[HN Gopher] The exploding Ford Pinto of 1973 (2021)
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The exploding Ford Pinto of 1973 (2021)
Author : arunc
Score : 73 points
Date : 2022-12-06 22:42 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (medium.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (medium.com)
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Not only was it a terrible car in all the ways already noted, but
| the floor in back seat had the largest drive train hump of any
| car I've ever been in.
|
| AND the mileage wasn't all that great, compared to Japanese
| compacts. The 70s destroyed the reputation of American car makers
| for a whole generation.
| pengaru wrote:
| > The 70s destroyed the reputation of American car makers for a
| whole generation.
|
| It's more like the second half of the 70s/early 80s that's
| responsible for this.
|
| Which was all due to the 1973 and 1979 "oil crises", and
| introduction of smog controls to a mature and established
| large-scale American auto industry that seemed utterly
| incapable of quickly transitioning to computer controlled
| closed-loop fuel injection without first making an absolute
| unmitigated mess of their engine control systems.
|
| My father was a proper American auto enthusiast purchasing anew
| both a 60s Mustang and 70s Torino, and myriad American work
| trucks for his construction company. That all came to a
| screeching hault in 1981 after purchasing a more family-
| oriented post-smog 81 Ford Thunderbird. He never bought another
| American vehicle again.
|
| That car had so many vacuum lines, solenoids, and pneumatic
| actuators under the hood in service of the emissions controls,
| they were an endless source of dysfunction. The car never idled
| right, and my dad never spent so much time cursing under the
| hood of a car.
|
| The adoption of smog controls and Big Auto's inability to
| implement them sanely until literally the 1990s is what killed
| the American auto industry. Japanese cars did it better and
| rode on that inertia for decades. In the case of my parents
| they replaced the T-bird with a Hyundai Sonata V6 (Mitsubishi
| V6 in a tin can, car was proper quick for an econobox) to test
| the waters and never looked back. Nissan Maximas and 350Z then
| 370Z after the Sonata. You couldn't pay them to buy American
| again.
| cafard wrote:
| The Ford Falcon was a very decent smaller car. The Falcon
| station wagon I drove one year to high school got around 20
| mpg in light traffic.
|
| I will add that it wasn't just Detroit that had problems in
| the 1970s. I remember the Volkswagen Rabbit as a pretty
| terrible follow-up to the Beetle.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| As was the Dasher, which I had and got rid of at 60K.
|
| Japanese cars were just better, sorry. They still are.
| There is something about "fanatical attention to quality"
| that beats the shart out of "ok, that's good enough."
|
| As for the Falcon, that came out before the 70s:
|
| https://archive.nytimes.com/wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/0
| 7...
| greedo wrote:
| It wasn't a matter of transitioning to new technology, it was
| a lethargic, dimwitted corporate mindset that they would
| never face real competition. Not only did Japanese cars offer
| smaller, more fuel efficient cars, but their quality was just
| worlds ahead of the US automakers. Deming had tried to get
| them to view quality as an integral part of manufacturing,
| but they dismissed his ideas. The Japanese automakers were
| smart enough to see the wisdom in his ideas.
|
| Same thing happened when Toyota started their Lexus division.
| Mercedes etc thought they had it made, but Japan quickly
| began to steal marketshare from the luxury segment.
|
| Later on, Korean automakers decided to follow the Japanese
| playbook, and again, were met with derision buy US
| automakers. When Rodney King was arrested and assaulted after
| driving his Hyundai at high speed, everyone made fun of the
| LAPD lying about how fast he was going because a HYUNDAI
| could never go that fast.
|
| Today, Hyundai and Kia are very reputable automakers, and
| Detroit is still struggling to make cars with consistent
| quality.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| > adoption of smog controls and Big Auto's inability to
| implement them sanely ... is what killed the American auto
| industry
|
| I would add: the inability to create a 4-cylinder engine that
| lasted beyond 60,000 miles (at least without significant
| work)
| dsfyu404ed wrote:
| >I would add: the inability to create a 4-cylinder engine
| that lasted beyond 60,000 miles (at least without
| significant work)
|
| Tell me you get your car info from Reddit without telling
| me you get your car info from Reddit. My eyes are rolling
| loops in my skull right now.
