So Ford would have been in the moral clear had they been less competent and not even known about the problem? Halt all testing immediately!
Your argument is basically an admission that the attention is a result of an emotional response rather than hard numbers. In other words: overblown.
Automakers know in what ways they cheap out anyway–it’s just that in most cases it ends up as a fairly boring statistic that can’t obviously be converted to deaths, like skid pad gee force ratings or braking distances. They know they can spend more money to improve these things, and that deaths would be reduced if they did. But you have to cut the line somewhere on a cheap compact car.
Here’s another piece of evidence for the Pintos place in the public conscience. This comic strip from 1986 rhymed “Union busting, profit lusting” with “little pintos all combusting”.
I know that’s the argument you thought you were making. But if knowing about the problem is the issue, then it follows that not knowing about the problem would have put them in the clear.
In any case, I agree that it’s a significant factor in the public reaction. And that’s exactly why we can say it’s overblown.
Not really; “not knowing about the problem” would have entailed not conducting the standard safety testing of their car design during development, and thus, they would have failed the due diligence expected for selling an automobile in the U.S.
What do you mean by “overblown?” That they shouldn’t have recalled the car when they were confronted with the defect? That the defect was no big deal? That other cars had equal or greater defects?
The car had a serious problem. Maybe “only” a few people died or were terribly injured. But maybe the number would have been significantly higher if no action were taken. And, more importantly, those people could have avoided injury if Ford did the right thing before putting the car on the market. Is there something wrong with holding a company responsible for injuries caused by its negligence or malfeasance?
I don’t think other cars had the same gas tank defect. They may have been dangerous in other ways. “Greed for lawsuit money” can also be “lawyers putting a ton of their own money into a case so they can pursue a lawsuit that (maybe) compensates their clients, and makes the world a better place.”
Lawsuits give 12 random citizens a chance to regulate large corporations. Sometimes for good, sometimes not. But in my experience, those jurors do a lot of good.
Yes, and that’s much of my point. The Chevy Vega had numerous defects, including engine fires and “rear axle separation.” Why didn’t these get equal attention? And why are we talking about the Pinto ~50 years later and not so much the Vega?
Probably that memo was a big part of it, even though it’s been misinterpreted. Certainly people think of it as callously putting a cheap price on human life. Never mind that it’s still done today.
I’m not saying anything about whether this incident was a good thing in the grand scheme of things, if maybe it set off a reevaluation of how we treat auto safety, and so on. Might be true. But overblown in the sense that this wasn’t a particularly out of the ordinary defect, which didn’t have much impact on the overall safety? Seems to be overblown in that sense.
This is, again, a highly disingenuous argument. The question isn’t whether the Ford Pinto was in general more dangerous than other cars on the road, or even whether the propensity to ignite as a result of an accident; it is specifically whether the issue of catching on fire due to a moderate speed rear impact of a type which occurs frequently rupturing the gas tank and spraying fuel into the passenger compartment as more prevalent in the Pinto than in other cars, which it certainly was and in ways well known to the development team, which proceeded to conceal this knowledge and rationalize not correcting a basic design flaw on the basis of a few dollars in order to remain under arbitrary cost and weight target.
Other vehicles are known for catching fire; the Pontiac Fiero, for instance, had about a 0.25% incidence (1 in 400) of just spontaneously catching fire in its first model year, but the passengers were protected such that it was typically possible to detect the fire and exit the vehicle before they were in jeopardy. Conflating all accidents in which a vehicle catches fire with this specific and completely avoidable failure mode that is due to inherent design flaws resulting in extreme hazard to occupants is a fallacious argument that equates all of the ways in which an accident might result in injury with this specific mode of failure that is known and could be corrected with minimal cost and design effort.
Engineers and designers working on products upon which the public rely upon to operate safely and reliably have an ethical duty above and beyond maximizing profitability to assure that the product is no unduly and unavoidably hazardous; this doesn’t mean going to extraordinary efforts to mitigate unlikely or unknown conditions, but in this case this was a specific defect that was known to the development team and could have been corrected (and in fact in which multiple mitigations were proposed and developed only to be rejected by management on the basis of not meeting an arbitrary cost target).
And I’ll again point out that the official attribution of 27 deaths due to this defect is known to be a gross underestimate of total deaths due to Pinto rear impact fires. Continuing to argue that the reputation for this specific defect was ‘overblown’ on the basis of that underestimate, or the safety record overall without respect to this particular and grievous flaw is the reason people distrust manipulation by statistics.
