No, that’s false. It was a small expense for a very small increase in safety. About 0.3% on the outside (based on NHTSA figures).
The baseline Pinto was $1919 in 1970 and the fix was $11, so the fix cost about 0.6% of the vehicle.
That reads like a distinction without a difference to me.
I don’t think engineers should be the ones in charge of all decisions. I know they think they should be, but they really shouldn’t.
Then again this seems like a religious thing, this anti any and all regulations because engineers know everything.
This de minimis style argument has come up multiple times in the thread, and I want to point out that it is completely and utterly invalid.
Here’s a typical way it comes up:
It sounds compelling but is total nonsense. You can use a simple thought experiment to prove it to yourself. Suppose a company is selling a decent mid-range car. How well is it likely to sell if it costs:
$10,000: That’s a great price for a car. They’ll sell as many as they can make.
$100,000: That’s an awful price. They’ll hardly sell any.
And yet, we can also try to claim:
If people will pay $10,000, then surely they’ll pay $10,001.
If people will pay $10,001, then surely they’ll pay $10,002.
… all the way to …
If people will pay $99,998, then surely they’ll pay $99,999.
If people will pay $99,999, then surely they’ll pay $100,000.
Obviously these are incompatible claims and it’s the first one (that people will pay $10k but not $100k) is correct. It must be the case that, at some point, adding a single dollar to the cost decreased sales by some number of people.
Of course, in practice these things are statistical in nature. What’s happening is that adding a dollar made the car very slightly less compelling and decreased the odds of any one buying it by a small amount. But this small amount times the millions of potential customers is not a small amount. Every dollar added to the cost reduces demand by a meaningful amount, eventually turning a compelling product into a non-compelling one.
All of this was known by the Ancient Greeks, of course:
The choice of methodology is a subjective one, based on how one values things in the real world. The calculation based on the methodology is objective. The $200k figure was by all accounts correct given their methodology.
So if they’d chosen to reduce the value of a human life to its constituent chemicals, and use that for their analysis, that would have been fine too, just a subjective choice they were free to make and we should not dare decry as wrong?
This is getting dangerously close to that line from Dr. Manhattan…
I don’t know what you’re trying to argue at this point. Is it that:
The $200k number was bogus => therefore the NHTSA was incompetent => therefore the reported 27 deaths is incorrect
If not, what is it?
That’s still not established. Nobody has yet in this thread posted any numbers about how much increase in safety any of the proposed improvements would have had. You can’t say “Here’s the value of X, therefore X < Y”, without also stating the value of Y.
The decision of the value of a human life isn’t an engineering question. Someone else has to answer that one. But once someone else has answered that, yes, it should be the engineers who figure out how to optimize around that.
That 200K was bogus (and the NHTSA itself has come to recognize this) should be enough. You can plead subjectivity all you want, but at the end of the day, I don’t think the outrage was overblown. I also think this is precisely the sort of situation where, as @Procrustus notes, jurors can do a lot of good by calling engineers and economists out for too readily reducing human lives to mere objects that can be easily (and cheaply) quantified according to simple analysis such as the average lifetime wages of an individual. As if that’s all we’re good for.
Enough for what? What are you arguing? Please, spell it out.
Engineers aren’t infallible gods. Plugging equations a real scientist derived into a spreadsheet doesn’t make (generic) you one either. Humility would be great thing to learn
I did. Here is the source document again:
https://web.archive.org/web/20051101041704/http://www.pointoflaw.com/articles/The_Myth_of_the_Ford_Pinto_Case.pdf
But the relevant parts are here:
Note that 27 is an upper bound, because they did not know how many of those would be prevented by an improved fuel system. Even without a fireball, a high speed rear impact has a high fatality rate.
I will note that the 0.3% figure I stated earlier is too low. But this is mainly because the Pinto was safer than the fleet average (i.e., all cars on the road):
So it may have been as high as 2%, depending on how you interpret the numbers. Either way, this is quite low, and the Pinto was still comparable to similar cars.
