The exploding Ford Pinto of 1973 (2021) | Hacker News Reader

The exploding Ford Pinto of 1973 (2021)

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Might as well read the rebuttal, as well, for balance: https://www.hemmings.com/stories/2017/10/17/misunderstood-ca...

TL;DR: Sure, the Pinto was unsafe, but that was not exactly unusual for small cars in the 70s.

Ford Mustangs with the drop-in tank had fire problems too. Maybe not as enough people died for a recall.

My hypothesis: Mustang drivers are the ones who rear-end others. Pinto drivers brake for squirrels QED

>TL;DR: Sure, the Pinto was unsafe, but that was not exactly unusual for small cars in the 70s.

And in light of that, ask yourselves, what's the lesson being taught here?

The lesson being taught is "if you're not doing anything unusual don't run the numbers and if you do definitely don't record that you did."

Probably not the lesson you want to be teaching.

The difference in this case is that Ford knew about a specific issue, figured out how it could be fixed, and deliberately decided not to fix it for purely financial reasons.

Yes, the Pinto was not, in total, more dangerous than its competitors. But this was a case of egregious corporate misconduct.

Confession: I still don't get it.

Manufacturers (and governments, for infrastructure) make a tradeoff between safety and cost all the time. You cannot make a car perfectly safe. Eventually you hit diminishing returns. This is an unavoidable fact of life.

What makes this case worse than the hundred other ones about e.g. making this structural column slightly stronger or the crumple zone this much longer, or the highway this much wider, and so on?

Unfortunately the same argument makes the case for ignoring safety all together. The socially acceptable ways to die in a car gets smaller and smaller. Things like death by gasoline fire illustrated here, or death by steering column implation[1] get reclassified from an unavoidable hazard of driving to a preventable death all the time. We've even seen steering column trauma get re-conceptualized as preventable with the passage of the Surface Transportation Efficiency Act in 1991 and it's implementation in 1998. We'll likely see the same with deaths that are currently considered unavoidable road hazards.

The fact is that as safety technologies are developed, they have the tendency to make people reevaluate what is and isn't avoidable. As to structural columns and crumple zones, public perception might reevaluate these too. The cumulative effect is that the deaths per VMT[2] has dropped and is likely to continue to drop as advances are made. Personally I don't care so much how it's done just that it's done. It seems to be working out pretty well so far.

1. https://www.pailton.com/latest-news/collapsible-steering-col...

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...

>Unfortunately the same argument makes the case for ignoring safety all together.

No it doesn’t. It’s all about cost/benefit. We accept some safety risk because the alternative is a product that is too expensive to be useful.

I don't think that addresses my question about why this particular tradeoff was unusually objectionable, it looks to be just the general point that safety is good. But even your examples of "doing it right" are implicitly doing the same thing as the Pinto: not spending infinite resources to improve safety, but cut it off at some point.

Also, this is false, or at least, you've asserted it without basis:

>Unfortunately the same argument makes the case for ignoring safety all together.

If you have a reason why this case stands out, I'd love to learn it. If you just want to shame everyone who recognizes the inherent tradeoffs in improving safety, then I'm not sure your comment makes HN a better, more curiosity-friendly place.

Thanks for the feedback. Feel free to rewrite it so that it is more curious.

If it were from a spirit of curiosity, none of those points would have been made, because you would have soon realized you're not responding to anything in my comment.

The more-curious version of your comment would be,

"That's a good point. I can't quite put my finger on what makes this particular safety/cost tradeoff different from the other cases, especially given that it maintains the same general level of safety through different decisions. Something still seems off, but I'm not at the point where I can rigorously justify it."

Does that about summarize where you stand?

The difference is that there are engineering standards that define what is acceptably "safe". From the article:

>"The standard requires that by 1972 all new cars can withstand a 20 mph rear-end collision without fuel loss, and by 1973 they can withstand a 30 mph collision. None of the prototype cars passed the 20 mph test."

They knew they had a design that didn't pass the industry-accepted safety standard.

Except that overall the car had the same safety, and normally HN is totally on board the argument that it's not an atrocity to neglect ossified standards if doing so finds an alternate way to accomplish the ostensible goal (here, safety).

How are the standards ossified if they are literally updated that year? Also, I think you're confusing two things. Meeting a explicit safety standards by other means is not the same as being equivalent to other vehicle safety. Ignoring regulations on the basis that your product is overall better is just not how engineering regulations work. You seem to be confusing attribution; we can't say the Pinto is safer because Ford turned a blind eye to regulation. Therefore, they are no off the hook for not ensuring regulations are met. The standard is considered the minimum safety threshold.

