Selects: SYSK Live: Back When Ford Pintos Were Flaming Deathtraps

Hi friends, It's me Josh, and for this week's select, I've chosen our episode live show really from twenty eighteen, back when Ford Pintos were flaming death traps. Now, this episode actually came out with an intro from me and Chuck, so it seems foolish to do an intro to an intro, even though that's what I'm doing.

Now.

That's why I'm going to stop and just say, hope you enjoy.

Welcome to stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Hey, welcome to the podcast.

I'm Josh Clark, There's Charles w Chuck Bryant. Jerry's not here, but we are with all these beautiful people live at the Buckhead Theater in our own Atlanta, GA.

Good. Hey, yeah they are.

Not too shabby, everybody. Yeah, So let's start.

Man. I feel great.

So I feel great.

Since this is a live podcast and it's actually set a little further back in time, we thought we would all get into the Wayback Machine. So for those of you who have seen us live before, you know the Wayback Machine is made up. It's not a real thing, but it does take a twinkle in your eye and a heart full of magic. To get into the wayback machine. So I hope all of you have that going on right now. That was my best serious Silverman impression.

It's pretty good.

Thanks.

So we're all on the way back machine, okay, and we're going back to Detroit, Michigan, back to like the mid sixties or something like that.

We'll say, yeah, back when people still wanted to go to Detroit.

On purpose.

Sorry man, Yeah, I told you.

And we're gonna fly in. That's the sounds, and.

We're very small and invisible, by the way, So we're gonna fly in over the shoulder of an up and coming auto executive with a beautiful head of hair named Lee Aya Coca.

And Lee Lee.

At the time, he was what you might call a young turk, up and coming, like ready to take on the world. Great guy, and he had a lot of cred around the company that he worked at called Ford Motor Company.

I tried its pre Chrysler right, and he.

Had a lot of cred because he had.

Designed the Mustang right. It was known as Lee's car.

Even yeah, I mean, if you if you are the guy and the of the Ford Mustang project, then you've kind of bought your ticket in the car industry. If you have be a great car, do you make.

The car that Vanilla Ice will eventually love, You've done something.

Quite right with your life, right.

Did he have a Mustang.

Rolling in my five point oh with the rag top down? That's a Mustang, buddy, is it sure? I think it's even in the video.

I've never been more ashamed.

To not know the lyrics of a song.

Yeah, because it's f and Vanilla Ice. So I don't feel like I should have known it. I just feel like a stooge.

Oh no, it's fine. No, you got a Wean shirt on. You probably should know this. But I know I know that lyric though. Yeah, I didn't know a five point.

Five point him? All right, it's my understanding, right everybody.

Yeah, I thought it was a Volkswagen Beatle.

No, no, but that does come up starting now because Leik Coca was one of the few people in Detroit at the time who realized that the American auto industry's lunch was being eaten in the subcompact market, mainly because no American car company was making subcompacts at the time.

Right now, we liked her cars very large at time.

Like land yachts.

Yeah, okay, so Li said, the Germans are eating our lunch with their little Volkswagen Beetle Hitler's car.

Look it up, I had two Volkswagen Beetles.

Those were two Hitler's cars.

You supported Hiller in a way.

My mom is over there. She bought that car. I don't know.

She's going like that.

And then the Toyota Corolla was also killing people, right, killing Detroit. I should say, yeah, And so Lee said, we need to get a car to market. But I'm not the president. There's a man who is president. And what is his name, Chuck?

I can't ever remember, honestly, Oh no, I do remember. His name is Bunkie Knudsen.

If you're the president of a car company and your name's Bunkie Knudsen, you gotta.

Know you have a target on your back.

Right, Nobody's gonna let that stand for very long, especially not Leyah Coca.

Yeah.

The only thing Bunkie Muson in that year would have been president of is the super Secret, super Secret Treehouse Playboy Magazine club.

Led by Bunkie Knutson.

Right, are the local union of the guys who sell those like monkeys that play the symbols on the street.

You know, they wind up once, all right.

So regardless of that, Bunkieknutson was in charge and Leah Coca had his sight set on that job, and so they settle things in the traditional way in the car industry at the time, which was arm wrestling.

It's a little crazy serious.

So Leiah Coca had this thing where we think this is probably how he rose to power. He could rip the sleeve clean off of his shirt right at the shoulder, right before an arm wrestling match.

Right.

It's very intimidating, and he always kept his arms oiled. Every morning he would oil him up and very gingerly put the shirt on over him so the oil wouldn't show too So it really had like a pronounced effect when he tore his shirts leeve off and went like that.

So when he did this, the Bunkie Nudsen and Bunkie saw that oil bicep. He knew his time running four Company had grown short.

That's right, Bunky Newton knew what time it was.

All that was totally made up. You all realized, right. The stun silence threw me off a little bit.

It was back to the treehouse for Bunkie.

So Leah Koka found himself in charge of Ford, and he said, we got to get a subcompact going fast, dudes. So here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna get a project going. I'm even gonna give it a code name, which is really weird and sort.

Of Simon Mark, kind of a Nudsen move.

But he named it Project Phoenix. Very cute and a little ironic once you know what this is about. And he said, I want a car, I want to on the market and what twenty four months?

Yeah, and normally it took like forty three months dated car from concept to production. Iakoka said, nope, twenty four.

Yeah, twenty four so super fast and it can't weigh more than two thousand pounds and it can't cost a customer more than two thousand dollars. And he totally should have called it Project two thousand, so that would have been a super cool name.

In the early nineteen seventies.

That car would go on to be known as the Ford Pinto. For those of you who aren't going, like, oh, colaps.

