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Comment by chiph | Hacker News Reader

The Pinto wasn't an engineering failure ("it was a two-thousand-pound car on the road with four-thousand-pound cars. It got hit. It lit up. What do you expect?") but a Public Relations failure.

Jason Vines was the PR guy for Ford during the Firestone/Explorer disaster. And he had one guiding principle: Don't blame the customer. Which is what Toyota did with the unintended-acceleration problem.

http://www.amazon.com/What-Did-Jesus-Drive-Christianity-eboo...

"PR in a crisis cannot be cleaning up after the elephants in a parade. The PR team needs to have a seat at the table before, during, and after a crisis."

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The engineering failure (as told to me by a college case study) was that there were exposed bolts directly in front of the gas tank, so a collision would almost always lead to a puncture, especially in a rear-end collision.

The fix was a 2-ounce, $2 piece of square plastic - it would cover the bolts, providing a flat face for the gas tank to impact the support beam. But Ford's leadership (Iacocca?) were too sold on the "sub-2000 pound car" and didn't allow this plastic piece, along with a ton of other features that were removed from the design.

The article suggests, though, that other compact cars had a similar bumper and fuel tank design, including sharp objects near the tank. The issue wasn't unique or exceptional. The one cherry-picked metric that came out of it was that the Pinto experienced puncture for rear end collisions at a marginally lower speed than other cars, and, after regulations were put in place to increase that minimum, fatality rates were not affected at all.

Any fatality effect is noise compared to the other causal factors in fatal accidents: highway design, speed, weight of the objects of collision, level of alcohol intoxication. And even factors within Ford's control trumped the Pinto gas tank design in importance. It's just that one particularly grisly and tragic death makes for some really bad PR.

Disclaimer: I've got no knowledge of the Pinto case besides hearsay and what's in this article.

> Disclaimer: I've got no knowledge of the Pinto case besides hearsay and what's in this article.

In that case, please don't post. Sharing what you know to be unreliable information makes everyone dumber.

That's not meant as a personal attack. Lots of folks do it, and you're at least good enough to admit it. But instead of admitting that you're making noise, why not just... not make noise?

Shouldn't you have put the disclaimer first? Gladwell has cherry picked reality to weave the narrative he wants.

I trust Gladwell and his research and interview access more than I trust your blanket, ad hominem dismissal of his work.

Unfortunately, this attitude is unjustified. Gladwell does research, but he'd be basically as reliable if he didn't bother. He doesn't use or understand the research he does.

Pretty much any vehicle with a rear-mounted gas tank is going to have problems with rear-end collisions. FCA (Fiat Chrysler Automobiles) is installing free trailer hitches on some Jeeps because they're vulnerable.

http://www-odi.nhtsa.dot.gov/owners/SearchResults?searchType...

Interesting - I remember an old debate that having a hitch is bad in a rear collision, because energy which would've been absorbed by a crumpling bumper instead ends up being transferred to the main chassis via the hitch.

Possibly the old argument is less valid due to unibody construction, but bumpers definitely exist for a reason

"Fix"?

From an engineering standpoint, the question is, "What proportion of accidents fall into the region between the force required to penetrate the tank with the bolts without the plastic guard, and the force required to penetrate the tank even with the guard?"

As I understand it, the bolts were pointing forward towards the fuel tank which caused the puncture and (the threads caused) the spark, but this was only in the Pinto wagon, a far less popular variant of the car. The hatchback most people think of as the Pinto did not have this design flaw (the bolts were perpendicular to the car instead of aiming forwards).

So, you had to rear-end a Pinto wagon (not hatchback) with a nearly empty tank so the bolts entered at the fume level for any chance of fire or explosion.

More recently there were controversies about Crown Vic cruiser fuel tanks rupturing in a collision - the reason was thought to be the tank hitting bolts used to mount additional police equipment

edit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Crown_Victoria#Fuel_tank

Yeah, you can contrast it with Tesla's handling of their battery fires where fires in crashes with no fire injuries (one at 100 mph from which the driver walked away) led to them fitting a new titanium underbody shield. Overkill from the engineering point of view but great PR.

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