Consider a surgeon who, on average, has better patient outcomes. Does this absolve them from malpractice lawsuits if they are shown to ignore standards of care like washing their hands in a particular case? It's a weird logic to apply fault when there are clear standards not being met.

That Ford had to cheat to pass the mandatory government tests?

"The only Pintos that passed the test were modified in some way" says the article.

Surprising to me that they mentioned the Pinto, Pacer and Gremlin, but no mention of the Chevrolet Vega, their small/seemingly-economical/not-very-good attempt to compete with the Japanese.

And on a lighter note, a friend who had a Pinto station wagon (which didn't have the fuel tank problem). He picked me up, and as I got in, said, "And you thought Chariots of Fire was a movie about running!"

The article also did not mention that Ford indeed had a breadth of corporate knowledge and technology in building cars of the Pinto's size. Rather than designing a new Pinto model, Ford HQ in the U.S.A. could have taken the most successful similar-sized model from any one of Ford's international divisions, converted it to U.S. highway standards, and retooled the North American assembly lines for it.

Pintos were a blast in the snow; they'd just glide right over top. Two of us could toss it back up onto the road. It took 4 to do a bug. Bugs were surprisingly heavy.

Working under the hood was easy. We could swap a 1600 for a 2300 in 90 min. Granted, it's not as easy as dropping a pancake out of a 911 but 90 min was pretty good for an American car.

> It took 4 to do a bug. Bugs were surprisingly heavy.

Note to self. I looked up the curb weight and bugs & pintos weigh about the same.

Maybe the bug was weighed down with all our sobriety.

Lol. The Ford Pinto was not made of aluminum. I remember seeing ads in magazines that bragged about the extra weight of the Pinto as a positive thing.

Yeah that's about the moment my BS meter started to really peg. Aluminum frame in a Pinto, hahahaha!

It's almost insane just how arrogant America was in the 1970s lol.

"Those who are first will later be last".

Not only was it a terrible car in all the ways already noted, but the floor in back seat had the largest drive train hump of any car I've ever been in.

AND the mileage wasn't all that great, compared to Japanese compacts. The 70s destroyed the reputation of American car makers for a whole generation.

> The 70s destroyed the reputation of American car makers for a whole generation.

It's more like the second half of the 70s/early 80s that's responsible for this.

Which was all due to the 1973 and 1979 "oil crises", and introduction of smog controls to a mature and established large-scale American auto industry that seemed utterly incapable of quickly transitioning to computer controlled closed-loop fuel injection without first making an absolute unmitigated mess of their engine control systems.

My father was a proper American auto enthusiast purchasing anew both a 60s Mustang and 70s Torino, and myriad American work trucks for his construction company. That all came to a screeching hault in 1981 after purchasing a more family-oriented post-smog 81 Ford Thunderbird. He never bought another American vehicle again.

That car had so many vacuum lines, solenoids, and pneumatic actuators under the hood in service of the emissions controls, they were an endless source of dysfunction. The car never idled right, and my dad never spent so much time cursing under the hood of a car.

The adoption of smog controls and Big Auto's inability to implement them sanely until literally the 1990s is what killed the American auto industry. Japanese cars did it better and rode on that inertia for decades. In the case of my parents they replaced the T-bird with a Hyundai Sonata V6 (Mitsubishi V6 in a tin can, car was proper quick for an econobox) to test the waters and never looked back. Nissan Maximas and 350Z then 370Z after the Sonata. You couldn't pay them to buy American again.

> adoption of smog controls and Big Auto's inability to implement them sanely … is what killed the American auto industry

I would add: the inability to create a 4-cylinder engine that lasted beyond 60,000 miles (at least without significant work)

>I would add: the inability to create a 4-cylinder engine that lasted beyond 60,000 miles (at least without significant work)

Tell me you get your car info from Reddit without telling me you get your car info from Reddit. My eyes are rolling loops in my skull right now.

Ford's Pinto engine, GM's Iron Duke and Chrysler's 2.whateverIforgetthename are all generally considered highly reliable engines. The competition was good too, Honda's E engine, Subaru's EA and Toyotas <insert alphabet soup here> are also held in high regard. The 80s was a great time for 4-banger engines. When you encounter an unreliable one it's generally a problem to the tune of a specific external system on a specific model and year range.