Couple of booze, a couple of groans, and a lot of like what we're going to fill the people in on this Okay, Yeah, So the deal with the Ford Pinto was if you don't know, and you did grow up in the seventies, it had a problem. We don't know a lot about, but we know that the Ford Pinto had a problem. If you would hit the Ford Pinto from the rear going very very slow, sometimes it would burst into a fiery ball. And that is not a good thing for a car to.

Do, especially when you're still in the car.

That's right.

Has anyone seen the movie Top Secret?

Remember that one? There's Alkilmer.

There's a scene where Valcimra, I think, is on a motorcycle. He's being chased by Germans and he somehow out maneuvers them and they swerve off the road and slam on their brakes and almost come to a complete stop right before hitting a Pinto in the rear, but don't quite make it. It makes that crystal thing sound and then boom they just blow up into flames.

Right, And this was in the eighties, This was like at least ten years after the Pinto had this reputation. That's not that.

Far from the truth, actually, we found from doing this research. So there's actually a lot of choice quotes that we found a lot of people love taking potshots at the Pinto. Some have written some pretty great stuff. You want to take the first one.

Yeah, the first one was from Popular Mechanics magazine, and they said, arguably the most dangerous fuel tank of all time was a rear mounted vessel installed on the seventy one through seventy six Ford Pinto. It's possibly the best example of what happens when poor engineering meets corporate negligence. Good quote, I got one.

There's this guy named doctor Leslie Ball. He was the chief safety officer for NASA's manned Space program.

So this guy knew safety, right.

He said that the release to production of the Pinto was the most reprehensible decision in the history of American engineering. So there's a couple of things I want your right. A couple of things to note in this quote. One he said was the most reprehensible decision, not one of the and he also qualifies it with American engineering, not automotive engineering. He's including like easy bake ovens and other stuff they have killed like millions of people.

You know.

He's including everything ever built basically, Yeah, easy bake ovens or death traps too.

So the Pinto.

It was kind of an issue for Ford is we're going to see but there's this one tibit we ran a cost that we just love. There was a radio spot for the Pinto in the seventies and Ford had to get their their agency to get rid of it because it had the line the Pinto leaves you with that warm feeling for real, this is this is a fun one of research, all right.

So again I want to reiterate, we don't know anything about the design of cars. You know how to drive cars, and that's about where it ends.

But we do know this.

The original design of the Pinto had a gas tank that started six inches from the rear bumper. I know that's not a good idea. If I was in Detroit, I would have said, well, that's weird, and why would you want to do that? Sure, because you know, accidents happened, right, No one thought about it.

No. That's made even worse by the fact that a car critic would later call that bumper little more than ornamentation, right, like, car's supposed to have a bumper, just put that thing that looks like a bumper on it. Basically, there was a later improved version of the bumper on the Pinto that could with stand a five mile an hour impact.

That was the improved version.

And again, this is all happening six inches away from the gas tank.

That's that's just one side of the field tank.

There's a whole other side, and it had like its own issues.

Basically, Yeah, there's there's something on a car called a differential.

Uh, we mechanics say it.

We don't know what that is, but I did some research and here's what I'm gonna call it. It's the magic box that makes the car go room.

I think it's pretty accurate.

What's what's so funny is like we pride ourselves on chasing down every tidbit of information when it comes to cars, We're just like, that's out.

No idea.

Who'd want to hear a live podcast about a car? So, uh, this magic box on the Ford Pinto had four protruding bolts facing the gas tank that uh see you're getting it now that uh in court later on, and this would end up in court that you see where this is going. Lawyers would call them can openers, and we're just gonna call them for this show, flaming death bolts.

I wish we had a sound effect or like a jingle like Flaming Death Bolts.

And we should totally trademark Flaming Death Bolts.

I think so too, or at least that's a band name. I think we should at least call it out as that.

Oh right, do you hear that?

Are they're Flaming Death Faults behind us?

That came out?

Uh, we're here on the wrong night.

So, like I said, there there's a lot of good quotes out there, but probably the best of them, the best came from this journalist named Mark Dowie who figures big time into the story and he probably got across

And this is me interjecting here. This is the seventies.

So every single person in every single car was smoking every single second of every moment they were driving.

There are four lit cigarettes in every car at all times with the windows.

Up barring that.

You could also get it from the ignition or scraping metal, and both cars would be engulfed in flames.

If you gave that pin to a.

Really good whack, say it forty miles per hour, chances are excellent that its doors would jam and you would have to stand by and watch its trapped passengers burn to death.

You're that's not me saying this.

Your additional what do you call it? Pantomiming acting?

It's in the pantomime tradition.

Fantastic, Thank you.

Reading Rainbow with Josh give LeVar Burton a run for his money. All right, So there was one thirty mile per hour crash test with a pinto that found that all thirteen gallons, all thirteen gallons, spilled out in less than sixty seconds. So we all drive here in Atlanta and you all pump gas. You know how fast when you're pumping gas, it's coming out and you're like, oh my god, that's so fast. Hole coming out so fast.

Think about that next time you go to the gas station.

Yeah, thank god, I'm not driving an early nineteen seventies Pinto. So the weird thing is this, despite the Pinto's reputation, whether it's from top secret, you learned about it from your older brother, who knows where you heard it from, but a lot most people, I would even say, know

It wasn't a thing.

So we wondered, okay, well, how did the Pinto actually get this reputation?

And to answer that question, we have.

To go to the Great Periodical Room in the sky and we have to go back to the ninth.

We all have to die.

No, No, that's the great part about it. You can go there alive.

Oh.

Usually when you say the great thing in the sky, that means you're totally dead.

Just in the sky.

Okay, all right, Great, we're going to the Great Periodical in the sky.

