SYSK Live: Back When Ford Pintos Were Flaming Deathtraps

April fourth, d C April five. St. Louis, May and Cleveland, Ohio. Come out and see us. Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from House Stuff Works dot com. Hey what, Actually, I shouldn't say that yet, Chuck, because we're going to start the podcast later. This is like a pre thing, that's right, a pre welcome to this episode, a very special episode of Stuff you should Know. That's right because well it's live, and not only that, where are we live.

We are live in our beloved town of Atlanta's right, Hotlanta. Well no you don't. No one calls it that everybody, but we we did this special show at the Buckhead Theater sold it out by the way, UM, and it was a it was a benefit show. Yeah, it was pretty great. We toured this topic in quite a few cities last year. We had a lot of fun, and

we decided, actually, is your idea, give you full credit. Hey, let's make this Atlanta local show a benefit show and give all of the dough to uh charities of our choice. So mine, Chuck was the National Down Syndrome Society UM, which is this great organization who advocate for people with Down syndrome obviously UM, but one of the things that the National Down Syndrome Society is dedicated to, especially right now, they have something called law Syndrome uh checkout law syndrome

dot org. And basically they're trying to get the laws changed that make people with Down syndrome choose between pursuing like a career and actually being able to support themselves or uh not in staying at home and living with their parents but still getting access to the really great government Medicaid healthcare that they need. So UM, the n d s S is saying they shouldn't have to choose, that we should want both of them, uh want them to have both of them. So that's that's their push

right now. Uh, and you can go to n d s S dot org and they have all sorts of ways for you to donate and you can do that and feel great about yourself. It's great. And they actually sent people from the society to the show and we met them and they were just they were wonderful and what it was a great place to uh to pick what a great way to donate your money people. Yeah, shout out to Colleen and Cale for coming to the show, Thank you very much. And for my charity, I picked

the Lifeline Animal Project right here in Atlanta. They are a sort of local grassroots see animal rescue organization. Uh. They have a few locations in Atlanta there to terrific. They have low costs spaying neuter programs. Obviously you can uh, you can adopt, you can volunteer. Um. They're they're really just great and they do it all um not for fame or glory or money, but because Atlanta has a serious, serious problem with stray pets. And they're just the nicest people.

So it's great that you guys are supporting them, and it's uh, it's very worthy cause they are who Emily and I are charitable with every year on our own anyway, and it was great to efficiently partner with them, uh and be able to combine with our regular donating and write them a big old fat check thanks to Stuff you Should Know listeners. Yeah, so, so here's the thing. We donated of our proceeds from that show, and we twisted every arm involved. Um, how stuff works, got T

shirts made up. Legendary super fan and friend Aaron Cooper donated his time to design the T shirts. Uh. The people who made the T shirts donated them for free. All the proceeds from the T shirts went to National Down Syndrome Society and Lifeline Animal Rescue. So what we're trying to say now is we're releasing this episode and we are hoping that you are beloved Stuff you Should Know listeners, Well, take the time to go make a donation yourself in exchange for this free live episode that

we're bringing you. That's right, And if you want to just donate regular style, you can go to Lifeline Animal dot org. That would be great, but they made it super easy and set up a text donation campaign, so all you have to do is text Lifeline whatever amount of money. So text Lifeline dollar sign five to five zero one five, and you have just donated five bucks

or however much money you want to donate. It's really really easy, right, And you can go to the n d S S dot org website and you can donate there. Um and they make it pretty easy on you. I believe both donations are donations to both organizations are text deductible. It's got that bonus two. That's right. So one more time for Lifeline, you can text to the number five, text the words Lifeline dollar sign and whatever number you want to donate, and then that's n D S S

dot org and away with the show. 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 g A good wow. Hey yeah they are not too shabby. Everybody. Yeah, So let's start. Man, I feel great. So I feel great. Since, uh, 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 way back machine. So for those of you who have seen us lie before, you know, The Way Back Machine is made up. It's not a real thing, you but it does take a twinkle in your eye and a heartful of magic to get into the way Back Machine. So I hope all of you have that going on right now. That was my best Sarah 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. I'm purpose sorry, ma'am. Yeah, I told you. And we're gonna fly in does 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 I A 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 um and he had a lot of cred around the company that he worked at called Ford Motor Company's tried his 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 in the lead of the Ford Mustang project, then you've kind of bought your

ticket in the car industry. If you have 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. Now you've got a Wan shirt on, you probably should know those lyrics. But I know I know that lyric. Yeah, I didn't know. It's my understanding, right everybody. Yeah, I thought it was a Volkswagen Beetle. No. No, but that does come up starting now because Lee I 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, we liked our cars very large, 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 Hitler in a way. My mom is over there, she bought that car. She's going like uh. And then the Toyota Corolla was also killing people, right, killing Detroit, I should say, 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 even remember, honestly, Oh no, I do remember. His name is Bunky Knudsen. If you're the president of car company and your name is Bunky Knudson, you gotta know you have a target on your back. Right, nobody's gonna let that stand for very long, especially not Lee.

