CKNSLS wrote:
Ford-PLEASE GOOGLE Ford Pinto! They decided it was cheaper to pay judgements than fix the cars. People were badly burned and/or killed!
Please do. You will find that the Pinto was no more or less fire prone than any other car of the era. Actually most of the items against Ford while "true" were taken way out of context.
The Pinto and GM Side Saddle Gas Tank fiasco were the results of shoddy journalism rather than actual issues.
As much as I hate Chrysler, I have to agree with them on the large recall. If the cars passed all applicable safety standars, there should be no recall. Want tougher standards? Then pass them.
Interesting Lawyer's review of PintoSome excerpts from the Pinto Wiki article:
Schwartz paper
In a 1991 paper, The Myth of the Ford Pinto Case, for the Rutgers Law Review, Gary T. Schwartz said the case against the Pinto was not clear-cut.
According to his study, the number who died in Pinto rear-impact fires was well below the hundreds cited in contemporary news reports and closer to the 27 recorded by a limited National Highway Traffic Safety Administration database. Given the Pinto's production figures (over 3 million built), this was not substantially worse than typical for the time. Schwartz said that the car was no more fire-prone than other cars of the time, that its fatality rates were lower than comparably sized imported automobiles, and that the supposed "smoking gun" document that plaintiffs said demonstrated Ford's callousness in designing the Pinto was actually a document based on National Highway Traffic Safety Administration regulations about the value of a human life — rather than a document containing an assessment of Ford's potential tort liability.
Schwartz's study said:
The Pinto Memo wasn't used or consulted internally by Ford, but rather was attached to a letter written to NHTSA about proposed regulation. When plaintiffs tried to use the memo in support of punitive damages, the trial judge ruled it inadmissible for that purpose (p. 1021, Schwartz study).
The Pinto's fuel tank location behind the axle, ostensibly its design defect, was "commonplace at the time in American cars" (p. 1027).
The precedent of the California Supreme Court at the time not only tolerated manufacturers trading off safety for cost, but apparently encouraged manufacturers to consider such trade-offs (p. 1037).