|
| Ford's Pinto engine, GM's Iron Duke and Chrysler's
| 2.whateverIforgetthename are all generally considered
| highly reliable engines. The competition was good too,
| Honda's E engine, Subaru's EA and Toyotas <insert alphabet
| soup here> are also held in high regard. The 80s was a
| great time for 4-banger engines. When you encounter an
| unreliable one it's generally a problem to the tune of a
| specific external system on a specific model and year
| range.
|
| The domestic's primary problem was they considered these
| small cars value priced economy cars and it showed in the
| fit and finish, ergonomics, available options and
| engineering quality all around, they were simply built to a
| price point in every way. So people preferred the generally
| nicer (and generally slightly more expensive) Japanese
| cars.
| pengaru wrote:
| > Ford's Pinto engine, GM's Iron Duke and Chrysler's
| 2.whateverIforgetthename are all generally considered
| highly reliable engines.
|
| The only of these I have firsthand experience with would
| be the Iron Duke in the Fiero, and "highly reliable" is
| the last thing coming to mind. It had a _plastic_ timing
| gear that liked to disintegrate FFS.
| dsfyu404ed wrote:
| You're confusing it with the GM V6 which was optional in
| the Fiero and had timing gears that tended to go out
| around 80-100k.
|
| Almost every OEM that used a gear timed engine has also
| used plastic composite timing gears over the years.
| They're less reliable than metal but not so much so as to
| really be an issue in practice. Ford 300s and their
| plastic gears last more or less as long as the owners are
| willing to run them.
|
| Just to really drive home that this is a "people forming
| opinions based on the badge on the grill" issue and not a
| "actual performance of the hardware" issue I'd like to
| point out that a) Grumman LLV which is the reliability
| darling of the internet is basically a Chevy S10 with a
| funny body on it and b) the Toyota 22R and RE, also
| fanboy favorites, eat timing guides and then the
| sprockets on a ~100k timeline if not equipped with the
| double roller version of the sprockets and chain.
| pengaru wrote:
| > You're confusing it with the GM V6 which was optional
| in the Fiero and had timing gears that tended to go out
| around 80-100k.
|
| No, I'm not.
|
| I worked as a shop assistant @ v8archie.com in my youth,
| and swapped out the Iron Duke in my 2.5l Fiero purchased
| with a busted rod (surprise surprise!) in favor of a 3.1
| stroker v6 that started life as the 2.8. The Iron Duke
| was the absolute laughing stock in that shop and the
| community in general. Neither of these engines were
| particularly good, but the Iron Duke was notoriously bad.
|
| It took me under one minute with ddg search results to
| find this gem [0]:
|
| 'I have an '87 Sport Coupe with the 2.5L "Iron Duke".
| This past July, with 126,000 miles on the engine, the
| timing tear sheared off about 30% of its teeth and
| stopped the engine dead.'
|
| The Iron Duke was so bad it singlehandedly ruined the
| Fiero's reputation by having a tendency to throw rods
| through the block which then set the car on fire by
| blowing crankcase gases and oil on the hot cat below.
|
| Am I actually arguing with someone defending the Iron
| Duke on the internet first thing in the morning right
| now? On HN no less? What has the world come to.
|
| [0] http://www.calgaryfieros.com/OSGdocs/timing-gear.html
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| I don't get the Reddit reference because I don't use
| reddit. I had many Mercury 4-cylinder cars in the 80s:
| Topaz, Zephyr, etc (Ford rebranded). They all sucked and
| didn't last beyond 60,000 or 65,000 without thousands in
| engine work.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| All that certainly accelerated it. The Pinto / Vega / Gremlin
| were a rousing start.
|
| My dad, too: finally caved in and bought a Camry. By the 80s
| everyone could see it.