Why and we're all living?

All right, it's great.

We're gonna go back to the nineteen seventy seventh section and we're going to find the nineteen seventy seven year for Mother Jones Magazine. Has everyone ever heard of Mother Jones Magazines still around today? So on one might characterize it as slightly left of center maybe, And it was very much the same back in the day.

Yeah.

And in this September October nineteen seventy seven issue of Mother Jones Magazine, there was an article by Mark Dowie.

That's right, it's called Pinto Madness. You can still read this article today. It was one of the main sources we used. It's a great deep dive if you want to read some more stuff about the Pinto But Mark Dowie was the quote you read earlier, and he was a journalist there at the time.

And this is this is one reason you know. This is also the seventies.

When they released this article in a print magazine, they had a press conference about it, which is adorable when you think about it, especially through today's lens. So they even traveled. They went to Washington, d C. From San Francisco, held a big press conference there on Capitol Hill about a magazine article, and they invited Ralph Nader to attend, which, yeah, yeah, if you don't know who Ralph Nader is, he is

He lived like a hermit to show that he wasn't being influenced by one side or the other. He had like a mattress on the floor of like a studio apartment.

I think he had a hot plate that he lived with.

Ironically, it's very dangerous how they think about it.

It was like probably the safer hot plates, but yeah.

I bet it was the best hot plate on the market.

Yeah, for sure, you would think so. But he bought it with his own money.

He did so anyother Ralph Nader was there. They got everyone together and they had this big press conference in Washington, DC, and Dowie starts to poke around a little bit and do a little more research for this article and say, you know, I need to go to these need to go to dot and need to go what was the.

Other one called NHTSA ones that stand for National Man the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration. Correct, it's a mouthful, very good, so a lot of common words, but when you put him together like that, it's tough.

So he went and started doing some investigating and he found out that Ford had been carrying out well, they've been carrying out crash tests in secret. And when you're carrying out crash tests in secret, that's probably not a good.

Thing, right.

It means that you didn't get the results you were hoping for, so you you suppressed the results you had.

All the scientists murdered.

Lea totally. Did He's like you see that?

Sure?

He probably like was like, go to sleep forever. But that was just to get the ball rolling. He had goons killed the rest of them. Oh sure, and you then you filed the crash test with the dot.

That was the normal thing.

So Dowy's sitting there going through all these file cabinets, and you know, there's all these bureaucrats going like, oh God, why does he keep saying Eureka.

Here's the guy in there with the spy camera.

And he figured out very very quickly that Ford was well aware of the notion that its Pintos were flaming death traps. Right, And from those forty crash tests, he found that eleven of them, this is really important, eleven of those crash tests had been carried out before the Pinto, the first one, had ever rolled off of the production line.

Right.

He found in these crash tests that every single one of those forty crash tests, if it was a Pinto that had not been altered, meaning it was the same one that you would buy at like the dealership, they lost gas and an impact of twenty miles an hour over Not very good, right, No, not.

Good at all.

So three of these cars passed the tests, and all three of them had been had been tweaked for safety like these aren't the ones that you would end up buying. They changed three of them and they all three passed. Yet they still didn't use it. And here are the three things they did. They one was a plastic baffle, a little square plastic that costs.

One dollar and it weighed one pound.

And it went between the flaming death bolts and the gas tank.

Solved the problem pretty sensible.

Did not use it because remember two thousand pounds two thousand dollars, which I don't know what that is today.

It's a two pounds and twelve thousand.

Dollars the pounds and change.

Okay, gravity is read relatively the same.

The other thing they did, and this ostensibly was a little heavier, They put a metal plate to reinforce that ornamental bumper.

In other words, they gave it a bumper and that worked.

And then the finally, the final thing they did was a I think they lined that was the inside of the outside of.

The gas tank, the inside of the gas tankah.

The inside of the gas tank with a rubber bladder. And that worked.

But no one likes saying the word bladder head forward. Be honest, it's too gross.

It works, but it's crony, So we're getting rid of that one.

The point is they had three solutions before the Ford was being rolled off the line, and they chose to ignore all three of them, right.

Big point here, right.

And in addition to this two thousand pound, two thousand dollars limitation that I Coca imposed, that radically shortened timeline also created a climate where really really dangerous engineering decisions were being made.

Right.

Normally, when you make.

A car, you sketch it out, somebody makes a model of it, some dude like works it in clay. Yeah, you run it into like a couple of walls or something like that. If you figure out how many like light like cigarette lighters are going to go into it, there's a lot of thought put into it. And then once all this stuff, this pre production stuff is done and you know what the car is going to look like,

Said, yeah, so when they discovered this, we have a couple of quotes here from actual engineers that worked there at the time, and they said, did anyone go to le Ayacoca and say, hey, we have a problem on our hands with his gat stank And this one engineer from the Mother Jones article said hell no.

But if it was like nineteen seventy seven, so we didn't say it like that, he went like, hell no.

Right in my mind he went, hell no, hell no.

Uh, that person would have been fired.

Safety wasn't a popular subject around Ford in those days, and with Lee it was taboo.

Or taboo, like if you're a normal.

Person, if you talk normally, tattoo, taboo, tattoo, taboo. All right, deletrious, it's that's a deep cut. Yeah, there's about twenty people in here that got that one. That's all right, all right, So I had a cocata saying around Ford at the time, which was safety doesn't sell. And here's another quote from another engineer. Safety is in the issue trunk spaces. You have no idea how stiff the competition is over trunk space.

And that's a real quote. Yeah, And here's something that you can do when you get home.

You can go and look up Ford Pinto ad and search Google images or being images? Is that of thing?

Yahoo?

Yeah, you have to be Google. Yeah, go to netscape.