The domestic's primary problem was they considered these small cars value priced economy cars and it showed in the fit and finish, ergonomics, available options and engineering quality all around, they were simply built to a price point in every way. So people preferred the generally nicer (and generally slightly more expensive) Japanese cars.

> Ford's Pinto engine, GM's Iron Duke and Chrysler's 2.whateverIforgetthename are all generally considered highly reliable engines.

The only of these I have firsthand experience with would be the Iron Duke in the Fiero, and "highly reliable" is the last thing coming to mind. It had a plastic timing gear that liked to disintegrate FFS.

You're confusing it with the GM V6 which was optional in the Fiero and had timing gears that tended to go out around 80-100k.

Almost every OEM that used a gear timed engine has also used plastic composite timing gears over the years. They're less reliable than metal but not so much so as to really be an issue in practice. Ford 300s and their plastic gears last more or less as long as the owners are willing to run them.

Just to really drive home that this is a "people forming opinions based on the badge on the grill" issue and not a "actual performance of the hardware" issue I'd like to point out that a) Grumman LLV which is the reliability darling of the internet is basically a Chevy S10 with a funny body on it and b) the Toyota 22R and RE, also fanboy favorites, eat timing guides and then the sprockets on a ~100k timeline if not equipped with the double roller version of the sprockets and chain.

> You're confusing it with the GM V6 which was optional in the Fiero and had timing gears that tended to go out around 80-100k.

No, I'm not.

I worked as a shop assistant @ v8archie.com in my youth, and swapped out the Iron Duke in my 2.5l Fiero purchased with a busted rod (surprise surprise!) in favor of a 3.1 stroker v6 that started life as the 2.8. The Iron Duke was the absolute laughing stock in that shop and the community in general. Neither of these engines were particularly good, but the Iron Duke was notoriously bad.

It took me under one minute with ddg search results to find this gem [0]:

'I have an '87 Sport Coupe with the 2.5L "Iron Duke". This past July, with 126,000 miles on the engine, the timing tear sheared off about 30% of its teeth and stopped the engine dead.'

The Iron Duke was so bad it singlehandedly ruined the Fiero's reputation by having a tendency to throw rods through the block which then set the car on fire by blowing crankcase gases and oil on the hot cat below.

Am I actually arguing with someone defending the Iron Duke on the internet first thing in the morning right now? On HN no less? What has the world come to.

[0] http://www.calgaryfieros.com/OSGdocs/timing-gear.html

Strictly speaking, many of the Tech4's problems in the Fiero were related to the shallow oil sump, necessary for packaging, that had it always effectively running a quart low.

I can't say I had heard of one losing teeth on the timing gear-but I don't doubt it either. My biggest gripe was that during the design phase, balance shafts were left out for cost reasons-it feels and sounds far too industrial for a small car engine, relative to its output.

The rods were defective from the factory.

But let's not ignore the elephant in the room when it comes to why the Iron Duke is absolute trash: 90hp from 2.5L

Sadly, pretty typical for 2-valve fours of that price & era. The Chrysler SOHC 2.5 made about as much power, but was quieter about it. Likewise, the AMC 2.5 that they designed to replace the Iron Duke in Jeep applications was, despite being a truck motor, smooth enough to put in Eagle Premier sedans.

I don’t get the Reddit reference because I don’t use reddit. I had many Mercury 4-cylinder cars in the 80s: Topaz, Zephyr, etc (Ford rebranded). They all sucked and didn’t last beyond 60,000 or 65,000 without thousands in engine work.

All that certainly accelerated it. The Pinto / Vega / Gremlin were a rousing start.

My dad, too: finally caved in and bought a Camry. By the 80s everyone could see it.

The Ford Falcon was a very decent smaller car. The Falcon station wagon I drove one year to high school got around 20 mpg in light traffic.

I will add that it wasn't just Detroit that had problems in the 1970s. I remember the Volkswagen Rabbit as a pretty terrible follow-up to the Beetle.

As was the Dasher, which I had and got rid of at 60K.

Japanese cars were just better, sorry. They still are. There is something about "fanatical attention to quality" that beats the shart out of "ok, that's good enough."

As for the Falcon, that came out before the 70s:

https://archive.nytimes.com/wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07...

That was also the period when Oldsmobile came out with a diesel station wagon (and I imagine other models). As I recall GM basically stuck a diesel into an existing design and it had all sorts of problems. I think GM eventually did a rather major recall.

