21 ms·

The exploding Ford Pinto of 1973 (2021)

83 points by arunc 4y ago

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
DesiLurker 4y ago
scene from the movie 'Top Secret' at the top of page: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9GGDOUDLhc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9GGDOUDLhc
- egberts1 4y ago
  Dang, beat me to it.
Waterluvian 4y ago
What was the cost to Ford for killing over 500 people? Money?
- jandrese 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    > 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 4y ago
      I consider the Fiesta the successor 2 door compact. The Escort was closer to mid-size.
      - to11mtm 4y ago
        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
      - TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
        The 80s escort in the US was SMALL. It definitely was not mid-size.
    - to11mtm 4y ago
      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.
      - linksnapzz 4y ago
        Someone from Ford and/or Getrag ought to have gone to jail for that shit. A car with an automatic that suddenly has a transmission full of neutrals in the middle of an intersection is a serious safety hazard!
  - TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
    > 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 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Tempo
rootusrootus 4y ago
Might as well read the rebuttal, as well, for balance: https://www.hemmings.com/stories/2017/10/17/misunderstood-cars-the-ford-pinto 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.
- Cyberdog 4y ago
  - rootusrootus 4y ago
    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?
    - SoftTalker 4y ago
      Yep. First case of "fake news" being exposed that I distinctly remember.
    - Cyberdog 4y ago
      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 4y ago
        > 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.
seo-speedwagon 4y ago
Crazy how back in the 70s, manufacturing a car that turned into a giant fireball in collisions would make it unpopular.
- noduerme 4y ago
  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?
WarOnPrivacy 4y ago
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.
- WarOnPrivacy 4y ago
  > It took 4 to do a bug. Bugs were surprisingly heavy. Note to self. I looked up the curb weight and bugs & pintos weigh about the same. Maybe the bug was weighed down with all our sobriety.
olivermarks 4y ago
We have similar issues today with BEV fire issues being overlooked/forgiven. https://www.ntsb.gov/news/press-releases/Pages/NR20210113.aspx https://www.ntsb.gov/news/press-releases/Pages/NR20210113.as...
- josephcsible 4y ago
  This couldn't be further from the truth. BEV fires get blown way out of proportion compared to ICE fires.
  - olivermarks 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WvMl8LUzQnk
      - jacquesm 4y ago
        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).
        King-Aaron 4y ago
        Yep that's right. I've seen some pretty spectacular runaways with our big trucks on site, usually you just get on the phone to CAT and order a new engine lol
macshome 4y ago
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 4y ago
  Yeah that's about the moment my BS meter started to really peg. Aluminum frame in a Pinto, hahahaha!
- WeylandYutani 4y ago
  It's almost insane just how arrogant America was in the 1970s lol. "Those who are first will later be last".
mabbo 4y ago
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 https://youtu.be/SiB8GVMNJkE
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
AlbertCory 4y ago
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 4y ago
  > 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.
  - TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
    > 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)
chris_st 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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.
incanus77 4y ago
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.
bigmattystyles 4y ago
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 4y ago
  > 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.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    The food scene was a lot more limited than today, even in many relatively cosmopolitan cities.
- nextos 4y ago
  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.
  - linksnapzz 4y ago
    So, Ford for years wanted to have alliteration in product names- Falcon, Fairlane, Five Hundred, Flex, Fusion-not always, but often. In the '60s, there was a meeting in Dearborn-trying to name what would become the Mustang. Somebody in Marketing suggested "Ford Fenix"; "Phoenix" like the mythical bird, but spelled with an F, for the alliteration. Henry Ford II looked like he was considering it. Lee Iaccoca and his pal Ben Bidwell (later CEO & CFO at Chrysler in the '80s)but who worked for Ford at the time, suddenly cracked up laughing. Henry asked them what was so funny, and Bidwell repeated what he had just told Lee-"We could call it the Ford Phuck; the ads won't work on radio or TV, but they'd be fine in print!". Everyone had a good laugh, Henry Ford scowled, but nobody objected to calling the car Mustang after that.
throwaway2037 4y ago
See also: "Unsafe at Any Speed" by Ralph Nader
cpleppert 4y ago
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 4y ago
  This article in Spanish is quite similar in wording and expressions used: https://noticias.coches.com/noticias-motor/ford-pinto-seguridad/282541 https://noticias.coches.com/noticias-motor/ford-pinto-seguri... Really, I think that the Internet now is mostly bot generated.
newshorts 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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 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/jury-in-pinto-crash-case-we-wanted-ford-to-take-notice/996a9aa5-8f48-4541-8553-19c63f666830/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1978/02/15/j...
fuzzythinker 4y ago
Hidden Brain had a pretty good podcast on this https://www.npr.org/2020/08/21/904660038/the-halo-effect-why-its-so-difficult-to-understand-the-past https://www.npr.org/2020/08/21/904660038/the-halo-effect-why... . Link includes a quick summary.
DonHopkins 4y ago
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EveryCarIsAPinto 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 Clichés" >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.
gcanyon 4y ago
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.
- _yb2s 4y ago
  > it topped out at something like 20 mph in first gear, but bogged out in second gear I had an early 80s Ford Ranger with had the same 4 cylinder pinto engine, and the same experience. It also had a 5th gear, which was useless unless you were actually going downhill because the engine didn't have enough torque. I am not sure why european cars with similar sized and power output 4 cylinder engines didn't have these problems. Possibly more low end torque, and better gear ratio choices? On paper a 1970s Volvo B20 is almost the same specs as a Pinto LL20, but drives excellent.
  - bluedino 4y ago
    > Possibly more low end torque, and better gear ratio choices? The Japanese engines had less torque but were higher revving engines, and had better gear ratios. Also lower curb weights and more manual transmissions. It took GM/Ford a while to go with overhead cam designs. 1984 Honda Civic 1600lbs 1.5 liter engine 91 hp at 5,500 rpm 93 lb⋅ft at 4,500 rpm. 1984 Chevrolet Citation 2.5 liter engine 83 hp at 4000 rpm 124 lb/ft 2400 rpm 2200lbs
dancemethis 4y ago
Now that's an unfortunate name. Ford male genitalia...?
- bumby 4y ago
  It was named after the "painted" horse. I suppose it aligned with the Mustang naming convention.
tinglymintyfrsh 4y ago
Chevrolet Corvair enters the chat.
- linksnapzz 4y ago
  The second-gen Corvair 65.5->69? fixed the swing-axle issue. Also, the Corvair Monza of that era is still the best looking four-door America has ever built.
tinglymintyfrsh 4y ago
Souvenirs. Novelties. Party tricks.
daVe23hu 4y ago
Interesting article. Fundamental to all NHTSA covered products is the CFR (Code of Federal Regulations), It is the law. It is best to understand not only the binary requirements of said code but also the intention. Generally the codes have logical origins in the development. As well, it is generally a best practice to not just barely meet the law/code but exceed it to some degree. Test to test there will be variability and one may avoid hassles recall/lawsuit by exceeding the code. Today's fuel tank test involves a test collision and then the tested vehicle is placed on a large rotisserie and only a limited amount of fluid is allowed to leak as the crashed vehicle is rotated in space.

