According to www. According to fordpinto. Tens of thousands more were badly burned and scarred for life. And the four-year delay meant that over 10 million new unsafe vehicles went on the road, vehicles that will be crashing, leaking fuel and incinerating people well into the s. These reports conclusively reveal that if you ran into that Pinto you were following at over 30 miles per hour, 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 that big bulge in the middle of your rear axle , which contains four sharp, protruding bolts likely to gash holes in the tank and spill still more gas. Now all you need is a spark from a cigarette, ignition, or scraping metal, and both cars would be engulfed in flames.
If you gave that Pinto a really good whack—say, at 40 mph—chances are excellent that its doors would jam and you would have to stand by and watch its trapped passengers burn to death. This scenario is no news to Ford.
Internal company documents in our possession show that Ford has crash-tested the Pinto at a top-secret site more than 40 times and that every test made at over 25 mph without special structural alteration of the car has resulted in a ruptured fuel tank. Despite this, Ford officials denied under oath having crash-tested the Pinto.
Eleven of these tests, averaging a mph impact speed, came before Pintos started rolling out of the factories. Only three cars passed the test with unbroken fuel tanks.
In one of them an inexpensive light-weight plastic baffle was placed between the front of the gas tank and the differential housing, so those four bolts would not perforate the tank.
It plays an important role in our story later on. In another successful test, a piece of steel was placed between the tank and the bumper. In the third test car the gas tank was lined with a rubber bladder. But none of these protective alterations was used in the mass-produced Pinto. 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 was a car known to be a serious fire hazard deliberately released to production in August of ? Iacocca argued forcefully that Volkswagen and the Japanese were going to capture the entire American subcompact market unless Ford put out its own alternative to the VW Beetle.
Bunky Knudsen said, in effect: let them have the small-car market; Ford makes good money on medium and large models. But he lost the battle and later resigned. Iacocca became president and almost immediately began a rush program to produce the Pinto. So he ordered his engineering vice president, Bob Alexander, to oversee what was probably the shortest production planning period in modern automotive history. The normal time span from conception to production of a new car model is about 43 months.
The Pinto schedule was set at just under A quick glance at the bar chart below will show you what that speed-up meant. Design, styling, product planning,advance engineering and quality assurance all have flexible time frames, and engineers can pretty much carry these on simultaneously. Tooling, on the other hand, has a fixed time frame of about 18 months.
So when crash tests revealed a serious defect in the gas tank, it was too late. The tooling was well under way. When it was discovered the gas tank was unsafe, did anyone go to Iacocca and tell him? With Lee it was taboo. The product objectives for the Pinto are repeated in an article by Ford executive F. Olsen published by the Society of Automotive Engineers. He lists these product objectives as follows:.
Safety, you will notice, is not there. It is not mentioned in the entire article. So, even when a crash test showed that that one-pound, one-dollar piece of plastic stopped the puncture of the gas tank, it was thrown out as extra cost and extra weight.
People shopping for subcompacts are watching every dollar. And nobody understands that better than Iacocca. Ball can name more than 40 European and Japanese models in the Pinto price and weight range wit h safer gas-tank positioning.
The patent on the saddle-type tank is owned by the Ford Motor Co. Los Angeles auto safety expert Byron Bloch has made an in-depth study of the Pinto fuel system. Lou Tubben is one of the most popular engineers at Ford. By he had grown so concerned about gas-tank integrity that he asked his boss if he could prepare a presentation on safer tank design. Tubben and his boss had both worked on the Pinto and shared a concern for its safety. His boss gave him the go-ahead, scheduled a date for the presentation and invited all company engineers and key production planning personnel.
When time came for the meeting, a grand total of two people showed up—Lou Tubben and his boss. But you miss the point entirely. You have no idea how stiff the competition is over trunk space. Do you realize that if we put a Capri-type tank in the Pinto you could only get one set of golf clubs in the trunk?
For, while he and his associates fought their battle against a safer Pinto in Dearborn, a larger war against safer cars raged in Washington. People who know him cannot remember Henry Ford II taking a stronger stand than the one he took against the regulation of safety design.
He spent weeks in Washington calling on members of Congress, holding press conferences and recruiting business cronies like W. In Detroit, worry was fast fading to panic as the Japanese, not to mention the Germans, began to gobble up more and more of the subcompact auto market.
Never one to take a back seat to the competition, Ford Motor Company decided to meet the threat from abroad head-on.
In , Ford executives decided to produce the Pinto. Eager to have its subcompact ready for the model year, Ford decided to compress the normal drafting-board-to-showroom time of about three-and-a-half years into two.
The compressed schedule meant that any design changes typically made before production-line tooling would have to be made during it. Before producing the Pinto, Ford crash-tested various prototypes, in part to learn whether they met a safety standard proposed by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration NHTSA to reduce fires from traffic collisions.
This standard would have required that by all new autos be able to withstand a rear-end impact of 20mph without fuel loss, and that by they be able to withstand an impact of 30 mph. The prototypes all failed the mph test. I just I don't paint anymore. I don't paint in the street, but if you do your piece can last for 10 years. For what you pay, I don't paint , I just -. Maris' often cited motto was: "I don't paint cows, but rather effects of light.
Personal motivation: Develops and upgrade myself, discover the world in line with this and the simplest thing - when i don't paint i have terrible mood. Matisse said, "I do not paint women; I paint pictures.
No pinto nada en ese mortuorio. Do not paint anything at the mortuary. Estoy harta de fingir que no pinto nada. I don't feel like I belong here. I belong here.
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