Instead of trying to second-guess the meaning of the OP’s precise words, I think it’s useful to frame a (possibly) different set of questions in the following way:
“Did the Ford Pinto have a unique safety hazard that the Ford Motor Company knew about”? The answer is “yes”.
Further, “had Ford been given various different solutions for this hazard, yet failed to implement any of them, despite the fact that they were very low-cost per vehicle?” Again, “yes”.
And, “was it because Ford callously calculated that it was cheaper to let people die?” Again, yes.
What, precisely, do you mean by unique? Was this specific defect unique to the Pinto? Well yes, but every defect is unique. Was this the defect uniquely out of the ordinary in comparison to defects that other cars of the time had? No. Cars then had all sorts of horrible defects that people died from.
The fact that you’re using emotional language like “callously” yet again demonstrates that the issue was overblown. If a cold, rational analysis still showed that the Pinto was dramatically less safe than competitors, then we could say it wasn’t overblown. But that wasn’t the case. You have to make an appeal to emotion, disconnected from the statistics, to think this issue was special.
“The Pinto is not alone in its fuel tank vulnerability,” said Nader when he made his charges about the Vega. The reason the controversy over unsafe gas tanks has so far centered on the Pinto, he said, was because Ford decided to fight lawsuits from crash victims, while General Motors chose instead to settle Vega lawsuits out of court.
So maybe only reason the Pinto has the explodey reputation and not the Vega is that Ford fought very public lawsuits, while Chevy settled quietly out of court.
The article does also say:
But NHTSA crash data, obtained by The Washington Post, shows that Vegas did considerably better than Pintos in comparative crash tests, showing only slight leaks and no fires.
The crash tests might not be representative of actual real-world crash-worthiness, though.
At the time, the public impression around exploding Pintos was mostly a jokey one despite the tragic loss of life. No one ever refused to a ride in my Pinto because they felt the car was dangerous (the driver on the other hand…). At the time, I think most people would paradoxically say that it’s dangerous reputation was overblown.
I’ve already acknowledged that the issue was overblown in the media. I think that point’s been settled. But my use of word “callous” doesn’t demand a moral judgment on what Ford did, it merely reflects an objective fact: when accountants use calculators to determine whether certain minimal monetary costs are worth human lives, that’s the very definition of “callous”.
Ok. For the most part, I want engineers to be callous in that sense.
But I will make one distinction. If you ask some engineers to optimize for safety given a certain cost, they will at some point have to “callously” decide that a certain expenditure, even if it saves lives, is not worth it. I want that kind of optimization. There is no de minimis exception here. What matters is minimizing deaths/injuries for the cost.
But if you include lawyers and businesspeople, you run the risk of the tradeoff being vs. the cost of fighting a lawsuit. That’s a very different, and worse sort of callousness. Instead of optimizing for maximum safety given a certain cost, you optimize for minimum legal exposure. You may well make the safety of the product worse as long as the problems are diffuse and hard to form a lawsuit around.
Since the NHTSA has since repudiated its own circa-1970 methodology for estimating the cost in life of a fatal traffic accident, perhaps you should reconsider. See, for example, the discussion on the value of a statistical life in a more recent NHTSA analysis (yep, they still do this sort of thing):
To that assertion, I would also note that, in most engineering contexts, products and infrastructure are intentionally over-designed, via things like a Design Factor, to account for errors in analysis (such as underestimating the death toll from a serious design defect). Yet Ford seems not to have applied a similar correction in its Pinto Memo.
There’s a vast difference between engineers (and a company) choosing to not include an extremely expensive feature for a slight increase in safety, versus a company choosing to not include a very inexpensive feature which would have a significant increase in safety (which is what happened with the Pinto).
That figure is unrelated to their determination for the number of deaths (which was based on looking at accident reports). The best method of assigning a value to a human life is subjective–the NHTSA’s early approach was clearly a low-ball in retrospect, but it wasn’t wrong so much as it used a methodology that we no longer consider valid.
Yes. One can’t call Ford callous for making this sort of calculation without also calling the NHTSA (and every other government agency, and every insurance company, etc.) callous.
The Pinto memo wasn’t about the Pinto. It was about all passenger cars sold at the time.
Eh… that doesn’t make much sense to me. Normally you add a safety factor to things that are not supposed to fail at all. You leave a margin between the working limit and the design limit so that it will still not fail if your calculations are somewhat off or the load is higher than specified. I don’t think this makes much sense when applied to cost-benefit analysis.