Maybe the deeper answer is the Pinto was the last straw for the camel. You mentioned other dangerous cars and when the Pinto came along enough was enough. Clearly the auto industry was not trying to make safer cars so congress decided it had to step in (I am unsure of the timeline of all unsafe cars…this is a guess on my part).
I’d say sure because the manufacturer will pass along the cost.
A quick Google says the average cost of a new car is $47,700 in 2024. Would $47,710 really change anyone’s mind when making the purchase? I’d think $10 more for a safer car is something most people would go for with a purchase that big even if “safer” was a relatively remote problem.
Not worldwide, but that’s beside the point.
The cost of the device is $780M per life saved. You would be better off spending that money on almost any other public safety program.
Now you’re building a straw man. This whole situation arose because it was unique to the Pinto (other cars also had risky features, some of them even similar, but not identical and with identical solutions). So as not to get into a pointlessly wide-ranging discussion, let’s stick to the Pinto. Around three million were built. It would have cost Ford around $30 million in 1970s dollars if they had not passed a penny of that extra cost to the customer. But as a customer, if I had known the facts, I’d gladly have paid it. Ford made a stupid, heartless decision.
Their bean-counters were making similar decisions in that era on other matters, too. I never had a Pinto but I had a Ford Maverick (the name now re-used for the current pickup, but at the time it was a sporty compact car). The body panels began to rust within six months of driving it out of the showroom. Worst car I’ve ever had. The cheap piece of junk was a bean-counter’s profitable dream! I got the rust patched up and repainted and traded it in for a real car the next month. Not a Ford.
The regulations were implemented to protect detroit from competition.
No, I’m making the point that you actually have to look at the number of lives saved to determine if the $10 is worth it, no matter how trivial the amount may be.
It’s easy to say, in isolation, that of course you’d pay such a trivial amount for an increase in safety. It becomes much less trivial when you consider all of the other engineering tradeoffs that were made. If you spent $10 more on slightly better tires, would you save more lives from tire blowouts? How about $10 on better seatbelts? $10 on stronger brakes? $10 on improved door strength? $10 on literally thousands of different tradeoffs?
Would you, at the time, have spent many thousands of dollars extra on all these marginal improvements, erring on the side of more safety in each case? Each one is trivial in isolation but not in aggregate.
The problem with the Pinto was that the rear differential had bolts that protruded out the back of it, which by itself is no biggie and was fairly common at the time. But then the way that the gas tank was mounted, it was possible in a rear collision that the gas tank would be pushed forward into those protruding bolts, ripping the gas tank open and spilling gas everywhere (very likely to result in a fire when the gas hit the hot exhaust). It was this combination of protruding bolts, the gas tank location, and the structure around the rear of the car that all came together to make the Pinto dangerous.
In any other type of collision (head-on, hit from the side, etc.) the gas tank wouldn’t be driven into those bolts, so it was only getting rear-ended that was the issue.
As @Stranger_On_A_Train quoted upthread, there were several easy and relatively cheap fixes that could have easily solved the problem. However, Ford decided that it was cheaper to pay out the lawsuits than to implement any of those fixes. It ended up not being a wise decision in the long run.
Eh…not fair really.
There would be a whole manufacturing industry making rubber grommets (or whatever). Jobs, industrial base, taxes. It’s not like the $780M disappears. Could that money be better spent? Probably but these things never work like that. It’s not as if the automakers would donate $780M if only they didn’t have to buy little rubber things for their car.
More importantly, it would be a market solution. Detroit could engineer better cars or pay for the safety gizmos instead of being forced by regulators to do the same thing.
Didn’t think the broken window fallacy would rear its head.
No. That’s not the way it works. If you spend the $780M on, say, a hospital, you also get the jobs, taxes, etc.
We’re already in a state where safety is mostly driven by the market. Almost everyone exceeds the minimum safety standards because consumers pay attention to safety ratings. That’s not to say we should eliminate the regulations. Just that people are already choosing to pay more than the minimum.
Imports were the biggest threat to detroit in the 70s 80s. The crash regulations impeded imports more than detroit
You’re right cuz that $780M will only ever go into shareholder pockets and will never, ever, build a hospital.
If the government can mandate a $10 device on every car, it can instead mandate a $10 tax per car and spend that on a hospital. Which one should it choose to do?
Probably the car safety thing.
Assuming the hospital has 1,000 beds that is 0.00128% of 78 million. MUCH better off with safety thing than a hospital. Better to not put people in the hospital in the first place.
That’s a total non sequitur. In general, the government shouldn’t mandate any special taxes on car buyers that aren’t applied to purchasers of all other products, except in special circumstances, like maybe reverse taxes (rebates) for EVs. But car buyers as a group have no special responsibility to fund hospitals, any more than they have to fund airports or space stations.
What the government absolutely does have a responsibility to do is investigate and regulate safety issues. Ford should bloody well have been ordered to fix the Pinto hazard. The problem in so many of these situations is the corporate lobbying that is so incredibly prevalent in the US. We saw the same thing with Boeing.
