Pinto Madness – Mother Jones. Skip to main content.

Photo courtesy of Wikipedia Commons. One evening in the mid- 1. Arjay Miller was driving home from his office in Dearborn, Michigan, in the four- door Lincoln Continental that went with his job as president of the Ford Motor Company. On a crowded highway, another car struck his from the rear.

The Continental spun around and burst into flames. Because he was wearing a shoulder- strap seat belt, Miller was unharmed by the crash, and because his doors didn’t jam he escaped the gasoline- drenched, flaming wreck. But the accident made a vivid impression on him. Several months later, on July 1.

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U. S. Senate subcommittee that was hearing testimony on auto safety legislation. He went on to express an almost passionate interest in controlling fuel- fed fires in cars that crash or roll over. He spoke with excitement about the fabric gas tank Ford was testing at that very moment. Riding with her was a young boy, whom we’ll call Robbie Carlton. As she entered a merge lane, Sandra Gillespie’s car stalled.

Another car rear- ended hers at an impact speed of 2. The Pinto’s gas tank ruptured. Vapors from it mixed quickly with the air in the passenger compartment. A spark ignited the mixture and the car exploded in a ball of fire. Sandra died in agony a few hours later in an emergency hospital.

Her passenger, 1. Robbie Carlton, is still alive; he has just come home from another futile operation aimed at grafting a new ear and nose from skin on the few unscarred portions of his badly burned body. An extensive investigation by Mother Jones over the past six months has found these answers: Fighting strong competition from Volkswagen for the lucrative small- car market, the Ford Motor Company rushed the Pinto into production in much less than the usual time. Ford engineers discovered in pre- production crash tests that rear- end collisions would rupture the Pinto’s fuel system extremely easily.

Because assembly- line machinery was already tooled when engineers found this defect, top Ford officials decided to manufacture the car anyway—exploding gas tank and all—even though Ford owned the patent on a much safer gas tank. For more than eight years afterwards, Ford successfully lobbied, with extraordinary vigor and some blatant lies, against a key government safety standard that would have forced the company to change the Pinto’s fire- prone gas tank. The figure could be as high as 9. Burning Pintos have become such an embarrassment to Ford that its advertising agency, J. Walter Thompson, dropped a line from the end of a radio spot that read “Pinto leaves you with that warm feeling.”Ford knows the Pinto is a firetrap, yet it has paid out millions to settle damage suits out of court, and it is prepared to spend millions more lobbying against safety standards. With a half million cars rolling off the assembly lines each year, Pinto is the biggest- selling subcompact in America, and the company’s operating profit on the car is fantastic.

Finally, in 1. 97. Pinto models have incorporated a few minor alterations necessary to meet that federal standard Ford managed to hold off for eight years. Why did the company delay so long in making these minimal, inexpensive improvements? Ford waited eight years because its internal “cost- benefit analysis,” which places a dollar value on human life, said it wasn’t profitable to make the changes sooner. Although this particular story is about the Pinto, the way in which Ford made its decision is typical of the U. S. There are plenty of similar stories about other cars made by other companies.

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But this case is the worst of them all. The next time you drive behind a Pinto (with over two million of them on the road, you shouldn’t have much trouble finding one), take a look at the rear end. That long silvery object hanging down under the bumper is the gas tank. The tank begins about six inches forward of the bumper. In late models the bumper is designed to withstand a collision of only about five miles per hour.

Earlier bumpers may as well not have been on the car for all the protection they offered the gas tank. Mother Jones has studied hundreds of reports and documents on rear- end collisions involving Pintos.

These reports conclusively reveal that if you ran into that Pinto you were following at over 3. The tube leading to the gas- tank cap would be ripped away from the tank itself, and gas would immediately begin sloshing onto the road around the car. The buckled gas tank would be jammed up against the differential housing (that big bulge in the middle of your rear axle), which contains four sharp, protruding bolts likely to gash holes in the tank and spill still more gas. Now all you need is a spark from a cigarette, ignition, or scraping metal, and both cars would be engulfed in flames. If you gave that Pinto a really good whack—say, at 4. This scenario is no news to Ford.

Internal company documents in our possession show that Ford has crash- tested the Pinto at a top- secret site more than 4. Despite this, Ford officials denied under oath having crash- tested the Pinto. Eleven of these tests, averaging a 3. Pintos started rolling out of the factories. Only three cars passed the test with unbroken fuel tanks.

In one of them an inexpensive light- weight plastic baffle was placed between the front of the gas tank and the differential housing, so those four bolts would not perforate the tank. It plays an important role in our story later on.) In another successful test, a piece of steel was placed between the tank and the bumper. In the third test car the gas tank was lined with a rubber bladder. But none of these protective alterations was used in the mass- produced Pinto. In pre- production planning, engineers seriously considered using in the Pinto the same kind of gas tank Ford uses in the Capri. The Capri tank rides over the rear axle and differential housing. It has been so successful in over 5.

Ford used it in its Experimental Safety Vehicle, which withstood rear- end impacts of 6. So why wasn’t the Capri tank used in the Pinto? Or, why wasn’t that plastic baffle placed between the tank and the axle—something that would have saved the life of Sandra Gillespie and hundreds like her?

Why was a car known to be a serious fire hazard deliberately released to production in August of 1. Whether Ford should manufacture subcompacts at all was the subject of a bitter two- year debate at the company’s Dearborn headquarters. The principals in this corporate struggle were the then- president Semon “Bunky” Knudsen, whom Henry Ford II had hired away from General Motors, and Lee Iacocca, a spunky Young Turk who had risen fast within the company on the enormous success of the Mustang. Iacocca argued forcefully that Volkswagen and the Japanese were going to capture the entire American subcompact market unless Ford put out its own alternative to the VW Beetle. Bunky Knudsen said, in effect: let them have the small- car market; Ford makes good money on medium and large models.

But he lost the battle and later resigned. Iacocca became president and almost immediately began a rush program to produce the Pinto. Like the Mustang, the Pinto became known in the company as “Lee’s car.” Lee Iococca wanted that little car in the showrooms of America with the 1. So he ordered his engineering vice president, Bob Alexander, to oversee what was probably the shortest production planning period in modern automotive history.

The normal time span from conception to production of a new car model is about 4. The Pinto schedule was set at just under 2. A quick glance at the bar chart below will show you what that speed- up meant. Design, styling, product planning,advance engineering and quality assurance all have flexible time frames, and engineers can pretty much carry these on simultaneously.

Tooling, on the other hand, has a fixed time frame of about 1.

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It was founded in 2. To become a member, the critic must have reviewed at least twelve films a year in an established publication with no more than two per publication admitted. It presents annual awards at the end of the year, for the best films of the preceding year. Hans Landa. Best Supporting Actress.

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