| ghaff wrote:
| That was also the period when Oldsmobile came out with a
| diesel station wagon (and I imagine other models). As I
| recall GM basically stuck a diesel into an existing design
| and it had all sorts of problems. I think GM eventually did a
| rather major recall.
| bigmattystyles wrote:
| I still can't get past the name - I'm in California and all I
| think about when I hear Pinto is beans. Did that not trigger any
| alarms in Ford USA marketing in the 70s? I know Pinto is a type
| of pony with odd color patches but I have to look that up every
| once in a while. And even if that's what they were going for,
| that's still a weird name to choose. I know companies often are
| oblivious to how names translate in other countries but was
| Mexican food just not popular in the 70s in the US?
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| > Mexican food just not popular in the 70s in the US?
|
| Definitely not in the NY and NJ area. There was one Mexican
| restaurant that I knew of in all NJ, and I never went there.
|
| Don't forget the "mustang", another car named after a horse by
| Ford that was very popular.
| nextos wrote:
| Actually pinto is a Spanish word that can be roughly translated
| as patches.
|
| Pinto beans are so called, like ponies, because of patchy
| appearance.
|
| Nonetheless, I agree with you, it's a confusing marketing
| strategy.
| jcampbell1 wrote:
| I always assumed it was fake Spanish for pint-sized, which is
| used to mean small/compact.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| Pintos were a blast in the snow; they'd just glide right over
| top. Two of us could toss it back up onto the road. It took 4 to
| do a bug. Bugs were surprisingly heavy.
|
| Working under the hood was easy. We could swap a 1600 for a 2300
| in 90 min. Granted, it's not as easy as dropping a pancake out of
| a 911 but 90 min was pretty good for an American car.
| gcanyon wrote:
| My first car in the early '80s was an early '70s Pinto. I don't
| remember the exact model year. It was an ugly green manual
| transmission, and it frustrated me that driving it up the hill to
| my parents' house, it topped out at something like 20 mph in
| first gear, but bogged out in second gear (cue the Lada
| comparisons), while a friend's automatic went up the hill just
| fine.
|
| I don't know if it was ever retrofitted, but I was never rear-
| ended in the time I owned it. It got my friends and me to Vegas
| and back from San Diego. No air conditioner, so that was a
| challenge. One time I had to replace the head gasket, put the
| replacement on backwards, and had to get another replacement --
| oil everywhere when I cranked it.
|
| It kept me mobile for a couple years.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| See also: "Unsafe at Any Speed" by Ralph Nader
| DesiLurker wrote:
| scene from the movie 'Top Secret' at the top of page:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9GGDOUDLhc
| egberts1 wrote:
| Dang, beat me to it.
| tinglymintyfrsh wrote:
| Chevrolet Corvair enters the chat.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EveryCarIsAPinto
|
| >Every Car Is a Pinto
|
| >"As everyone knows, cars are highly volatile machines, seemingly
| made of tissue paper, birch bark and lighter fluid. Or so you
| would think by how often, easily and massively they explode." --
| WatchMojo, "Top 10 Worst Action Movie Cliches"
|
| >Car damage = instant fireball.
|
| >Any significant impact to a vehicle, particularly when falling
| off a cliff, will result in the vehicle exploding and/or
| immediately catching fire. Evidently fictional cars run on
| nitroglycerine. This trope comes from the public knowledge that
| vehicles are full of flammable substances like gasoline minus the
| less-public knowledge that liquid gasoline has to be vaporized
| and mixed with air at the proper ratio before a spark will ignite
| it. At worst your "exploding" car would actually be a car with a
| small fire. Needless to say, Rule of Cool is in full effect here.
|
| >While cars are the most common vehicle to go kaboom, it seems
| that any form of transport has a good chance of exploding in a
| huge ball of flames and debris if it's shot at or wrecked.
| Aircraft, locomotives, ships: pretty much anything gas-powered
| and motorized is a fireball waiting to happen. Sometimes vehicles
| tumbling off cliffs will burst into flames spontaneously, in
| midair, before they've even hit the ground. Some pretty egregious
| instances might even have them mushroom. Expect it to intersect
| frequently with Dangerous Clifftop Road (as in the page image).
