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.