I’m curious how the other cars in these accidents did? As can be seen in the crash test (linked upthread) the car that rear-ends the Pinto also gets engulfed in flames.
The 27 official reports are not a complete counting of all possible car fires with the Pinto because the NHTSA does not maintain a comprehensive database of automobile accident reports, which would have been completely impossible in the ‘Seventies with paper reports and would be challenging even today with electronic reports. Rather, its Crash Report Sampling System takes a sampling from representative areas and makes statistical estimates from its official reports to come to a national estimate:
To be eligible for the CRSS sample, a police crash report must be signed by law enforcement and completed using an official crash report; it must involve at least one motor vehicle traveling on a trafficway; and the crash must result in property damage, injury, or death.
These crash reports are chosen from 60 areas across the United States that reflect the geography, population, miles driven, and crashes in the United States. CRSS samplers review crash reports from hundreds of law enforcement agencies within the sites, randomly sampling hundreds of thousands of crash reports each year. Selected crash reports are then coded to create the annual data file. No other data is collected beyond that in the selected crash reports.
The author of the Mother Jones article “Pinto Madness” claimed to have “studied hundreds of reports and documents on rear-end collisions involving Pintos” to come to an estimate of over 500. Because this was published in magazine format in the ‘Eighties an extensive bibliography of references was not provided but given the geographic sampling relative to the total population that would be right about a close order of magnitude for total incidences, and of course the more than a hundred cases filed about Pinto fires suggests that the incidence was far more than the NHTSA numbers would indiciate.
No, you don’t. First of all, engineers only very rarely make any kind of casualty projection, mostly because it is basically impossible to make credible estimates for complex systems like an automobile, and only do so based upon adherence to an identified standard. Engineers work to standards and requirements which have objective criteria such as structural and functional margins, mean time between failure (MBTF) intervals, and durability or robustness criteria. In the case of a low speed rear impact, the criteria for a passenger car should certainly be that it doesn’t routinely rupture the fuel tank and spray flammable gasoline into the passenger compartment, which the Pinto was repeatedly demonstrated to do in testing because of very specific flaws with the placement and connection of the tank.
These are issues that not only could have been resolved with a relatively simple redesign but for which Ford actually held a patent on a safer tank design that was implemented on the European market Capri. Ford management elected to not fix this defect in order to meet arbitrary cost and weight targets (and more specifically because they had already built tooling for this tank and its mounting provisions and didn’t want to redesign that tooling).
The notion that the obligation of a corporation should be to only demonstrate some kind of cost comparison to justify the delivery of a product with known catastrophic defects is both illogical from a business standpoint and ethically repugnant. That isn’t to say that every product has to meet some impossible standard of perfect safety at outrageous production costs, but it certainly should be demonstrated to function within normal operational conditions without putting users or others at unadvertised risk of grievous harm or death, and I say this as as an engineer who has worked in both heavy equipment and aerospace industries on hardware that can easily injure or kill unwary or unskilled users. Ford knew this position was wrong and demonstrated this to be the case by trying to conceal knowledge of this defect. And no, this is not unique in the annals of automotive history, as concealing defects and trying to dodge liability is a near constant among automakers even as they make inexplicable decisions to sell products with known defects even when it would cost mere dollars to fix and would ultimately avert tens or hundreds of millions spent in recall campaigns, PR spin to fix reputations, and lives lost, but that just demonstrates that the supposedly objective “cost-benefit analysis” with figures cherry-picked to get whatever answer the inquirers are looking for is basically a bullshit justification.
The irony here is that Ford was once on the forefront of automotive safety, with among other innovations being the first American car company to install seat belts as standard equipment even though the cost was considered to be prohibitive at the time by management (and mostly ignored by drivers and passengers), and safety features are a marquee selling point for certain prestige brands like Volvo and Mercedes. But poor suckers should be happy for anything that rolls on four wheels and doesn’t break in half the first time it his a pothole, amirite?