|
| >The Trope Namer is the now-infamous Ford Pinto, a low-cost car
| launched by the Ford Motor Company in 1970. Its fatal flaw was
| that its gas tank was placed between the rear axle and the bumper
| -- and the bumper itself was not sturdy -- meaning that any
| damage to the car's back end could easily puncture the tank and
| spill fuel on the hot exhaust pipe. After several incidents when
| a Pinto burst into flames after a minor collision, its reputation
| as a cheap death trap was sealed, and it was taken off the market
| in 1980 to be replaced by the North American Ford Escort.
| cpleppert wrote:
| Was this written by ChatGPT? It is completly wrong but written in
| a confident manner with broad sweeping generalizations that leave
| no doubt of the truth. It even asserts multiple times that the
| Ford Pinto was made out of aluminum.
| Villodre wrote:
| This article in Spanish is quite similar in wording and
| expressions used: https://noticias.coches.com/noticias-
| motor/ford-pinto-seguri...
|
| Really, I think that the Internet now is mostly bot generated.
| incanus77 wrote:
| I was only 3 when this was taken off the market, but it was still
| legendary in name only in my childhood. I even had a Matchbox car
| called the Poison Pinto and friends would comment about how it
| might explode.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| What was the cost to Ford for killing over 500 people? Money?
| jandrese wrote:
| Looks like a quarter million dollars and 1.5 million recalls
| according to the article. All in all Ford probably came out
| ahead from a dollar perspective. What they lost was reputation.
| Compact Fords would sell poorly until they were completely
| discontinued decades later.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > Compact Fords would sell poorly until they were completely
| discontinued decades later.
|
| I dunno man. It seems like there were about a million Escorts
| out there. For as long as they held up, that is.
| jandrese wrote:
| I consider the Fiesta the successor 2 door compact. The
| Escort was closer to mid-size.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| The 80s escort in the US was SMALL. It definitely was not
| mid-size.
| to11mtm wrote:
| Fiesta is B/Subcompact. So are the (lol) EcoSport and
| (plz bring to US) Kuga.
|
| Escort/Contour(OG Mondeo)/Focus are considered Compact in
| the US
| to11mtm wrote:
| It's a weird comparison.
|
| Escorts sold fairly well compared to the Chrysler/GM
| competition IIRC (And that's speaking as a very happy
| former Saturn owner)[1]
|
| Frankly, I'd blame Ford's discontinuation of compacts in
| the US more on their cognitive dissonance around the
| PowerShift than anything else.
|
| People knew it was junk as far back as 2016. Rather than
| fix it, they stuck with their lie and tried to use the
| EcoSport as a nonsensical distraction.
|
| To then cite 'declining sales' is IMO dishonest. OFC the
| sales declined, both you _and the consumer_ knew the
| product was faulty.
|
| It's worth stating that Saturn is the only brand I ever
| really really trusted, one of their techs warned me about
| the ignition switch issue 4+ years before it came to light.
|
| [1] - I should also add, when Ford gets it right they get
| it right. I have a Maverick Hybrid and it is the perfect
| apology for the last A/T Focus, if only they could produce
| in reasonable numbers.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| > Compact Fords would sell poorly
|
| No. Ford Tempo was a best selling car between 1984 - 1994:
|
| "The Tempo was a sales success for Ford, staying one of the
| top ten best selling cars in the US, if not one of the top
| five, during its entire production run."
|
| Wikipedia also has production counts, and it's more than 2.8
| million.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Tempo
| tinglymintyfrsh wrote:
| Souvenirs. Novelties. Party tricks.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Might as well read the rebuttal, as well, for balance:
| https://www.hemmings.com/stories/2017/10/17/misunderstood-ca...
|
| TL;DR: Sure, the Pinto was unsafe, but that was not exactly
| unusual for small cars in the 70s.