And or if you're a paranoid type, duck dut gout.

That even flew over my head.

Uh, it's like they don't like track or use cookies or anything like that.

Oh yeah, so you're creep.

I guess. I guess are you stockpile weapons or something?

Gotcha?

So anyway, you can look up four Pinto ads and there are all kinds of great ads from the old days. And there's one where there's where there's this couple that I guess is unpacking for like a camping trip from their Pinto. But it doesn't look like anywhere you would want to go camping. It's just kind of like a field.

There's like a ditch.

Yeah, it's kind of weird looking. And it says this in the text. Just slip down the Runabout's rear seat. The Runabout was one of the Pinto models. Open up the big back door, which we call a hatchback these days, and the big back room makes packing easy. Pack in your golf clubs, those groceries and those big pieces of luggage, pack it all in.

You make it sound really.

Dirty, there's a big room in your little Pinto.

I'm the sicko because I'm using Duck Duck.

It's a sexiest out of the seventies as read by me.

I like old ads in old magazines because like you can smell them after work, you know what I'm saying. Like if you go into Google images, the ads there, but not the smell. But you know what an old magazine smells like. But it's a great fantastic smell.

You mean, like musty, what magazines are you reading?

Just any old magazine? Pick up? Just like.

All right, Jerry cut that part.

Now, I'm not doing my shot yet.

And everybody calmed down. My niece left to go to bed.

So oh, okay, are there any other kids here?

All right?

You have a very deep voice, young boy right here.

I'm seven, bear me screw.

So everybody, I think we can all agree this is going pretty well.

You're not gonna like this. That means that we need.

To put an ad break in here.

Calm down, We'll be right back right after these messages. Stuff we Josh shop.

Soft your shore.

Hey, everybody, we're back.

Magic about words.

Yeah, thank you, sir. I am wearing me Undies. Oh you know what we should say this?

That's a freebie man.

Well this part out too, but uh, I have to share this we got.

This is a legit tangent like you know, like all of them.

The heavily scripted and reversed tangents that you've heard him.

We got an email yesterday. You saw it. I did where a woman?

This is so weird. A woman wanted to send a new pair of me Undies to us for us to autograph so she could frame underwear for her husband's Christmas gifts.

Now that is a deep cut.

Sure, that's a true fan. At least she wasn't like and you wear them first? Yeah, each of you passed it off to the other one and then mail them back to me.

Those are like, oh yeah, send him in right, totally do that I.

Sent you will smell them like an old magazine, you know. Right when she got that in the mail.

Oh chuck, uh said, I didn't what guys, what why would you do that?

No one else saw that. We should probably edit this part out.

To Jared, this guy right here.

So I send that email to our head of sales though, and he was just so delighted. He was like, oh, I can't wait to send this to me Undies. They're you're autographing underwear. They're not gonna believe it.

That's that's like David Lee Wroth level, except we're autographing me undies for a fan some dude.

It's not David right.

All right, everybody, we're back, kind of thinking, sure you may do it again though, because you just said that, right, Okay, Hey everybody, we're back.

I think I just stepped on you again. And stop laughing, everybody. We need to clean I said, stop laughing.

Hey, everybody, we're back. Thanks for hanging there.

Thank you. That was a really long app We know where we were now. I got it.

I got it you right, I got creepy right before I know that, I know, all right, I got you. Hey, everybody, we're back. Everyone's gonna be like, what the hell happened in Atlanta?

That's good enough. We're leaving that dinn right. So by now, everybody you may be saying, Chuck, Josh, WTF, how how could this possibly be going on?

How could Ford be doing.

This kind of stuff. We're gonna tell you WTF. It turns out that back in the sixties, the American auto industry was like the last great unregulated industry the entire country. And the reason why was because most Americans considered the auto industry the backbone of the American economy. Right, so everyone said, we should probably just let the auto industry decide what's best for it and us it's consumers, because we don't want to mess with them.

Yeah, and big corporations love to look out for everyday Americans, all right.

But at the time, there was a fatality rate aka death rate on the America's highways reaching fifty thousand people a year.

We did the math. That's a lot.

That is a lot.

Ralph Nader had a book called Unsafe at Any Speed that was a big hit.

He also had one called hot.

Plates Unsafe at any temperature, So does cell quite as well.

Has anyone actually read Unsafe at Any Speed? Don't feel bad, We haven't either, Okay, good. So he released his book in nineteen sixty five, and it was basically like a chapter by chapter, really wonky detailed description of how your car was ready and willing to murder you, right, not kill you, murder you intentional.

They were like chapters.

On like the steering column it's going to impale you, or that dashboard it ain't padded, and your head's going to open up like a ripe candle op when it comes in contact with it.

Right.

It was amazing chapter I think that.

Yeah.

And the reason that this would happen for both instances is because there's no such thing as seat belts, right, So he goes to the truck.

There were seat belts. It was your mom doing that, right, And.

That's how you knew, like a really dedicated mom in the in the sixties, because she was missing an arm, right, that's right, like her kid was all messed up at a den on his head or whatever because it didn't quite work because her arm came clean off when they both went forward. But he was still alive. She didn't have an arm. It was a badge of honor back then.

Yeah, and this is another way you knew it was a day from way back in the day. The House and the Senate passed it unanimously.

This is so quaint.

They all got together and said, well, this is what's good for the American people.

So this is our job to do this.

And they went yeah, yeah, pretty sweet, pretty sweet time.