It was a very successful engine. It soured American's tastes for diesel engines for a good 30 years.

It wasn't a matter of transitioning to new technology, it was a lethargic, dimwitted corporate mindset that they would never face real competition. Not only did Japanese cars offer smaller, more fuel efficient cars, but their quality was just worlds ahead of the US automakers. Deming had tried to get them to view quality as an integral part of manufacturing, but they dismissed his ideas. The Japanese automakers were smart enough to see the wisdom in his ideas.

Same thing happened when Toyota started their Lexus division. Mercedes etc thought they had it made, but Japan quickly began to steal marketshare from the luxury segment.

Later on, Korean automakers decided to follow the Japanese playbook, and again, were met with derision buy US automakers. When Rodney King was arrested and assaulted after driving his Hyundai at high speed, everyone made fun of the LAPD lying about how fast he was going because a HYUNDAI could never go that fast.

Today, Hyundai and Kia are very reputable automakers, and Detroit is still struggling to make cars with consistent quality.

I owned a 1984 Corolla in the early 2000's. Under the hood was a mass of vacuum lines, solenoids, pneumatic actuators. Ran perfectly well.

I have this belief that US auto company management thought they could use their political clout to get rid of the new emissions and safety rules and go back to the old cheap way of doing things. So some of the malaise era crap was a feature not a bug. The Japanese managers though had no such illusions and they were also engineers at heart. Vs US managers who were all MBA's and finance guys.

scene from the movie 'Top Secret' at the top of page: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9GGDOUDLhc

Dang, beat me to it.

My first car in the early '80s was an early '70s Pinto. I don't remember the exact model year. It was an ugly green manual transmission, and it frustrated me that driving it up the hill to my parents' house, it topped out at something like 20 mph in first gear, but bogged out in second gear (cue the Lada comparisons), while a friend's automatic went up the hill just fine.

I don't know if it was ever retrofitted, but I was never rear-ended in the time I owned it. It got my friends and me to Vegas and back from San Diego. No air conditioner, so that was a challenge. One time I had to replace the head gasket, put the replacement on backwards, and had to get another replacement -- oil everywhere when I cranked it.

It kept me mobile for a couple years.

> it topped out at something like 20 mph in first gear, but bogged out in second gear

I had an early 80s Ford Ranger with had the same 4 cylinder pinto engine, and the same experience. It also had a 5th gear, which was useless unless you were actually going downhill because the engine didn't have enough torque. I am not sure why european cars with similar sized and power output 4 cylinder engines didn't have these problems. Possibly more low end torque, and better gear ratio choices? On paper a 1970s Volvo B20 is almost the same specs as a Pinto LL20, but drives excellent.

> Possibly more low end torque, and better gear ratio choices?

The Japanese engines had less torque but were higher revving engines, and had better gear ratios. Also lower curb weights and more manual transmissions.

It took GM/Ford a while to go with overhead cam designs.

  1984 Honda Civic
  1600lbs
  1.5 liter engine
  91 hp at 5,500 rpm
  93 lb⋅ft at 4,500 rpm.

  1984 Chevrolet Citation
  2.5 liter engine
  83 hp at 4000 rpm
  124 lb/ft 2400 rpm
  2200lbs

I'm reminded of the delightful opening scene of "Fight Club" where the narrator explains that his job is to apply "The Formula".

https://youtu.be/SiB8GVMNJkE

I was only 3 when this was taken off the market, but it was still legendary in name only in my childhood. I even had a Matchbox car called the Poison Pinto and friends would comment about how it might explode.

I still can't get past the name - I'm in California and all I think about when I hear Pinto is beans. Did that not trigger any alarms in Ford USA marketing in the 70s? I know Pinto is a type of pony with odd color patches but I have to look that up every once in a while. And even if that's what they were going for, that's still a weird name to choose. I know companies often are oblivious to how names translate in other countries but was Mexican food just not popular in the 70s in the US?

> Mexican food just not popular in the 70s in the US?

Definitely not in the NY and NJ area. There was one Mexican restaurant that I knew of in all NJ, and I never went there.

Don’t forget the “mustang”, another car named after a horse by Ford that was very popular.

The food scene was a lot more limited than today, even in many relatively cosmopolitan cities.

Actually pinto is a Spanish word that can be roughly translated as patches.

Pinto beans are so called, like ponies, because of patchy appearance.

Nonetheless, I agree with you, it's a confusing marketing strategy.