| Hatrix wrote:
| Ford Mustangs with the drop-in tank had fire problems too.
| Maybe not as enough people died for a recall.
| danbmil99 wrote:
| My hypothesis: Mustang drivers are the ones who rear-end
| others. Pinto drivers brake for squirrels QED
| jasonhansel wrote:
| The difference in this case is that Ford knew about a
| _specific_ issue, figured out how it could be fixed, and
| deliberately decided not to fix it for purely financial
| reasons.
|
| Yes, the Pinto was not, in total, more dangerous than its
| competitors. But this was a case of egregious corporate
| misconduct.
| SilasX wrote:
| Confession: I still don't get it.
|
| Manufacturers (and governments, for infrastructure) make a
| tradeoff between safety and cost _all the time_. You cannot
| make a car perfectly safe. Eventually you hit diminishing
| returns. This is an unavoidable fact of life.
|
| What makes this case worse than the hundred other ones about
| e.g. making this structural column slightly stronger or the
| crumple zone this much longer, or the highway this much
| wider, and so on?
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| Unfortunately the same argument makes the case for ignoring
| safety all together. The socially acceptable ways to die in
| a car gets smaller and smaller. Things like death by
| gasoline fire illustrated here, or death by steering column
| implation[1] get reclassified from an unavoidable hazard of
| driving to a preventable death all the time. We've even
| seen steering column trauma get re-conceptualized as
| preventable with the passage of the Surface Transportation
| Efficiency Act in 1991 and it's implementation in 1998.
| We'll likely see the same with deaths that are currently
| considered unavoidable road hazards.
|
| The fact is that as safety technologies are developed, they
| have the tendency to make people reevaluate what is and
| isn't avoidable. As to structural columns and crumple
| zones, public perception might reevaluate these too. The
| cumulative effect is that the deaths per VMT[2] has dropped
| and is likely to continue to drop as advances are made.
| Personally I don't care so much _how_ it 's done just
| _that_ it 's done. It seems to be working out pretty well
| so far.
|
| 1. https://www.pailton.com/latest-news/collapsible-
| steering-col...
|
| 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rat
| e_in...
| microsoftdoes wrote:
| > _Unfortunately the same argument makes the case for
| ignoring safety all together._
|
| No it doesn't. It's all about cost/benefit. We accept
| some safety risk because the alternative is a product
| that is too expensive to be useful.
| bumby wrote:
| The difference is that there are engineering standards that
| define what is acceptably "safe". From the article:
|
| > _" The standard requires that by 1972 all new cars can
| withstand a 20 mph rear-end collision without fuel loss,
| and by 1973 they can withstand a 30 mph collision. None of
| the prototype cars passed the 20 mph test."_
|
| They knew they had a design that didn't pass the industry-
| accepted safety standard.
| [deleted]
| Cyberdog wrote:
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Ha! I sort of remember NBC's hit piece of the late 70s Chevy
| pickup with side saddle tanks. We owned one of those. Didn't
| they use a flare or something because it wouldn't ignite
| otherwise?
| Cyberdog wrote:
| That would have been before my time. The first big instance
| that I can remember is the Killian Memos controversy during
| the Dubya administration, where Dan Rather wanted us to
| believe a document written in a proportional serif font
| with ligatures and superscripts which happened to match up
| to Microsoft Word's default typeface at the time was in
| fact typed on a typewriter in the early '70s.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > Killian Memos
|
| I had never heard of that. Going out on a limb, it is one
| of those controversies (which still happen all the time
| today) which is particularly interesting depending on
| your partisan viewpoint.
|
| It may be 100% valid. But these days it's tough to know
| what is legitimate malfeasance and what has been hyped up
| because it's a good way to malign one's political
| opponents.
| Cyberdog wrote:
| Oh, it was 0% valid, and anyone who knows anything about
| how typewriters work (which you would think Rather, as
| someone styling himself as an old-school journalist,
| would know) could tell you in an instant. A partisan
| viewpoint is exactly the problem here - if you hated
| Dubya enough, as Rather and the others at CBS apparently
| did, you were able to punt logic to the curb and believe
| the story they wanted to believe.