Pretty sweet. So they passed this thing. And the upshot of it was that now the auto industry would be regulated. It was just the way it was going to be. Okay, And the auto industry said, okay, okay, fine, fine, but what about this. Why don't we agree to use something called a cost benefit analysis to decide if we a actually undertake any regulations you propose? Deal and the DOT and NHTSA was like, well oh no. In the auto industry went like that, and the DOTWO is like, all right, fine, fine,

Yeah, So if you don't know what a cost benefit analysis is, we call it the cruelest of all analyzes because it's basically just a math problem. You plug in numbers and you say, I plug in this, I plug in this.

Is it worth it to do this?

Right?

Which works great in.

A lot of circumstances if you're talking about I don't know, like a like what's a good example.

Or like if you're trying to figure out whether to go with tire distributor A or tire distributor, be kind of easy.

Right exactly.

But if you're talking about replacing a fuel tank because it's killing people, it gets a little sticky. Because one of the inputs on those math problems has to be the value of a human life.

There's no getting around it, no way around it.

Right.

So the NHTSA say said, well, I guess we should go ahead and figure out how to quantify a human life. They all went home and like kissed their children. Then they came back to work, and what they came up with they actually did it. There was a nineteen seventy two document that said, everybody, this is the value of a human life. We figured it out two hundred thousand, seven hundred and twenty five dollars. And what they did was it was just like, who, yeah, really, I.

Thought mine was half that. So what they did was they figured out.

The average life span or the average age I guess, of a person who dies in a car wreck, and then subtracted it from the average lifespan of the Americans at the at the time in the Iraq such as and they came up with They came up with thirty seven years. Those people who die in a car wreck would have lived thirty seven more years. And then they said, well, how much would those people make in that time? And they said, well, two hundred thousand, seven and twenty five dollars.

Stab exactly again, the cruelest of all analyses. So Mark Dowie is sorting through all the file cabinets of the DOT and the.

The National Highway Transportation Safety Administration. It's no faster to say it abbreviated.

I know, I would just mess it up though. So he's sorting through all this stuff, he's going through file cabinets. Everyone's worried, and he comes across to document a memo called Fatalities associated with the Crash induced fuel Leakage and Fires. And over the years people come to think like, this is the smoking gun.

This was pinto.

It was about pinto fires from getting hit in the rear, and that's what it is. It really wasn't that. What it was was it was about all cars in the United States.

And whether they caught on fire when they rolled over.

However, the one damning thing in this memo was that Ford used that number, well almost that number to quantify the value of a human life. But Ford rounded down.

They rounded down the value of a human life, just you know, to make the math easier.

Yeah, they made it two hundred grand.

They cut off the seven hundred and twenty five dollars, just made it a straight up two hundred.

Right.

So they estimated like one hundred and eighty fatalities and one hundred and eighty injuries in car fires post collision car fires every year in the US. And they said, well, that would cost society forty nine million dollars in lost productivity.

That was kind of a do you guys see fight club? Remember Edward Norton's job. That was kind of what he did right a little bit.

Yeah, he had to kind of calculate whether or not it was worth taking a recall exactly. And Ford, thanks to Dowie, had just been caught red handed with one of these submitted in the public record.

All right, so part of the Motor Vehicle Safety Act was something and all these bills this gets a little wonky, but bear with me. They're all broken down into subcategories, and one of them was called Vehicle Safety Standard three oh one and three yoho one was basically our government getting together and saying, you know what, we feel like you should be able to get hit from the rear at like twenty miles an hour and not explode it into a fiery ball.

We've talked about it. We know what you're going to say, Detroit, what we've talked about. We feel very strongly about this.

We feel that's reasonable.

Democrats push for thirty, Republicans pushed for ten. They met in the middle at twenty.

There are people from copp County here on sure. They are not happy with you right now, so that's right. They are going to let us know via email after this show.

I'm so angry that the way you feel about life. So they settle in twenty miles an hour and that was Safety Standard three oh one. But here's the rub for Ford and the Pinto is they had a problem on their hands. They could with stand twenty miles an hour, they could barely withstand five, so this would have meant a complete redesign on the Pinto.

So they came up with a.

Plan basically to shall we say delay the process.

Yeah, I Coca went kill it, killed that thing, killed that standard three oh one, I hate it.

And they were happy because they didn't have to kill a human.

Right for once.

So what Clowson is, Oh, yeah, I didn't even mean to say that, but.

Getting dark pretty well.

So here's what they did.

They got attorneys on the case and they said, here's what you'll do. You're gonna you're gonna file these arguments on the last day that you can file an argument, and you're gonna get all this data together and you're gonna shove it in their face and say here's an argument, dot dot U, and now you got to look through all this stuff and you have to satisfy that argument. So they may not have even cared if the argument

Nine years.

They started arguing against it in nineteen sixty eight, and standard three oh one went into effect in nineteen seventy seven.

Right, yeah, boo. So there's kind of like.

A silver lining to this whole thing, and that Ford's objections actually forced the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration to study the problem of car fires, to answer Ford's objections and say, no, actually, you're wrong, they're kind of a problem.

Yeah.

They were giving them reams of data and then they went, oh, we just gave them.

Right, But the NHTSA also had to like contract with people to study this stuff. And what they were finding was that car fires in America were way, way more of a problem than even Ford I think realized at the time. They turned up some stats like four hundred thousand cars were burning up on the American Highway every year, burning more than three thousand.

People of death. Is that high?

Four hundred thousand cars.

Yeah, maybe it's a little high. I don't know, but this is what they turned up.

It sounds high. Here's a here's one forty percent of all calls to all fire departments in the United States and the nineteen sixties were cars on fire.

Isn't that nuts?

Just the last time you guys trust a car on fire. This would be like an like you would see one and a couple of miles later, there's another one.

Well yeah, And this was people didn't have cell phones, so you would have to see a car on fire, have a dime in your pocket, be near enough to a payphone.

