The Ford president insisted that the model be introduced quickly. While most new car plans at the time took 43 months from conception through delivery, the Pinto would be completed in 25 months - at the time, the shortest production planning schedule in automotive history.
Designers would work overtime to bring the Pinto from concept to reality. The ramped-up timeline meant various aspects of production would take place at the same time, rather than sequentially. Such a schedule proved problematic when a design flaw was found during the testing phase. This posed a serious risk of fire, since a simple spark could lead the car to become engulfed in flames.
As the vehicles were already in production, Ford examined its options. The prototypes all failed the mph test. In Ford crash-tested the Pinto itself, and the result was the same: ruptured gas tanks and dangerous leaks.
The only Pintos to pass the test had been modified in some way—for example, with a rubber bladder in the gas tank or a piece of steel between the tank and the rear bumper. Thus, Ford knew that the Pinto represented a serious fire hazard when struck from the rear, even in low-speed collisions. Ford officials faced a decision. Should they go ahead with the existing design, thereby meeting the production timetable but possibly jeopardizing consumer safety?
Or should they delay production of the Pinto by redesigning the gas tank to make it safer and thus concede another year of subcompact dominance to foreign companies? Ford not only pushed ahead with the original design but stuck to it for the next six years. The problem was not burns, but…impact! Most of the people killed in these fiery accidents, claimed Ford, would have died whether the car burned or not.
They were killed by the kinetic force of the impact, not the fire. Once again it began a time-consuming round of test crashes and embarked on a study of accidents. The latter, however, revealed that a large and growing number of corpses taken from burned cars involved in rear-end crashes contained no cuts, bruises or broken bones.
They clearly would have survived the accident unharmed if the cars had not caught fire. This pattern was confirmed in careful rear-end crash tests performed by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. NHTSA waffled some more and again announced its intentions to promulgate a rear-end collision standard.
Waiting, as it normally does, until the last day allowed for response, Ford filed with NHTSA a gargantuan batch of letters, studies and charts now arguing that the federal testing criteria were unfair. Ford also argued that design changes required to meet the standard would take 43 months, which seemed like a rather long time in light of the fact that the entire Pinto was designed in about two years. Specifically, new complaints about the standard involved the weight of the test vehicle, whether or not the brakes should be engaged at the moment of impact and the claim that the standard should only apply to cars, not trucks or buses.
Perhaps the most amusing argument was that the engine should not be idling during crash tests, the rationale being that an idling engine meant that the gas tank had to contain gasoline and that the hot lights needed to film the crash might ignite the gasoline and cause a fire.
Some of these complaints were accepted, others rejected. But they all required examination and testing by a weak-kneed NHTSA, meaning more of those month studies the industry loves so much.
So the complaints served their real purpose—delay; all told, an eight-year delay, while Ford manufactured more than three million profitable, dangerously incendiary Pintos. To justify this delay, Henry Ford II called more press conferences to predict the demise of American civilization. Recon men began encouraging lawyers to look beyond one driver or another to the manufacturer in their search for fault, particularly in the growing number of accidents where passengers were uninjured by collision but were badly burned by fire.
Pinto lawsuits began mounting fast against Ford. Every lawyer in the country seems to want to take their depositions. Looking at it, one imagines its large staff protects consumers from burned and broken limbs.
Not so. When the Pinto liability suits began, Ford strategy was to go to a jury. Confident it could hide the Pinto crash tests, Ford thought that juries of solid American registered voters would buy the industry doctrine that drivers, not cars, cause accidents. It seems that juries are much quicker to see the truth than bureaucracies, a fact that gives one confidence in democracy. Juries began ruling against the company, granting million-dollar awards to plaintiffs.
Juries are just too sentimental. They see those charred remains and forget the evidence. Settlement involves less cash, smaller legal fees and less publicity, but it is an indication of the weakness of their case. They must therefore be considered a factor in determining the net operating profit on the Pinto. However, financial officer Charles Matthews did admit that the company establishes a reserve for large dollar settlements.
He would not divulge the amount of the reserve and had no explanation for its absence from the annual report. The bottom line ruled, and inflammable Pintos kept rolling out of the factories. In , however, an incredibly sluggish government has at last instituted Standard Now Pintos will have to have rupture-proof gas tanks.
Or will they? The agency was so convinced the Pinto would fail that it was the first car tested. Amazingly, it did not burst into flame. Remember that one-dollar, one-pound plastic baffle that was on one of the three modified Pintos that passed the pre-production crash tests nearly ten years ago? Well, it is a standard feature on the Pinto. In the Phoenix test it protected the gas tank from being perforated by those four bolts on the differential housing.
We asked Grubbs if he noticed any other substantial alterations in the rear-end structure of the car. But was it? Thomas, Ontario. The significance of that becomes clear when you learn that Canada has for years had extremely strict rear-end collision standards.
He refused to explain why he was selling Fords made in Canada when there is a huge Pinto assembly plant much closer by in California. Farther up the line in Dearborn, Ford people claim there is absolutely no difference between American and Canadian Pintos.
They say cars are shipped back and forth across the border as a matter of course. But they were hard pressed to explain why some Canadian Pintos were shipped all the way to Scottsdale, Arizona. Significantly, one engineer at the St. The Department of Transportation is considering buying an American Pinto and running the test again. For now, it will only say that the situation is under investigation. Whether the new American Pinto fails or passes the test, Standard will never force the company to test or recall the more than two million pre Pintos still on the highway.
Seventy or more people will burn to death in those cars every year for many years to come. If the past is any indication, Ford will continue to accept the deaths. According to safety expert Byron Bloch, the older cars could quite easily be retrofitted with gas tanks containing fuel cells. The accident resulted in the court case Grimshaw v. Ford Motor Co.
Initially, the NHTSA did not feel there was sufficient evidence to demand a recall due to incidents of fire. In , Ford initiated a recall providing a plastic protective shield to be dealer-installed between the fuel tank and the differential bolts, another to deflect contact with the right-rear shock absorber, and a new fuel-tank filler neck that extended deeper into the tank and was more resistant to breaking off in a rear-end collision. Schwartz said the case against the Pinto was not clear-cut.
According to his study, the number who died in Pinto rear-impact fires was well below the hundreds cited in contemporary news reports and closer to the 27 recorded by a limited National Highway Traffic Safety Administration database. Given the Pinto's production figures over 2 million built , this was not substantially worse than typical for the time.
Schwartz said that the car was no more fire-prone than other cars of the time, that its fatality rates were lower than comparably sized imported automobiles, and that the supposed "smoking gun" document that plaintiffs said demonstrated Ford's callousness in designing the Pinto was actually a document based on National Highway Traffic Safety Administration regulations about the value of a human life — rather than a document containing an assessment of Ford's potential tort liability.
The comedy film Top Secret! However, the car just barely taps the rear bumper of the Pinto, causing the car to explode. The Pinto was entered in the Trans Am Series durning the season.
After suffering several problems throughout the season, and finishing only one race, it was withdrawn from the series. The Pinto had also been entered in one race in the season. Classic Cars Wiki Explore.
Explore Wikis Community Central. Register Don't have an account? Ford Pinto. View source.
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