|
| But even if you were ideologically opposed to Bush, this
| should have been interesting to you too as an example of
| something _not_ to do. Why not report on the stuff that
| actually happened and was backed by evidence that wasn 't
| easily-debunkable? Plenty of not-so-flattering things
| happened during the Bush Jr administration... starting
| with an unwinnable war in which military contractors made
| out like bandits.
|
| But I think the yet-still-ongoing three-ring media circus
| around the Trump administration proved the press learned
| nothing from this. Oh well. So long as the people instead
| learn that the press is just as ideologically-driven as
| anyone - more so, even.
| ghaff wrote:
| My understanding is that other news organization were
| furious about CBS's mishandling of the story. There was
| plenty else about Dubya's actions at the time to report
| on but when the Killian papers were quickly debunked it
| pretty much tainted the broader topic as a Bush
| controversy.
|
| CBS did _some_ investigation but they clearly didn 't try
| very hard to falsify the documents.
| mc32 wrote:
| There was a hit piece on a Suzuki I think (anyway second
| tier Japanese car) some years back[1] and the journalists
| (actually Consumer Reports of all people) thought the
| high(er) center of gravity would make it too easy to roll
| over, but they had a hard time getting it to roll over
| anyway. So they made it tip and put out the hit piece. (any
| they made their data fit their presumption)
|
| [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suzuki_Motor_Corp._v._Cons
| umer....
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Sounds like CR wanted to see it fail the tip test because
| they knew it had a tendency to do exactly that, one of
| their own staff members experienced it while testing. And
| Suzuki knew it had a tendency to roll, they documented
| that internally and settled a number of lawsuits about
| it.
|
| Definitely not a good look for CR to try and put their
| finger on the scale like that. And not a good look for
| Suzuki to make a narrow top-heavy vehicle and then foist
| it on amateur drivers.
| chiph wrote:
| It was a model rocket engine that was ignited by the film
| crew just before impact to ensure that any spilled fuel
| caught fire. Which it did because they overfilled the tank
| and used the wrong gas cap for that model year truck.
| Apology starts around 1:40
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADOwKSal17I
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Yep. First case of "fake news" being exposed that I
| distinctly remember.
| hulitu wrote:
| In which country ? Last i looked they all do that. It
| increases revenue.
| dsfyu404ed wrote:
| >TL;DR: Sure, the Pinto was unsafe, but that was not exactly
| unusual for small cars in the 70s.
|
| And in light of that, ask yourselves, what's the lesson being
| taught here?
|
| The lesson being taught is "if you're not doing anything
| unusual don't run the numbers and if you do definitely don't
| record that you did."
|
| Probably not the lesson you want to be teaching.
| olivermarks wrote:
| We have similar issues today with BEV fire issues being
| overlooked/forgiven. https://www.ntsb.gov/news/press-
| releases/Pages/NR20210113.as...
| josephcsible wrote:
| This couldn't be further from the truth. BEV fires get blown
| _way_ out of proportion compared to ICE fires.
| olivermarks wrote:
| They are far more serious than ICE fires, extremely hard to
| extinguish. Trapped, runaway energy is a serious issue that
| needs to be urgently addressed. (This comment is not some
| kind of X is better than Y argument, this is just a safety
| comment.
| King-Aaron wrote:
| Not trying to go for the comparison either here, but have
| you ever seen a diesel engine fail and go into runaway?
| It's pretty impressive if nothing else!
