Misunderstood cars: The Ford Pinto

Kurt Ernst on Oct 17th, 2017

A popular car for the decade, it was produced by the Ford Motor Company, the subcompact Pinto is today best known for its propensity to combust in rear-end collisions. Despite its horrific portrayal in Pinto Madness, published by Mother Jones magazine in its September/October 1977 issue, later fatality rate data revealed the Pinto to be on par with other subcompacts of the day and certainly not the threat it was purported to be in both print and broadcast media.

Looking for a subcompact to counter the market onslaught from Japanese and European automakers, Ford Motor Company began work on the model that would become the Pinto in 1967. By December 1968, the basic design concept was approved by Ford Product Planning, but there was a catch: Lee Iacocca wanted the Pinto to be in dealer showrooms by the 1971 model year, condensing the typical 43-month development cycle into just 25 months. Furthermore, Iacocca insisted that the new model weigh no more than 2,000 pounds and cost no more than $2,000, standards that were considered by engineers to be set in stone.
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About the same time, Mark Dowie’s article – which would go on to earn a Pulitzer Prize – was published in Mother Jones magazine. In the piece, Dowie referred to the Pinto as a “firetrap” and a “lethal car,” citing 500 to 900 fatal Pinto fires, erroneously attributing an NHTSA calculated social cost fatality to Ford and incorrectly attributing industry-wide rollover fatality data to Pinto rear-end collisions. The actual number of rear-impact, fire-related fatalities that could be attributed to the Pinto at the time of the article, per NHTSA data, was 27 – still too many, but far fewer than the numbers cited in Pinto Madness.
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For years, no one sought to verify if any of the sensationalistic data on Pinto crashes was true, but in November 1990, Gary T. Schwartz, a professor at the U.C.L.A. School of Law, presented a paper at the Pfizer Distinguished Visitors Series sponsored by the Rutgers School of Law. Entitled The Myth of the Ford Pinto Case, Schwartz patiently dispels, over 56 annotated pages, the idea that the Pinto was any more dangerous than the subcompacts it competed against at the time.