83 points by arunc 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

scene from the movie 'Top Secret' at the top of page: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9GGDOUDLhc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9GGDOUDLhc

egberts1 4y ago
Dang, beat me to it.

Waterluvian 4y ago

What was the cost to Ford for killing over 500 people? Money?

jandrese 4y ago
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 4y ago
  > 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 4y ago
    I consider the Fiesta the successor 2 door compact. The Escort was closer to mid-size.
    - to11mtm 4y ago
      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
    - TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
      The 80s escort in the US was SMALL. It definitely was not mid-size.
  - to11mtm 4y ago
    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.
    - linksnapzz 4y ago
      Someone from Ford and/or Getrag ought to have gone to jail for that shit. A car with an automatic that suddenly has a transmission full of neutrals in the middle of an intersection is a serious safety hazard!
- TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
  > 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 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Tempo

rootusrootus 4y ago

Might as well read the rebuttal, as well, for balance: https://www.hemmings.com/stories/2017/10/17/misunderstood-cars-the-ford-pinto 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.

Cyberdog 4y ago
- rootusrootus 4y ago
  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?
  - SoftTalker 4y ago
    Yep. First case of "fake news" being exposed that I distinctly remember.
  - Cyberdog 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      > 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.

seo-speedwagon 4y ago

Crazy how back in the 70s, manufacturing a car that turned into a giant fireball in collisions would make it unpopular.

noduerme 4y ago
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?

WarOnPrivacy 4y ago

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.

WarOnPrivacy 4y ago
> It took 4 to do a bug. Bugs were surprisingly heavy. Note to self. I looked up the curb weight and bugs & pintos weigh about the same. Maybe the bug was weighed down with all our sobriety.

olivermarks 4y ago

We have similar issues today with BEV fire issues being overlooked/forgiven. https://www.ntsb.gov/news/press-releases/Pages/NR20210113.aspx https://www.ntsb.gov/news/press-releases/Pages/NR20210113.as...

josephcsible 4y ago
This couldn't be further from the truth. BEV fires get blown way out of proportion compared to ICE fires.
- olivermarks 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WvMl8LUzQnk
    - jacquesm 4y ago
      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).
      - King-Aaron 4y ago
        Yep that's right. I've seen some pretty spectacular runaways with our big trucks on site, usually you just get on the phone to CAT and order a new engine lol

macshome 4y ago

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 4y ago
Yeah that's about the moment my BS meter started to really peg. Aluminum frame in a Pinto, hahahaha!
WeylandYutani 4y ago
It's almost insane just how arrogant America was in the 1970s lol. "Those who are first will later be last".

