but considerably safer than the Toyota
Corolla with 333 deaths the VW Beetle that had 378 deaths and the Datsun 210
that had a whopping 392 deaths per million cars for the year of 1975 that's
almost a hundred more looking at this data one could assume that the Pinto was
less or the same amount of dangerous but suppose that we focus on the subset of
accidents involving fire if we just take a look at that subset we finally see a
pattern which is to say that they may have been as safe or safer than other
cars in most respects but a lot less safe in the exploding fireball category
so if the statistics showed a clear issue with the pintos fuel tank and the
company knew about it why was nothing done to understand this let's take
another look at another company Toyota and Toyotas acceleration problems in
2009 and 2010 these issues all follow the template created by the Pinto case
forty years ago the company knows about a problem and doesn't fix it why not
one of the problems facing the company was sticky accelerator pedals drivers
would take their foot off the accelerator and in a small number of
cases the pedal wouldn't spring back up immediately
therefore cases in Europe were brought to Toyota's attention the company
determined that under conditions of high heat or humidity the synthetic material
used in part of the pedal mechanism was degrading slightly the primary concern
was determining if sticky pedals affected the ability of drivers to stop
their vehicles this question is the hidden factor around which much of the
subsequent controversy revolved if the sticky pedals kept drivers from stopping
or materially increased the amount of time required to bring a car to a halt
then the sticky pedals were clearly a safety defect and required immediate
corrective action if on the other hand braking performance was unaffected by
the sticky pedals then the engineers felt the pedals were not a safety defect
but a consumer satisfaction and component reliability issue what did the
engineers find when the pedals stuck it made no difference how quickly the car
can be brought to a stop the brakes were powerful enough to override the problem
if applied with sufficient force then they looked at the federal accident
database and learned that there had been no crash credited to a sticky
accelerator pedal the system was in their mind sufficiently tolerant of
imperfection they decided against an immediate recall choosing instead to
redesign the part and introduce it in new model lines the public saw things
very differently what if an inexperienced driver found his car
behaving unexpectedly a panicked to be engineer the car sits somewhere on the
gradient of acceptability to the public the car status is binary it's broken or
it's working it's flawed or it's functional looking at the Toyota example
we now see what Ford engineers saw with the Pinto gas tank issue the Pinto was
right in the middle of the pack and at most slightly worse than average and
from an engineering standpoint this makes sense but with the loss of life
and the particular way that people lost their lives in a fiery iron coffin made
the pintos imperfection highly unacceptable I'm Jeff from modern muscle
two and three and this is the truth about the Ford
Pinto now guys just ask yourself what fatal flaws do you think your car
company is hiding from you it could be anything
drive safely my friends and who's done more about safety than we have Americans
just don't understand the quality of our cars we got to get people to wake up to
the truth
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