The Pinto was no more prone to fires than other vehicles of the time. Its explosiveness is a myth.
It was by no means the most dangerous vehicle on sale in its time—that was probably the Volkswagen Beetle—but it was absolutely more likely to catch fire in a collision than pretty much anything else on the road that wasn't a literal fuel delivery truck.
So no, it wasn't necessarily going to kill you in a collision, but if it did, it was a lot more likely to be with fire.
> "But despite the memo's cold calculations, was Ford characterized fairly as the Kevorkian of automakers? Perhaps not. In 1991, A Rutgers Law Journal report [PDF] showed the total number of Pinto fires, out of 2 million cars and 10 years of production, stalled at 27. It was no more than any other vehicle, averaged out, and certainly not the thousand or more suggested by Mother Jones."
So again, it was no more likely to catch fire than other cars at the time.
Mother Jones is rightly a revered publication now, but their reporting on this was seriously flawed to the point of being journalistic malpractice.
"In nine staged collision tests of 1971-1976 Pinto 2-door sedans and 3-door runabouts impacted by 1971 Chevrolet Impalas at closing speeds of 30 and 35 miles per hour, two tests resulted in fires. In all of the remaining seven tests, fuel tank damage occurred with fuel leakage rates ranging from 6 to 700 ounces per minute, with an average rate in excess of 240 ounces per minute."
Does having two out of nine low speed collisions result in fire seem normal? Does having nine out of nine low speed collisions result in significant enough damage to the fuel tank to cause gasoline leakage seem normal? I would certainly hope not.
The original Pinto design was flawed and dangerous, unnecessarily killed people, and Ford was rightfully and successfully sued for releasing it.
P.S. That Rutgers PDF in your citation is about the myth of the Ford Pinto legal case, which is that whole thing about how Ford allegedly calculated that it would cost less to settle on wrongful death lawsuits than to fix their cars, not about the safety of the Pinto. The link in the article is broken but you can find it here: http://www.pointoflaw.com/articles/The_Myth_of_the_Ford_Pint...
It's like you're saying that a lab test is more relevant than years of field testing with millions of miles traveled.
> The original Pinto design was flawed and dangerous, unnecessarily killed people, and Ford was rightfully and successfully sued for releasing it.
Again: it did not kill more people than the average car at the time. That was my original contention, that it was not more likely to explode than any other car.
Could it have been safer if they had designed it more responsibly? Yes. Could those deaths have been avoided? Probably. And should Ford have been sued for that failure? Yes.
But that doesn't change the raw fact that it did not explode more than the average car at the time.
> That Rutgers PDF in your citation is about the myth of the Ford Pinto legal case
The Rutgers studies provides data, which are you are still ignoring, that showed the Pinto was 1.9% of all vehicles on the road and accounted for 1.9% of all fatalities.
If the lawsuit was suggesting that Ford was negligent for not getting that number even lower, then it's still a valid lawsuit. But I wasn't referring to whether Ford should've been sued, only that the "exploding Pinto" myth is a myth in real-world observational data.
The Rutgers report is about the lawsuit, not the safety of the automobile, as mentioned. It's also just an opinion piece. Though it does cite some data!
Can you check the PDF? Upon its publication the Pinto accounted for 1.9% of vehicles on the road, 1.9% of vehicles involved in fatalities, and 4.1% of vehicles involved in fatalities involving rear impact. So maybe the Pinto was actually overall a pretty safe car! Except for exploding upon rear impact. Which is, you know, the defect in question.
They oftentimes couldn't escape the vehicle due to crumple zones pinching the doors shut.
Sure, the "exploding Pinto" is a myth, but only on a technicality. Those people experienced your real-world observational data first hand.
That site then linked to the PDF on a website that, at time of writing, returns 404. Some googling produced an article in the now defunct "student run law journal" that appears to be a hit piece or history rewrite. Perhaps it is an application for work at the law office of a major car manufacturer.