To report it, right, And that was forty percent, and have made.

The judgment that there was a chance that the person was going to make it in the time that you went to the payphone. You know, there's a lot of factors here. Forty percent seems high. Like if you had a Christmas parade in your town, there was a pretty good chance a couple of those cars were just going to catch fire in the middle of the parade. This is insane. And this is what the NHTSA was finding from studying this problem. There's a University of Miami study.

That was the cane saying that.

All right, so.

Wait, wait, wait, we got to take another Mbrank Okay, everybody.

We'll be right back.

Don't get up, We'll be right back right after these messages.

Softly soft, Hey, everybody, we're back.

It's a lot better live. Huh.

They get it now.

So, the original draft of the Motor Vehicle Safety Act had had a part that provided it was very controversial.

It provided for criminal.

Sanctions, criminal sanctions against executives of auto companies, and these well, let's be honest, these white dudes that were executives of these auto companies said, well, I think I don't think you really mean that right.

That means we could go to prison, you understand.

I like, I think we should. Uh, we have some lobbyists on the case. And so they put the lobbyists on the case, and they did get that lobbied out of the Safety Act. Unfortunately, Yeah, I say, unfortunately, that's me talking.

Sure, Well, you're speaking for both of us, buddy, And.

They end up with like five or ten thousand dollars.

Yeah, in nineteen seventy seven, money which today translates to like forty grand. So if you were an auto executive who knowingly put a dangerous car out on the American market, you could face a fine of forty thousand dollars and from what we understand, that's like once one time.

Fine, Yeah, that was it.

So it would be up to the media and the courts to force Forward to do something about its Pinto And boy.

Did they ever the drumbeat started, isn't that right?

Yeah?

It started with Dowie, right, Like, Mark Dowie gets this gets a lot of credit for the Pinto article, and definitely he definitely had a big impact, but he gets some undue credit for getting Standard three to ZHO one to come into effect because it came into effect pretty shortly after the Pinto madness article came out. It turns out later research turned.

Up that the NHTSA had.

Said, Ford, we're so sick of you arguing against standard three oh one. How long will it take for you guys to get your cars up to standard three TOZHO one level, which again is a twenty mile an hour rear impact that doesn't lead to fuel loss.

And four it was like, I don't know, seems like a.

Big job, right, four years And the NHTSA was like, you know, it took you two years to design the car from scratch, right, They're like like, yeah, this is huge, massive improvements to make it safe. So four years so the NHTSA said, fine, fine, in nineteen seventy seven, it'll come into effect. So it was just coincidence, but Dowy's article did have a big impact in the way of like shaping public opinion.

Yeah, for sure.

So what happens is there's starting to be some lawsuits. People that are getting burned alive in pintos and other cars say well, maybe maybe we could sue somebody, and that is that a duck.

Class a duck in the house. Well, okay, let's get back on tracks. Get back on track.

Works, doesn't it. You're all charmed? Thank you for taking that one for us, Chuck.

Jerry cut that part all right, so by that's delicious, it's good.

Yeah, bullet bullet, bran bourbon.

It's called buzz marketing everyone. They don't even pay us for that yet. So they're these people that have this job where they recreate accidents for sometimes it's for court, for attorneys for the state. Sometimes it's for insurance companies. But they recreate these accidents to kind of show what went down. And some of them started to say, and again it was a rat started to say, wait a minute, I think that if you get in a car wreck,

Yeah, they go back to San Diego hippie.

Well the notion from from America.

Everyone sort of agreed to the thing where like you get in a car wreck and die, like you got in the car wreck, it's your fault.

It was a driver's fault.

Yeah, it's a driver's fault. You can't make cars safer in the case of an accident. It seems weird now because it's all we think about is auto safety, but it was just not on the radar. LEI Coca was not the only one, but that.

Was thanks to Detroit, like saying, it's your fault, you're a dummy.

But everyone agreed to it. Everyone was.

Yeah, in in Detroit's defense, at the time, everybody was drunk while they were driving, way more than today, so they kind of had a point. But still they could still make the cars safe and should have even even more back then.

Yeah, for sure.

So these I don't know, we call them accident recreationists.

Reconstruction reconstructionists, recreationists, or the Civil War dudes.

Does anyone here do that?

Any Civil War reenactors?

There's three who are just sitting there like right.

Now, all right, quick sidebar Emily and I went hiking at you guys ever go to Sweetwater.

State Park.

See local show.

Emily remember this.

We went hiking in Sweetwater and there were some Civil War reenactors, but it wasn't like what I know about Civil War reenactors is that they throw a big battle party or whatever it's called, and they act like it's a big war and they go bang you die or don't die and bang bang, and then that's sort of what happens.

I have no idea what they do, but.

It's a big show, like on a field like I went to one when I was a kid.

I remember that.

But these dudes were just hanging out in the woods at sweet Quater State Park. They were like they had a fire going and it was it was like three or four people. It was a couple of dudes and a couple of ladies and in their outfits and they were cooking like I guess, like a squirrel on a spit.

That's Huckeby style.

It was no organized thing, and I was just hiking by. It was like a year ago. I was like, well, that's weird.

Did you guys just like back slowly into the ward, don't make eye contacted me.

I guess I approved because it wasn't war, so that's kind of cool.

It was you know, they were prepping for war.

So oh okay, they were gathering their strength from squirrels, plowing their muskets to go faint.

Very strange.

Don't go to Sweet Waters, by the way, don't go there.

No, not after that, Okay.

I didn't know if there's something out like there's a lot of abandoned tires in the ravine or something.

All right, so where are you Jared cut that whole story.

I don't know. I think it was a good story. I think we should keep it.