Stranger
You shouldn’t be arguing at all. This is FQ, not GD.
That said, I think the facts of this topic have been pretty well established, and we’re getting into a lot of opinion and debate. Since this isn’t a properly framed debate, let’s not move this to GD, but rather let’s give IMHO a try instead.
Moved from FQ to IMHO.
@Dr.Strangelove and @ASL_v2.0, you’re also getting into a bit too much of a back and forth with each other. Dial that back a bit, please.
Here’s the Washington standard (the part that relates to his discussion):
(a) A product is not reasonably safe as designed, if, at the time of manufacture, the likelihood that the product would cause the claimant’s harm or similar harms, and the seriousness of those harms, outweighed the burden on the manufacturer to design a product that would have prevented those harms and the adverse effect that an alternative design that was practical and feasible would have on the usefulness of the product
Yes, really … going back to very early in the thread while still in single-digit posts we saw it go from the straight question as to whether the defect was “significantly more dangerous” straight to how Ford should have known and done better and inevitably into the values questions.
ISTM Ford did know and made a very callous calculation.
I don’t know how it could be anything but a values problem. Dr.Strangelove seems to want to end the analysis at recognizing that settling in a method for the valuation of human life is subjective, as if reducing something to a subjective judgment should end the inquiry as long as that subjective methodology for valuation was correctly applied.
I disagree, and further am of the mind that if we can just get so far as agreeing that maximally advancing human wellbeing should be the goal in a product design, then everything that flows from there may indeed be objective, not subjective, and within that framework I think the NHTSA’s methodology for measuring the societal cost of a human life was seriously flawed, as was Ford’s reliance on it, whether it was unique among car manufacturers or not.
And FWIW, the NHTSA (and a jury or two) ultimately arrived at the same conclusion, as evidenced by a change in methodology and damages awards respectively.
It should be noted that this wasn’t a calculation performed on a de novo design; they rushed into a design on an accelerated timeline which produced an objectively defective product design, and then performed this “cost-benefit analysis” as a post hoc justification rather than implement fixes or go back and rework the design to eliminate the fundamental deficiencies. From an engineering standpoint this is unacceptable and unethical practice, but from a ‘business’ perspective, this is about the total costs of bearing the defect versus spending the money and lost time to eliminate it. Even in the latter case, this was a losing decision for Ford because they took a massive hit on reputation for safety in order to save a comparatively small amount of profit margin (albeit on a vehicle that didn’t have much profitability to begin with) and ended up running a recall campaign that cost many times what it would have cost to fix the problem in-factory.
“maximally advancing human wellbeing” is a pretty expansive goal for the design of consumer products but I think we can agree that a product should produce a measurable benefit without adding to the hazard or liability of the consumer or others. With some products there is definitely a set of conflicting goals insofar that it is not possible to ameliorate all hazards; a chainsaw, for instance, will always be a dangerous tool because of the nature of its operation, and will require training and care to use to minimize (but not eliminate) risks, but the hazards of that tool are known. Automobiles obviously created certain hazards by the nature of their operation but one does not reasonably expect to be engulfed in flaming fuel from a low speed rear impact, and the many vehicles on the road then and now for which this is not a problem is evidence that such a condition is avoidable by good design practice.
Regardless of whether the Pinto was a relatively safe vehicle overall, it was very unsafe with respect to this particular condition which could have been easily mitigated by good design or the proposed solutions. Arguing that there are many other conditions that could not be addressed without the encumbrance of unfeasible costs does not change the fact that Ford knew of this particular issue prior to full production, could have implemented multiple solutions at a marginal cost, and elected not to on the basis that it would eat into their profit margins. So, no, the danger of a catastrophic fire from a low speed rear impact was not “overblown”, and Ford was rightly vilified for trying to conceal their knowledge and avoid liability for a design defect they could have easily rectified.
Stranger