3 ms·

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/st

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.
      - Cyberdog 4y ago
        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 4y ago
        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 4y ago
    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._Consumers_Union_of_the_U.S.,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suzuki_Motor_Corp._v._Consumer....
    - rootusrootus 4y ago
      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 4y ago
    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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADOwKSal17I
- hulitu 4y ago
  In which country ? Last i looked they all do that. It increases revenue.
Hatrix 4y ago
Ford Mustangs with the drop-in tank had fire problems too. Maybe not as enough people died for a recall.
- danbmil99 4y ago
  My hypothesis: Mustang drivers are the ones who rear-end others. Pinto drivers brake for squirrels QED
dsfyu404ed 4y ago
>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.
jasonhansel 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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-columns-explained/ https://www.pailton.com/latest-news/collapsible-steering-col... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in_U.S._by_year#/media/File:US_traffic_deaths_per_VMT,_VMT,_per_capita,_and_total_annual_deaths.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...

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.
    - Cyberdog 4y ago
      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 4y ago
        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 4y ago
  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._Consumers_Union_of_the_U.S.,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suzuki_Motor_Corp._v._Consumer....
  - rootusrootus 4y ago
    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 4y ago
  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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADOwKSal17I
hulitu 4y ago
In which country ? Last i looked they all do that. It increases revenue.

Hatrix 4y ago

Ford Mustangs with the drop-in tank had fire problems too. Maybe not as enough people died for a recall.

danbmil99 4y ago
My hypothesis: Mustang drivers are the ones who rear-end others. Pinto drivers brake for squirrels QED

dsfyu404ed 4y ago

>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.

jasonhansel 4y ago

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 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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-columns-explained/ https://www.pailton.com/latest-news/collapsible-steering-col... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in_U.S._by_year#/media/File:US_traffic_deaths_per_VMT,_VMT,_per_capita,_and_total_annual_deaths.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...