Jerry, is she dead?

Skyticle? Remember the sky?

All right?

So these recreationists that's where I was, are saying, uh, maybe you should sue the car company, like because cars should be safer, And people went, oh, well that's not a bad idea. Yeah, because every revolutionary idea.

These guys were saying. With the Pinto in particular, I'm starting to notice a lot of charred bodies that are otherwise in perfect shape, look great aside from the charred part, right, Like they don't have any contusions, they don't have any broken bones. So like these accents are happening and really low speed. Maybe it's actually a design flaw with Ford. And so the lawyers were like, that sounds great, and they started circling the.

Courthouses like the flying Monkeys and.

The Wizard of Oz and dropping lawsuits down on the Ford's head. And at first it was like, bring it, We're Ford. You know, juries are made up of like upstanding registered voters, right, We're going to be just fine. And Ford won a couple at first, and then they started losing them and Ford was still kind of like, we're still we're still taking the jury trial on. But the whole thing turned on this one trial in nineteen seventy seven in Orange County, California, and Ford lost big time.

Yeah, they lost, and this was in seventy seven. They lost one hundred and twenty five million dollars and damages to a boy named He's thirteen years old, Richard Grimshaw was very sad. He's burned very badly, and the driver of the car died and one hundred and twenty five million bucks back I mean, it's a lot of money now, but back then it's a ton of money. And it's what they call, you've heard of like a symbolic award, where they'll just hit a company with a ton of

It's still pretty It seems a lot.

Of money back then, of course, but that initial figure like really made a point and sent shockwaves through the auto.

Industry, and so Ford changed its tactics. They're like, okay, well maybe we'll start settling.

And we got another quote and.

Chuck reads it way better than me, so if you don't mind, Yeah, this.

Was an attorney for Ford, and I'll read it in the voice of Lionel Hunts of the Simpsons, the great Phil Hartman. Uh, here we go. We'll never go to a jury again, not in a fire case. Jury is a just too sentimental. They see those charred remains and forget the evidence. No, sir, we'll settle thanks for that. That is a he wasn't overheard saying that a TV reporter stuck a microphone in his face and he said that.

Right, that was his quote that he gave, Like Amazon Alexa didn't overhear him saying that to his wife at home later, right exactly.

So Ford was like, Okay, kill that guy, that lawyer.

Yeah, we're going.

To start settling. And so they did start settling. There's some benefits to settling. Well, there's some drawbacks too. One is that it tells the entire world that you know, your case is terrible, but it says, well, there's going to be lower payouts to the lawyers, and there's going to be lower payouts.

To the defendants.

And it also cuts down on discovery. So discovery, if you go to jury, the plaintiff, the person filing the case, has legal access to any and all documents that you have that prove their case against you.

Right.

So with all these jury there was this steady trickle or flow even of Yeah, it wasn't even a trickle.

You know.

Everyone took their shirts off and they put like.

War paint on, and just FOURB was starting to get a little nervous. They were like, like US America said, you.

So that got a little weird. Yeah, thank you for clapping, Thank you, buddy.

You get a T shirt that bordered on performance art, did it?

I think so?

Had I taken my shirt off, it would have been.

For oh my god, do it.

No, you're out of your mind, you guys until blood comes.

Out of your mouths.

And I still wouldn't take my shirt off. There's nothing you can do to make me take my shirt.

Actually, I would probably be my shirt off, which would be uh.

That does feel good, though. Now we've reached David Lee Roth level.

I wish I had another shot.

Oh my god, all right.

That's so shy. That's just having common values. Not taking your shirt off in public when people tell you to.

That's normal stuff. Man, you did good is what I'm saying. You Jerry cut out the last series.

Shame on all of you.

I'metown show, all right.

So finally, in nineteen seventy seven, safety three oh one came into effect. What we talked about, would you should be able to hit a car from twenty miles an hour not be a flaming death ball? And the nineteen seventy seven new Pento debuted with a very brand new safety feature that one dollar one pound piece of plastic in between the flaming death bolts and the gas dagg.

That they've known since nineteen sixty eight would save lives.

Boom, thank you.

So Leiah Coca by this time and Ford in general, were scared to death of the PR crisis that had been growing and growing. And the whole thing again was started by Dowie's article. Not only did he get the Mother Jones readership involved, he really kind of awakened the mainstream media to the thing. So everybody was reporting on this, people were suing for it.

It was a huge, big.

Problem, and I had Coca told everybody clam up. That's actually a direct quote from his book, his nineteen eighty eight book. I used to think in a happier time. That was called straight Talk. That's a Dolly Parton movie. It's called talking Straight job.

I gotta say you sent me this initial Josh said this wrote this show, and he sent it and he said straight talk, And I was like, did Dolly Parton play lee?

Still it still says I never corrected it.

I never saw the movie. That would be great.

You never saw straight talk?

Oh no, that's so ashamed. Is that gonna be your movie? Crush pick?

Oh maybe that's buzz marketing. Now I have to do it.

No, no, no, no, So yeah, it was called talking Straight In the end, I think straight talk might have been the working title.

Okay, but in it he says, like we were so afraid of this PR crisis bankrupting forward. If you could imagine that that they just said, no one talked, don't talk to anybody, just clam up. And they thought that if somebody said something the wrong way and like there was a scary turn of phrase or something like that that was just taking the wrong way, it would be seen as an admission of guilt. The problem was to the public that the fact that they weren't talking was seen.

As an admission of guilt. More than anything.

Yeah, it was a big deal.

Like sixty Minutes was literally knocking at the door, like morally safer?

Was it? Ford knocking at the door?

And he said, I'm morally safer And if you're not intimidated, now, I got Ed Bradley with me. We've sent two of our best dudes, so you should be pretty worried.

