Some dude on Reddit claimed, without citation, that the Ford Pinto wasn’t significantly more dangerous than other cars at the time, and that the backlash against it was basically Dateline-like sensationalism, self aggrandizement, and greed for lawsuit money.
I did know that this was a belief; is there anything to this?
No, I remember reading about it before I bought my first car, a used 1972 Chevy Vega, which had it’s own design issues, like an aluminum block engine. I believed what I was told by people I trusted at the time. YMMV.
According to one source, “Yes, the Ford Pinto was considered dangerous, primarily due to its fuel tank design and susceptibility to fires in rear-end collisions. While some debates exist about the extent of the danger, it’s widely recognized that the Pinto had a reputation for being unsafe, especially in these types of accidents.”
A reputation for being unsafe is not the same as being unsafe. Everyone knows it had that reputation.
I think it was largely overblown. The total number of deaths in fires attributable to the fuel tank placement was 27 across 8 years. And it wasn’t shown how many of those deaths would have been avoided with an otherwise state of the art system. The car was sold in the millions–about 3 deaths per year is just not meaningful.
See also:
Pintos represented 1.9% of all cars on the road in the 1975–76 period. During that time, the car represented 1.9% of all “fatal accidents accompanied by some fire”. This implies the Pinto was average for all cars and slightly above average for its class.[145] When all types of fatalities are considered, the Pinto was approximately even with the AMC Gremlin, Chevrolet Vega, and Datsun 510. It was significantly better than the Datsun 1200/210, Toyota Corolla, and VW Beetle.
Actually, the problem was known to engineers working at Ford, and solutions were proposed but rejected because of single digit dollar costs:
The Ford Pinto - The American Museum of Tort Law.
Internal company documents showed that Ford secretly crash-tested the Pinto more than forty times before it went on the market and that the Pinto’s fuel tank ruptured in every test performed at speeds over twenty-five miles per hour. This rupture created a risk of fire.
Ford engineers considered numerous solutions to the fuel tank problem, including lining the fuel tank with a nylon bladder at a cost of $5.25 to $8.00 per vehicle, adding structural protection in the rear of the car at a cost of $4.20 per vehicle, and placing a plastic baffle between the fuel tank and the differential housing at a cost of $1.00 per vehicle. None of these protective devices was used.
…
The Grimshaw case was just one of more than one hundred lawsuits that were filed because of design flaws in the Pinto that resulted in fuel tank fires. Estimates by Mother Jones attribute between 500 and 900 burn deaths to Pinto crashes. These people would not have been killed or even seriously injured if the car had not burst into flames.
Stranger
You can see what happens for yourself (actual crash test).
This video goes into more detail about the design flaws (and notes that, as originally designed, eight out of eight crash tests resulted in a ruptured fuel tank…Ford knew about the problem but chose not to fix it).
I didn’t say it wasn’t a defect. Just that it was largely overblown and had no real impact on the overall safety of the vehicle. Tens of thousands of people die per year in cars and the Pinto was a non-trivial subset of that, even outside of the rear-end fires. An extra 3 just doesn’t budge the numbers much.
If you did a complete engineering analysis of every vehicle (especially at the time), you would probably find thousands of examples of some cost-cutting that could be traced to deaths. The entire vehicle class of compact car trades cost for safety. What matters is if, overall, they made better engineering tradeoffs than the competition. The stats indicate that it was about the same.
Ok…Pinto driver is trading safety for cost but what about the driver who rear-ended them? They are on fire too (see crash test video above). Did they choose that?
Occupants rarely die in car accidents which occur at 25 mph unless there is some aggregating factor, i.e. they are tailgating a truck carrying sharped fenceposts or your car catches on fire because the automaker wanted to save a couple of pounds and a few bucks. But hey, it’s all about money, right?
Stranger
Yes, and Pinto drivers rarely died in fires caused by rear-endings, despite the flaw.
I knew, before I clicked that link, exactly which video you would link to 
.
All engineering involves tradeoffs. Ford probably made the wrong one here, but it was one among thousands that affected the car’s safety and performance.
All automakers, even today, could increase the fuel system safety of their vehicles by adding extra armoring, open-cell foam filling, nitrogen purge systems, automatic fire suppression systems, and so on. People still die in car fires, so this would probably save at least a few lives. But no one does it because the cost isn’t worth it.
People were supposed to think small cars = unsafe, and they were vis a vis the 16’ massive products coming out of detroit. The shift toward small cars and economy were scary.
All kinds of cars coming out of asia & europe were “unsafe”. Comparing the “unsafe” Honda CVCC to a mercury marquis was obvious.
The safety regulations helped detroit compete against the smaller more fuel efficient competition.
I was certain that your link was going to be to this actual crash test.
Remember there was more than one recall for Pintos (there were actually 15 recalls). Notably their accelerators had a habit of getting stuck and another recall was fumes would escape in the engine compartment and then explode.
Gas tank was not the only problem the Pinto had.
If it wasn’t FQ that would have been the link.
Nevertheless, the overall safety of the cars was comparable to similar ones.
The Chevy Vega also had a recall related to engine fires, and defects in the rear axle, and throttle sticking, and others. Cars were pretty shitty at the time. I don’t think the Vega has a great reputation today either, but it isn’t thought of as a deathtrap.
Maybe so but, IIRC, the Pinto is what led to the Feds instituting stricter safety regulations. I know “regulation” is a dirty word but we are all safer on the road now because of the Pinto.
The OP’s question is whether the issue was overblown, not whether it resulted in an improved regulatory environment.
As a Ford dealer line mechanic at the time, I did a lot of those gas tank recall repairs. There were 2 parts to it, but I only remember the one. The gas tank filler-neck-flange screws onto the body from the outside(under the gas door), and the fix was to replace it with a filler neck whose flange was inside the body and adding a ring around the filler neck and screwing the 2 together. The idea was that the body would keep the filler from exiting the tank which would have let the gasoline spill/spurt out upon collision
The OPs question was whether the Pinto issues were overblown. Since they resulted in an improved regulatory environment I think they were not overblown. It was enough to get politicians who are notoriously sluggish and beholden to powerful automobile lobbyists to impose safety regulations the industry did not want.
That still has nothing to do with the OP’s question as it was stated. Is it true that, as the OP asked,
The answer to that is yes, as best I can tell.
Some of those things are genuinely expensive. The tragedy of Ford’s decision-making is that the costs involved in the various reinforcement schemes discussed for the Pinto were on the order of $10 or so per vehicle, and Ford said no.
Two things are pertinent here. One, Ford has long been notoriously dominated by bean-counters rather than engineers. Two, because of the massive multiplier associated with the cost of production of high-volume vehicles, even a dime of extra cost is significant. So it’s not surprising that Ford made the decisions they did. But “unsurprising” is not the same thing as “morally right”. Ford paid heavy fines and was also indicted – but ultimately acquitted – of reckless homicide in Indiana v Ford Motor Co.
As to the OP question, the above-cited facts support the prevailing view that the risks of the Pinto, statistically, were overblown by media sensationalism. But I still make the moral judgment that Ford was grossly irresponsible in failing to make a tiny financial sacrifice to save lives from a known risk that they themselves had created.
I’m aware of that. But if you throw away the concept of cost-benefit analysis entirely on the basis of it being distasteful or something, you are left unable to argue against “if it saves a single life, it’s worth it.”
You can’t determine whether that was a good decision or not unless you know how many lives it’s going to save.
Suppose someone developed a $10 device that would save one life per year if added to all cars. Is that worth it, given that 78M cars are sold per year worldwide?