mabbo 4y ago

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 https://youtu.be/SiB8GVMNJkE

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

AlbertCory 4y ago

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 4y ago
> 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.
- TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
  > 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)

chris_st 4y ago

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 4y ago
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.

incanus77 4y ago

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.

bigmattystyles 4y ago

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 4y ago
> 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.
- ghaff 4y ago
  The food scene was a lot more limited than today, even in many relatively cosmopolitan cities.
nextos 4y ago
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.
- linksnapzz 4y ago
  So, Ford for years wanted to have alliteration in product names- Falcon, Fairlane, Five Hundred, Flex, Fusion-not always, but often. In the '60s, there was a meeting in Dearborn-trying to name what would become the Mustang. Somebody in Marketing suggested "Ford Fenix"; "Phoenix" like the mythical bird, but spelled with an F, for the alliteration. Henry Ford II looked like he was considering it. Lee Iaccoca and his pal Ben Bidwell (later CEO & CFO at Chrysler in the '80s)but who worked for Ford at the time, suddenly cracked up laughing. Henry asked them what was so funny, and Bidwell repeated what he had just told Lee-"We could call it the Ford Phuck; the ads won't work on radio or TV, but they'd be fine in print!". Everyone had a good laugh, Henry Ford scowled, but nobody objected to calling the car Mustang after that.

throwaway2037 4y ago

See also: "Unsafe at Any Speed" by Ralph Nader

cpleppert 4y ago

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 4y ago
This article in Spanish is quite similar in wording and expressions used: https://noticias.coches.com/noticias-motor/ford-pinto-seguridad/282541 https://noticias.coches.com/noticias-motor/ford-pinto-seguri... Really, I think that the Internet now is mostly bot generated.

newshorts 4y ago

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 4y ago
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 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/jury-in-pinto-crash-case-we-wanted-ford-to-take-notice/996a9aa5-8f48-4541-8553-19c63f666830/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1978/02/15/j...

fuzzythinker 4y ago

Hidden Brain had a pretty good podcast on this https://www.npr.org/2020/08/21/904660038/the-halo-effect-why-its-so-difficult-to-understand-the-past https://www.npr.org/2020/08/21/904660038/the-halo-effect-why... . Link includes a quick summary.

DonHopkins 4y ago

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EveryCarIsAPinto 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 Clichés" >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.

gcanyon 4y ago

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.

_yb2s 4y ago
> it topped out at something like 20 mph in first gear, but bogged out in second gear I had an early 80s Ford Ranger with had the same 4 cylinder pinto engine, and the same experience. It also had a 5th gear, which was useless unless you were actually going downhill because the engine didn't have enough torque. I am not sure why european cars with similar sized and power output 4 cylinder engines didn't have these problems. Possibly more low end torque, and better gear ratio choices? On paper a 1970s Volvo B20 is almost the same specs as a Pinto LL20, but drives excellent.
- bluedino 4y ago
  > Possibly more low end torque, and better gear ratio choices? The Japanese engines had less torque but were higher revving engines, and had better gear ratios. Also lower curb weights and more manual transmissions. It took GM/Ford a while to go with overhead cam designs. 1984 Honda Civic 1600lbs 1.5 liter engine 91 hp at 5,500 rpm 93 lb⋅ft at 4,500 rpm. 1984 Chevrolet Citation 2.5 liter engine 83 hp at 4000 rpm 124 lb/ft 2400 rpm 2200lbs

dancemethis 4y ago

Now that's an unfortunate name. Ford male genitalia...?

bumby 4y ago
It was named after the "painted" horse. I suppose it aligned with the Mustang naming convention.

tinglymintyfrsh 4y ago

Chevrolet Corvair enters the chat.

linksnapzz 4y ago
The second-gen Corvair 65.5->69? fixed the swing-axle issue. Also, the Corvair Monza of that era is still the best looking four-door America has ever built.

tinglymintyfrsh 4y ago

Souvenirs. Novelties. Party tricks.

daVe23hu 4y ago

Interesting article. Fundamental to all NHTSA covered products is the CFR (Code of Federal Regulations), It is the law. It is best to understand not only the binary requirements of said code but also the intention. Generally the codes have logical origins in the development. As well, it is generally a best practice to not just barely meet the law/code but exceed it to some degree. Test to test there will be variability and one may avoid hassles recall/lawsuit by exceeding the code. Today's fuel tank test involves a test collision and then the tested vehicle is placed on a large rotisserie and only a limited amount of fluid is allowed to leak as the crashed vehicle is rotated in space.