And Ford was crouched down under their window, like are they still out there?

It's just so funny. Is I used to love sixty Minutes?

Sure?

You know when I was like thirteen. It's so such a weird show to watch as a kid.

It's sophisticated.

Yeah, that was not so investigated, apparently you were. Yeah, I was not. I don't know what.

I like the little right, and then after that you're just like all right, I'll turn the channel.

Well, and you know, and also now I think about I think it came on after either like the Wonderful Warble of Disney.

Or that was great or Wow Kingdom or something. Anyway, I don't know what that is, sir.

That was like Full House was on there, that was like the nineties.

You're way off, but yeah, I'm so old.

Do you see this?

Beard?

So much gray, like the Davy Crockett story Hour was that one?

Let just make that up.

Well, I'm not that old night writer.

That was a good I had a good theme song.

This has devolved into like shout out your favorite old thing.

We're almost done. Everybody call that.

All right, we're hit in the end.

So uh. Nineteen seventy eight, In June, they started their own recall proceedings. In sixty minutes, was on the on the door, they're knocking, they're knocking, and Ford says, you know what, We're gonna undertake a voluntary recall if anyone believe that the will make us look so good of one point four and I don't know if we mentioned the Pinto was a big, big seller, Like, despite all this, it was a super super popular car.

It was like the best selling subcompact of the seventies.

It very much was.

It was It's Winona Ryder's car and Stranger Things Too.

Oh yeah, I haven't seen it. I don't know.

Was it her car and Stranger Things one?

I don't remember, but they feature the Pinto and Stranger Things too.

Night Rider.

Spoiler thanks a lot, right now, I know what car she drives, all right? So they undertake a one point four million car recall on just the Pinto alone, but also another car they had, right.

The Mercury Bobcat right, which was its like more luxurious but equally deadly twin. And we're not quite sure like what made it so luxurious?

No idea.

Maybe it had like an onboard like blow dryer brush to like to feather your hair with while you were going home.

What were you sit in the back seat and they just have the thing from the hairplace that just right lowers over your head.

That is the pinnacle of luxury that we can think of for the nineteen seventies.

God bless the seventies.

All right.

The bad news is, though, and this.

Is very sad to stop laughing, between the time four decided to undergo that recall in June and the time it told consumers, like internally they said, all right, June, we'll do this September we announced it to the public. In those few months, that was a very very sad crash.

Rear rear end.

You need another shot, no, a re random impact where where some young women died. And there was a prosecutor in Indiana named Michael Constantino that said you know what, I've had it, I've done.

I know the deal.

I'm going to bring these dudes on trial for murder.

Murder, like he filed criminal homicide charges against the executives at Ford for that crash.

Yeah, very big deal.

Yeah.

So, and it wasn't just like a flash in the pan like this trial actually or these charges went to trial.

It was over like three years.

And over the three years, everybody was reporting on Ford executives on trial for murder every day, and the charges got dismissed, but the public criminalizing of Ford's executives were it was huge. Like it was a bad PR crisis before that. It couldn't get worse than that, your executives on trial for murder, right.

Yeah, for sure.

So despite all this, despite the fact that the Pinto was a flaming death trap to a certain extent, when you look at the numbers today and when you look at the real statistics, it was not much worse and sometimes better than other cars on the market at the time that would kill you from.

Fire, like the Vega or the Grimlin. They would kill you, right, So we tried to figure out and actually it turns out there was this nineteen ninety three article in Harvard Law Review where this guy said, I've done the math. I've actually figured it out, and here's the number I came up with.

It was twenty seven.

Twenty seven people is probably the number of people who died in low speed rear collision impact fires in pintos.

And it's over like ten years, like millions of cars.

Twenty seven. It's not that bad, actually.

Right, it was way less than I I think Mother Jones said like five hundred to nine hundred. Yeah, and this is so mother Jones. They said that was a conservative estimate that we just made up. And then I think sixty minutes Chuck's beloved sixty Minutes said like thousands of people had died in Pinto's, no one knew, so.

They were just making up numbers.

But this nineteen ninety three article said, no, it was probably twenty seven actually exactly.

So in the end we look back and the Pinto was, even though it could have been a flaming death trap, what it really was was a very bad victim of pr Yeah, you know, yep.

So, like the problem was was that the way you could die in a Pinto was just too bad to be allowed to continue, right, the idea that, like if you got in a rear in collision and the passenger compartment filled up with gas.

That's bad enough.

But the idea that it could happen at such a low speed that you would still be conscious when you caught fire and burned a death. The American public said, Nope, that can't happen. It doesn't matter. And so thanks to Dowie's article and sixty minutes, eventually, for sure, the Pinto was basically laid to waste as far as the American public was concerned, and still has a bad reputation today.

That's right.

In the end, the Pinto took career impact, but not in the good.

Way, not in the good way, in every kind of bad.

You know, that's true. I never thought about that.

So in the end, mister Lee Ayacoca would go on to write his legend with the Chrysler Corporation by bringing them back from kind of the brink of bankruptcy into huge success.

In the nineties.

In the eighties, and he was named I think by Portfolio magazine as the eighteenth greatest CEO of all time, just ahead of Oprah, which is.

Both team Oprah. Up Here.

Wrote A couple of books wrote that biography that Josh talked about, that Dolly Parton did not star in, and another called Where Have all the Leader's Gone? And mister Iacocca is still live today, the ripe old age of ninety two in bel Air neighborhood of Los Angeles, California.

Where there is nary a Pinto to be found.

That's right, and that is the story of the Ford Pinto.

Yeah, thanks, yeah, good luck. Stuff you should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.