So, Ford for years wanted to have alliteration in product names- Falcon, Fairlane, Five Hundred, Flex, Fusion-not always, but often.

In the '60s, there was a meeting in Dearborn-trying to name what would become the Mustang. Somebody in Marketing suggested "Ford Fenix"; "Phoenix" like the mythical bird, but spelled with an F, for the alliteration. Henry Ford II looked like he was considering it. Lee Iaccoca and his pal Ben Bidwell (later CEO & CFO at Chrysler in the '80s)but who worked for Ford at the time, suddenly cracked up laughing.

Henry asked them what was so funny, and Bidwell repeated what he had just told Lee-"We could call it the Ford Phuck; the ads won't work on radio or TV, but they'd be fine in print!". Everyone had a good laugh, Henry Ford scowled, but nobody objected to calling the car Mustang after that.

I always assumed it was fake Spanish for pint-sized, which is used to mean small/compact.

Interesting article. Fundamental to all NHTSA covered products is the CFR (Code of Federal Regulations), It is the law. It is best to understand not only the binary requirements of said code but also the intention. Generally the codes have logical origins in the development. As well, it is generally a best practice to not just barely meet the law/code but exceed it to some degree. Test to test there will be variability and one may avoid hassles recall/lawsuit by exceeding the code. Today's fuel tank test involves a test collision and then the tested vehicle is placed on a large rotisserie and only a limited amount of fluid is allowed to leak as the crashed vehicle is rotated in space.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EveryCarIsAPinto

>Every Car Is a Pinto

>"As everyone knows, cars are highly volatile machines, seemingly made of tissue paper, birch bark and lighter fluid. Or so you would think by how often, easily and massively they explode." — WatchMojo, "Top 10 Worst Action Movie Clichés"

>Car damage = instant fireball.

>Any significant impact to a vehicle, particularly when falling off a cliff, will result in the vehicle exploding and/or immediately catching fire. Evidently fictional cars run on nitroglycerine. This trope comes from the public knowledge that vehicles are full of flammable substances like gasoline minus the less-public knowledge that liquid gasoline has to be vaporized and mixed with air at the proper ratio before a spark will ignite it. At worst your "exploding" car would actually be a car with a small fire. Needless to say, Rule of Cool is in full effect here.

>While cars are the most common vehicle to go kaboom, it seems that any form of transport has a good chance of exploding in a huge ball of flames and debris if it's shot at or wrecked. Aircraft, locomotives, ships: pretty much anything gas-powered and motorized is a fireball waiting to happen. Sometimes vehicles tumbling off cliffs will burst into flames spontaneously, in midair, before they've even hit the ground. Some pretty egregious instances might even have them mushroom. Expect it to intersect frequently with Dangerous Clifftop Road (as in the page image).

>The Trope Namer is the now-infamous Ford Pinto, a low-cost car launched by the Ford Motor Company in 1970. Its fatal flaw was that its gas tank was placed between the rear axle and the bumper — and the bumper itself was not sturdy — meaning that any damage to the car's back end could easily puncture the tank and spill fuel on the hot exhaust pipe. After several incidents when a Pinto burst into flames after a minor collision, its reputation as a cheap death trap was sealed, and it was taken off the market in 1980 to be replaced by the North American Ford Escort.

See also: "Unsafe at Any Speed" by Ralph Nader

Hidden Brain had a pretty good podcast on this https://www.npr.org/2020/08/21/904660038/the-halo-effect-why... . Link includes a quick summary.

Crazy how back in the 70s, manufacturing a car that turned into a giant fireball in collisions would make it unpopular.

Back in the 70s you had to actually use your own hands to drive your car into the side of an 18 wheeler before it would explode. Now your self-guided lithium bomb will do it for you. Isn't progress amazing?

In school we were taught that Ford had done an analysis and concluded the legal damages would be less than the cost of the fix.

Not sure if my professor was just whistling Dixie, but if that’s true the author left out an important part of the story.

Harley Copp, a former Ford engineer and the executive in charge of the crash testing program, "testified that the highest level of Ford's management made the decision to go forward with the production of the Pinto, knowing that the gas tank was vulnerable to puncture and rupture at low rear impact speeds creating a significant risk of death or injury from fire and knowing that 'fixes' were feasible at nominal cost."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimshaw_v._Ford_Motor_Co.

