Featured America's Manufacturing Failure (Autoline After Hours)

I seem to recall that the people who published that video was sued by Ford. It turned out that the video producers installed igniters in the ramming vehicles for more dramatic effect - ensuring a fire explosion effect when the gas tank ruptured.
I believe Ford prevailed in that lawsuit, but the damage was already done. Now all fuel tanks are located in front of the rear axles of cars.

 

THE FORD PINTO MEMO: THE COST TO REPAIR VS THE COST OF PAYING INJURED VICTIMS | Law Offices of Mitchell Alter LLC


The Ford Pinto Scandal: When Cost-Cutting Became a Death Sentence | by Sanchari Sen, MBA (Business Analytics) | Coping With Capitalism | Medium
"In the early 1970s, Ford engineers identified a fatal flaw in the design of the Pinto — a compact car meant to compete with Japanese imports. The fuel tank, positioned dangerously close to the rear bumper, tended to rupture upon impact, leading to deadly fires.
The solution? A mere $11 per car. But Ford, after crunching the numbers, decided it was cheaper to pay for wrongful death lawsuits than to fix the defect."

 

Some Jeeps might have the tank behind the rear axle.

 

Possibly; Ford was also sued for placing the old truck gas tanks behind the seat, in the cab.
I remembered that my dad owned one of those old trucks and he sold it after he read an article about how it would splash gasoline all over the occupants in a violent enough crash.

 

gm did the 'save a buck' thing with the known faulty ignition switches

and chrysler did it with minivan transmissions.

likely, every mfg has done something knowingly evil along the way, cost vs safety wise

 

I rode to high school in a car that had a gas tank just ahead of a windshield that would open. And with no AC in those days we had it open a lot. The '30 Ford 2 door sedan crashed into a '56 Ford station wagon and had to straighten a fender on the A. The '56 had its entire side all torn up. Some kids had removed a stop sign and the wagon made a left turn assuming we would stop. Skid marks proved to the investigator the mechanical brakes of the Model A worked and were applied.

Crashed a VW Type 3 (never owned a bug) head on folded back to the firewall and yet it was rebuilt.

Cars weighed a lot less and were driven at slower speeds back then.

 

i had a TR4A with no floorboards or heat. loved that car til my dad made me dump it

 

What's weird to me about the whole Pinto story is the constant regeneration of new content about it. It happened a long time ago, even the litigation about it happened a long time ago, and there's been perfectly good coverage about it for a long time. But things keep popping up like that video above in #23, apparently from just last year, apparently some kind of AI slop thrown together to cash in on some new clicks for an old story. (I also notice the YouTube notes under it include "Altered or synthetic content
Sound or visuals were significantly edited or digitally generated. Learn more".)

Even that top link in #23 has some things about it that wiggle my weird detector. It goes to a page that is titled "THE FORD PINTO MEMO: THE COST TO REPAIR VS THE COST OF PAYING INJURED VICTIMS | Law Offices of Mitchell Alter LLC" but you don't find the actual memo there.

The closest thing you find is what looks like a link but is not a link, so you can't click it:



Which is, already, like, weird: you're writing a page for the web, web pages can have links, and you've got a URL to the actual thing your web page is about, but you put it in as ordinary text, so the person reading your web page can't just click it and go there?

But of course that only slows down a reader by so much. It's not super hard to drag over the text with a mouse and paste it in the browser address bar and go find it that way.

Only it turns out that doesn't work either. Here is the URL the way they put it in their web page (which brings you to a "Page not found" result), and a URL that actually takes you to a page with the memo:

• www.autosafety.org/ford–pinto-costbenefit-memo (as used on Mitchell Alter law office page)
• www.autosafety.org/ford-pinto-costbenefit-memo (URL that actually works)

Can you spot the difference?

On the law office page, one of the hyphens (-) in the URL, but only the first one, has been changed to an en dash (–). It possibly could have happened just by careless use of some weird word processor—but sure makes things even harder for a reader who wants to go look at the memo you're talking about. Hmm.

When you do go look at the memo (using the working link above, or this deep-link to save a step if it works: https://www.autosafety.org/wp-content/uploads/import/phpq3mJ7F_FordMemo.pdf), it turns out to not be quite what it's been made out to be.

For one thing, there's nothing Pinto-specific in the memo. The memo was about how Ford was going to comment on an NHTSA proposed safety standard for rollover crashes.



Rollover crashes weren't the big Pinto issue.

It also seems that the figure used for dollar values on fatalities was not something Ford ghoulishly pulled out of the air, but a figure they got from NHTSA:




I would have to think, after reviewing all this, that there really were problems with the Pinto design around the fuel tank and poor Ford decisions around spending a few more dollars per car to remedy them—but that there's also been some fair amount of plaintiff's-attorney slimy conduct, dredging up memos that were about other things and waving them in front of juries and somewhat misrepresenting them, and so on.

 

The gas tank placement that never made sense to me was in my 1969 Chevy C10 Pickup.

It was in the cab right behind the bench seat - you could hear the gas sloshing around and approximate pretty much how full the tank was quite accurately without even looking at the gauge.

Chevy C10 Gas Tank Relocation Guide

"One of the most crucial safety problems for the C10 is the location of the gas tank. Original C10 models had the fuel tank located in the cab with the driver. This placement made it much more likely for the driver to be exposed to gas fumes as well as making the cabin more susceptible to catching on fire in the event of a crash."

+1 on gas fumes in the cab!