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WvMl8LUzQnk
| jacquesm wrote:
| When that happens more often than not the turbo seal is
| gone and the engine is running on its own oil rather than
| on the fuel it is supposed to be running on. When the
| engine oil runs out it will stop all by itself... Usually
| these are either scrap or ready for a complete rebuild
| (if you're lucky).
| rootusrootus wrote:
| This is only true for cars with lithium ion batteries that
| use a very flammable electrolyte. Cars that use lithium
| iron phosphate chemistry have considerably less exciting
| failures. And future chemistries will be even better.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Is this getting better over time? What is the timeframe?
| josephcsible wrote:
| It's already started happening. The Model 3 SR has been
| using the safer LFP chemistry for about a year now.
| olivermarks wrote:
| There isn't one. The idea batteries are getting 'safer'
| is not true and is not nearly an urgent enough issue.
| josephcsible wrote:
| Why do you think that? It's totally wrong. LFP is
| absolutely being used already.
| newshorts wrote:
| In school we were taught that Ford had done an analysis and
| concluded the legal damages would be less than the cost of the
| fix.
|
| Not sure if my professor was just whistling Dixie, but if that's
| true the author left out an important part of the story.
| rawgabbit wrote:
| _Harley Copp, a former Ford engineer and the executive in
| charge of the crash testing program, "testified that the
| highest level of Ford's management made the decision to go
| forward with the production of the Pinto, knowing that the gas
| tank was vulnerable to puncture and rupture at low rear impact
| speeds creating a significant risk of death or injury from fire
| and knowing that 'fixes' were feasible at nominal cost."_
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimshaw_v._Ford_Motor_Co.
|
| _All this convinced jurors that Ford had known the design was
| dangerous and retained it anyway in order to save money. "Ford
| knew people would be killed," declares juror David Blodgett,
| who works for Western Electric Co. and who is the only member
| of the panel who drives a Pinto._
|
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1978/02/15/j...
| fuzzythinker wrote:
| Hidden Brain had a pretty good podcast on this
| https://www.npr.org/2020/08/21/904660038/the-halo-effect-why... .
| Link includes a quick summary.
| macshome wrote:
| Lol. The Ford Pinto was not made of aluminum. I remember seeing
| ads in magazines that bragged about the extra weight of the Pinto
| as a positive thing.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Yeah that's about the moment my BS meter started to really peg.
| Aluminum frame in a Pinto, hahahaha!
| WeylandYutani wrote:
| It's almost insane just how arrogant America was in the 1970s
| lol.
|
| "Those who are first will later be last".
| mabbo wrote:
| I'm reminded of the delightful opening scene of "Fight Club"
| where the narrator explains that his job is to apply "The
| Formula".
|
| https://youtu.be/SiB8GVMNJkE
| alamortsubite wrote:
| Also, this scene from Top Secret!
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-Qj58o87sY
| chris_st wrote:
| Surprising to me that they mentioned the Pinto, Pacer and
| Gremlin, but no mention of the Chevrolet Vega, their
| small/seemingly-economical/not-very-good attempt to compete with
| the Japanese.
|
| And on a lighter note, a friend who had a Pinto station wagon
| (which didn't have the fuel tank problem). He picked me up, and
| as I got in, said, "And you thought Chariots of Fire was a movie
| about running!"
| cf100clunk wrote:
| The article also did not mention that Ford indeed had a breadth
| of corporate knowledge and technology in building cars of the
| Pinto's size. Rather than designing a new Pinto model, Ford HQ
| in the U.S.A. could have taken the most successful similar-
| sized model from any one of Ford's international divisions,
| converted it to U.S. highway standards, and retooled the North
| American assembly lines for it.
| dancemethis wrote:
| Now that's an unfortunate name.
|
| Ford male genitalia...?
| bumby wrote:
| It was named after the "painted" horse. I suppose it aligned
| with the Mustang naming convention.
| seo-speedwagon wrote:
| Crazy how back in the 70s, manufacturing a car that turned into a
| giant fireball in collisions would make it unpopular.
| noduerme wrote:
| Back in the 70s you had to actually use your own hands to drive
| your car into the side of an 18 wheeler before it would
| explode. Now your self-guided lithium bomb will do it for you.
| Isn't progress amazing?
| labrador wrote:
| The feeling back then was that only losers bought Pintos. They
| always seemed to be tan or sh*t brown. Nobody seemed surprised
| that a loser car would burst into flames like that.
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