BTW, there’s lots of detail in this document, which was linked to on the Ford Pinto Wiki page, but with a dead link. Found it on archive.org, though:
Wayback Machine
Amusingly, the original site was called “Point of Law”, or pointoflaw.com, which looks very much like Pinto Flaw.
It calls the case a “myth”, not in the sense of it being fictional, but in the sense that there are so many misconceptions about it that the public perception basically has nothing to do with reality.
For instance, there is much consternation about Ford only using a figure of $200,000 as the value of a life. But this figure didn’t come from Ford. It was the figure used by the NHTSA itself. It does seem to be absurdly low, but that’s not due to some evil lawyers at Ford; it’s just the number that the NHTSA used. Also, the document wasn’t the cost-benefit analysis that Ford used for the Pinto but rather part of a document that Ford prepared for the NHTSA for general use.
It’s not. The entire reason we do cost-benefit analysis is that we want to spend our money on the most effective things. There is not infinite money, so we have to pick between X and Y. So in any decision, we should always ask what other things we could spend an equivalent amount of money on.
Which fix? The $10 one that would have avoided the most obvious problems? The $100 fix that added closed-cell foam and a more effective bumper? The $1000 fix that added a nitrogen purge?
Unless you know how many lives are saved, you have no way of determining which of these fixes are appropriate.
I’m continually amazed that people seem to think cost-benefit analysis breaks down when you get to seemingly trivial amounts. It doesn’t.
While we’re talking about lives lost (and distasteful $$ calculations on the value of human life), let’s not forget how many injuries, some serious, resulted from Pinto crashes resulting in fires.
It’s a safe bet that many more life-changing injuries resulted from such crashes/fires compared to the number of deaths.*
*the fatal 1972 crash that resulted in the landmark Grimshaw vs. Ford case caused a boy, Richard Grimshaw who was a passenger in the Pinto, to suffer severe burns requiring several operations.
This is an absurdly diversionary argument. First of all, that the fuel tank of the Ford Pinto was subject to rupture and spraying its contents into the passenger compartment as well as the exhaust system where it would catch fire from even moderate speed impacts was not due to a decision to not implement some novel new safety system but was a result of defective design which came from the speed at which the vehicle was developed and the lack of any real engineering effort to evaluate safety. Ford knew this was a defect borne of haste and ineptitude because they performed testing and argued the cost-basis rationale for not fixing it, and they knew this was wrong—not just ethically but in terms of public perception—because they went to great lengths to conceal this information.
Second, the consumer has an expectation of some baseline level of competent design and safety in a contemporary vehicle, even circa 1971; not, say, to survive a 90 mph impact into a concrete embankment or for the vehicle to withstand being run over by a monster truck, but that the gas tank won’t rupture and spill fuel on red-hot elements of the exhaust system due to a kind of moderate speed impact that occurs many times every day. The Ford Pinto did not meet the baseline safety profile that an automobile operating upon modern highways and roadways should be expected to display as a default condition.
Third, the number of “27 deaths” is bandied about because it was the official number listed in documents about the lawsuit, but credible estimates of total deaths, such as those where an estate of the deceased did not sue or the defect was unknown, ranges from two hundred to several hundred people not inclusive of those who were injured by not killed. But quite frankly, even 27 deaths over 8 years is too many for a defective design introduced by a lack of engineering diligence in safety and of which Ford management was not only aware but had inexpensive proposed solutions to fix. This wasn’t one of a myriad of “marginal improvements”; it was a critical failure mode of which the management was well aware under conditions that numerous cars on the road will experience at some point.
The notion that an automaker should say, “Oh, we did an oopsie but you know what they say about caveat emptor,” is absurd, even from the standpoint of the supposed “cost control” of not fixing the problem, as the general public doesn’t have the technical aptitude to look at a car and discern such issues (and in many cases even an expert mechanic or engineer may not be able to identify them just by looking at the finished product). Companies which make products that can jeopardized public safety actually have an ethical obligation to anticipate those issues and implement solutions or inform buyers of potential hazards, and Ford pointedly did neither. That the attitude exists that this is someone else’s problem as long as the financials are balanced and the company is making a profit is what has caused 737s to fall out of the sky or have a door plug spontaneously eject during ascent.
Stranger
Known for starting to rust the moment it leaves the lot, I believe.
That all just seems like a lot of special pleading. Why did this particular issue, above all others, get so much attention? It’s not because there were an excessive number of deaths attributable to this issue compared to a host of other ones. I doubt the answer is any more complicated than “giant fireballs get media coverage” and that media attention tends to snowball.
I’m not talking about extreme cases like that; I’m talking very simple and basic improvements that would save lives. Brakes. Steering. Suspension. Tires. Etc. How many hundreds or thousands of people slid off the road into a tree because they lost traction or the sway bar was undersized or something else? Well, I don’t know, but about 50k people were dying in the US per year in cars at the time. If the sales figures above are correct, the Pinto’s share over its life is about 7500 people. In every one of those you could point to some improvement that would have saved their life or at least improved their odds. But most of those aren’t exciting compared to fireballs.