All this convinced jurors that Ford had known the design was dangerous and retained it anyway in order to save money. "Ford knew people would be killed," declares juror David Blodgett, who works for Western Electric Co. and who is the only member of the panel who drives a Pinto.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1978/02/15/j...

We have similar issues today with BEV fire issues being overlooked/forgiven. https://www.ntsb.gov/news/press-releases/Pages/NR20210113.as...

This couldn't be further from the truth. BEV fires get blown way out of proportion compared to ICE fires.

They are far more serious than ICE fires, extremely hard to extinguish. Trapped, runaway energy is a serious issue that needs to be urgently addressed. (This comment is not some kind of X is better than Y argument, this is just a safety comment.

Not trying to go for the comparison either here, but have you ever seen a diesel engine fail and go into runaway? It's pretty impressive if nothing else!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WvMl8LUzQnk

When that happens more often than not the turbo seal is gone and the engine is running on its own oil rather than on the fuel it is supposed to be running on. When the engine oil runs out it will stop all by itself... Usually these are either scrap or ready for a complete rebuild (if you're lucky).

Yep that's right. I've seen some pretty spectacular runaways with our big trucks on site, usually you just get on the phone to CAT and order a new engine lol

This is only true for cars with lithium ion batteries that use a very flammable electrolyte. Cars that use lithium iron phosphate chemistry have considerably less exciting failures. And future chemistries will be even better.

Is this getting better over time? What is the timeframe?

There isn't one. The idea batteries are getting 'safer' is not true and is not nearly an urgent enough issue.

Why do you think that? It's totally wrong. LFP is absolutely being used already.

It's already started happening. The Model 3 SR has been using the safer LFP chemistry for about a year now.

What was the cost to Ford for killing over 500 people? Money?

Looks like a quarter million dollars and 1.5 million recalls according to the article. All in all Ford probably came out ahead from a dollar perspective. What they lost was reputation. Compact Fords would sell poorly until they were completely discontinued decades later.

> Compact Fords would sell poorly until they were completely discontinued decades later.

I dunno man. It seems like there were about a million Escorts out there. For as long as they held up, that is.

I consider the Fiesta the successor 2 door compact. The Escort was closer to mid-size.

Fiesta is B/Subcompact. So are the (lol) EcoSport and (plz bring to US) Kuga.

Escort/Contour(OG Mondeo)/Focus are considered Compact in the US

The 80s escort in the US was SMALL. It definitely was not mid-size.

It's a weird comparison.

Escorts sold fairly well compared to the Chrysler/GM competition IIRC (And that's speaking as a very happy former Saturn owner)[1]

Frankly, I'd blame Ford's discontinuation of compacts in the US more on their cognitive dissonance around the PowerShift than anything else.

People knew it was junk as far back as 2016. Rather than fix it, they stuck with their lie and tried to use the EcoSport as a nonsensical distraction.

To then cite 'declining sales' is IMO dishonest. OFC the sales declined, both you and the consumer knew the product was faulty.

It's worth stating that Saturn is the only brand I ever really really trusted, one of their techs warned me about the ignition switch issue 4+ years before it came to light.

[1] - I should also add, when Ford gets it right they get it right. I have a Maverick Hybrid and it is the perfect apology for the last A/T Focus, if only they could produce in reasonable numbers.

Someone from Ford and/or Getrag ought to have gone to jail for that shit. A car with an automatic that suddenly has a transmission full of neutrals in the middle of an intersection is a serious safety hazard!

> Compact Fords would sell poorly

No. Ford Tempo was a best selling car between 1984 - 1994:

“The Tempo was a sales success for Ford, staying one of the top ten best selling cars in the US, if not one of the top five, during its entire production run.”

Wikipedia also has production counts, and it’s more than 2.8 million.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Tempo

Souvenirs. Novelties. Party tricks.

Chevrolet Corvair enters the chat.

The second-gen Corvair 65.5->69? fixed the swing-axle issue. Also, the Corvair Monza of that era is still the best looking four-door America has ever built.

Now that's an unfortunate name.

Ford male genitalia...?

It was named after the "painted" horse. I suppose it aligned with the Mustang naming convention.

Was this written by ChatGPT? It is completly wrong but written in a confident manner with broad sweeping generalizations that leave no doubt of the truth. It even asserts multiple times that the Ford Pinto was made out of aluminum.

This article in Spanish is quite similar in wording and expressions used: https://noticias.coches.com/noticias-motor/ford-pinto-seguri...

Really, I think that the Internet now is mostly bot generated.

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