but was no worse statiscally than many other cars...
I don't know about that.
It wasn’t until May of 1978 that the Department of Transportation (a division of the NHTSA) announced that the Pinto fuel system had a "safety related defect" and demanded a recall. Ford agreed, and on June 9, 1978 the company recalled 1.5 million Pintos.
The Story:
Ford spent just 25 months to engineer and produce the Pinto to match the smaller Japanese cars, it normally took 43 months to engineer a brand new car model.
Lee Iaccoca wanted the car under $2k and weigh under 2k lbs, not matter what.
..."The rush of the Pinto from conception to production was a recipe for disaster. Many studies have been concluded by Mother Jones on Pinto accident reports which have revealed conclusively that if a Pinto being followed at over 30 miles per hour was hit by that following vehicle, the rear end of the car would buckle like an accordion, right up to the back seat. The tube leading to the gas-tank cap would be ripped away from the tank itself, and gas would immediately begin sloshing onto the road around the car. The buckled gas tank would be jammed up against the differential housing (the large bulge in the middle of the rear axle), which contains four sharp, protruding bolts likely to gash holes in the tank and spill still more gas. Now all that is needed is a spark from a cigarette, ignition, or scraping metal, and both cars would be engulfed in flames. If a Pinto was struck from behind at higher speed say, at 40 mph chances are very good that its doors would jam shut and its trapped passengers inside would burn to death..."
Heck, they calculated that paying lawsuits that resulted in death/inury would be $47.5 million, but, actually doing the "fix" for the gas tank problem would cost $137 million...."In pre-production planning, engineers seriously considered using in the Pinto the same kind of gas tank Ford uses in the Capri. The Capri tank rides over the rear axle and differential housing. It has been so successful in over 50 crash tests that Ford used it in its Experimental Safety Vehicle, which withstood rear-end impacts of 60 mph. Why didn’t Ford use such a gas tank? When asked about the Pinto gas tank, a Ford engineer admitted: "That's all true (The fact that the car tends to explode in minor accidents). But you miss the point entirely. You see, safety isn't the issue, trunk space is. You have no idea how stiff the competition is over trunk space. Do you realise that if we put a Capri-type tank in the Pinto you could only get one set of golf clubs in the trunk?" ..."Goodyear had developed the bladder and had demonstrated it to the automotive industry. Crash-tests were conducted and there are reports showing that the Goodyear bladder worked very well. On December 2, 1970, Ford Motor Company ran a rear end crash test on a car with the rubber bladder in the gas tank. The tank ruptured, but no fuel leaked. On January 15, 1971, Ford again tested the bladder and again it worked. The total purchase and installation cost of the bladder would have been $5.08 per car. That $5.08 per car could have saved the lives of several hundred innocent people.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) began investigating the case shortly after the Pinto started rolling off the assembly line. The NHTSA contracted with several independent research groups to study auto fires from around the country. The studies took months, which was just what Ford wanted. The results were worse than anyone could have imagined. Robert Nathan and Associates, a Washington research firm, found that 400,000 cars were burning up every year, burning more than 3,000 people to death. Furthermore, auto fires were increasing five times as fast as building fires. Another study showed that 35 per cent of all fire deaths in the U.S. occurred in automobiles. Forty per cent of all fire department calls in the 1960s were to vehicle fires—a public cost of $350 million a year, a figure that, incidentally, never shows up in cost-benefit analyses.
Also a report was prepared for NHTSA by consultant Eugene Trisko entitled "A National Survey of Motor Vehicle Fires." His report indicates that the Ford Motor Company makes 24 per cent of the cars on the American road, yet these cars account for 42 per cent of the collision-ruptured fuel tanks. Another staggering fact that was discovered was that a large and growing number of corpses taken from burned cars involved in rear-end crashes contained no cuts, bruises or broken bones. They clearly would have survived the accident unharmed if the cars had not caught fire.
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