I a coca. Yeah. The only thing Bunky Ninson and that year would have been president of is the the super secret, super secret Treehouse Playboy magazine club led by Bunkie News, right or the local Union of the Guys who sell those like monkeys that play the symbols on the street, you know, the wind up ones. Alright. So regardless of that, Bunky Knutson was in charge and Leah Coca had his eight had sights set on that job. And so they settle things in the traditional way in

the car industry at the time, which was arm wrestling. Serious. So Leaa Coca had this thing where um, and 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 shirtslee of off and went like that. So when he did this, the Bunky nuts in and Bunky saw that oil bicep. He knew his time running for a company had grown short. That's right, funky news, and knew what time it was that was totally made up. You all realized the stunt silence threw me off a

little bit. It was back to the Treehouse for Bunky. So Leah Coca found himself in charge of Forward, and he said, we gotta 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 sman mark, kind of a Newts and move. But he named it Project Phoenix, which is very cute and a little ironic once you know what this is about. And he said, I want a car I want on the market, and what twenty

four months? Yeah, and normally it took like forty three months dating car from concept to production. I cocy said, no, twenty four so super fast, and it can't weigh more than two thousand sounds 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 a couple of collaps, a couple of booze, a couple of groans, and a lot of like we're gonna 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, um, it had a problem. We don't know a lot about cars, 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. It's asleep when you're still in the car. Has anyone seen the movie Top Secret? Remember that one? There's there's a scene where Valkimer I think, is on a motorcycle. He's being chased by Germans, and um, 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 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 is 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 pot shots at the Pinto. Some have written some pretty great stuff. Um, you want to take the first one? Yeah.

The first one was from Popular Mechanics magazine and they said, Argue dobably, the most dangerous fuel tank of all time was a rear mounted vessel installed on the seventy one through seventies Ford Pinto. It's possibly the best example of what happens when poor engineering meets corporate negligence. Good quote, I got one. There was this guy named Dr Leslie Ball. He was the chief safety officer for NASA's manned Space program.

So this guy new safety. Right. Um, 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 wanted to try. 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, um, easy bake ovens and other stuff

that have killed like millions people. You know, he's including everything ever built basically easy, big governance 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 Tippitt we ran acrost that we just love. There was a radio spot for the Pinto in the seventies and Ford had to get there um 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, alright. 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, because you know, accidents happen. No

one thought about it. No. That's made even worse by the fact that a car critic would later call that bumper a little more than ornamentation, right, like cars 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 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

fuel 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. The mechanics say, we don't know what that is, but um, I did some research and here's what I'm gonna call it. It's the magic box that makes the car go room. It's pretty accurate. What's what's so funny is like we pride ourselves like chasing down every tidbit of information when it comes to cars. Were just like out no idea. Who would want to

hear a live podcast about a car. So 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 a right do you hear that the Flamings Faults

behind us? That came out uh on the wrong night? So, like I said, there was 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

the problem with the Pinto better than anybody. And if I may, okay, Mark Daway said, if you ran into a Pinto you were following it over thirty miles, the rear end of the car would buckle like an accordion right up to the back seat, and the tube bleeding to the gas tank cap would be ripped away from the tank itself and gas would immediately begin squashing onto

the road around the car. Right the buckle. Gas tank would be jammed up against the differential housing, which contained 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. 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 four lit cigarettes in

every car at all times, with 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 at forty miles per hour, chances are excellent that it's doors with jam and you would have to stand by and watch its trap passengers burned to death. You're let's not me saying this your additional what do you call that? Pantomiming acting? Uh, it's it's in the pantomime trade fantastic

reading rainbow with Josh. Give LaVar Burton a run for his money, all right, So there was one thirty mile per hour crap dust with the pinto that found that all thirteen gallons, all thirteen gallons uh 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 coming out. It's so fast you can't pump or take a gas in sixty seconds.

So the Pinto is spilling gas faster than you can pump gas. Think about that next time you go to the gas station. Yeah, I think, thank God, I'm not driving in early 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 of the Pinto is a flaming

death trap. It turns out in retrospect, the Pinto was really not much worse than any other car and it's class at the time, which is not to say that the Pinto wasn't a flaming death trap, but instead all cars were flaming death traps. At the time. The idea of being safe if you got into a crash was totally lost on Detroit at a time. 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. Usually when you say the great thing in the sky, that means you're totally dead. It's just in the sky. Okay, alright, Great, we're going to the Great Periodical in the sky and

we're all living. All right, it's great. We're gonna go back to the nineteen seventy seven section and we're going to find the nineteen seventies seven year for Mother Jones Magazine. Has everyone ever heard of? Mother Jones Magazine is still around today. One might characterize it as slightly left at center maybe, and it was very much the same back of the day. And in this in this September October ninety 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 um. Mark Dowie was the quote you read earlier, and he was a journalist there at the time, and uh, 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, uh, if you don't know who Ralph Nader is, he is a great American.

He uh it was a consumer crusader who cared really about one thing in life, and that is making sure that corporations didn't screw you over and they kept you safe. And he it's not like he got rich doing it. Ralph Nader was a great, great dude, right. He like lived like a hermit to show that it 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 I think about it. It was like

probably one of the safer hot places. But yeah, I bet it was the best hot plate on the market, you think so, but he bought it with his own money, he did so any Ralph Nader was there, They got everyone together and they had this big press conference in Washington, d C. And uh Dowie starts to poke around a little bit and do a little more research for this article, and uh say, you know, I need to go to these need to go to d O T and need to go what was the other one called the an

h T S A once that stand for nationale man the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration. Correct some mouthful because a lot of common words, but when you put them together like that, it's tough. Uh 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 test 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 Lee, I coke its totally. Did He's like you see that He'd probably like it was like go to sleep forever. But that was just to get the ball rolling, he had goons kill the rest of uh and you then you filed the crash tests with the

d O T that was the durable thing. So dawis 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 a spy camera. And he figured out very very quickly that Ford was well aware of the notion that it's

Pinto's were flaming death traps. Right, And from those forty crash tests, he found that eleven of them, and 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 it like the dealership, they lost gas and an impact of twenty miles an hour over Not very good, right, not good at all. So three of these cars passed the test, and all three of them had been um 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 sank solve the problem. 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 thousand pounds and

twelve thousand dollars the pounds and change. Okay, gravity has 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 they finally the final thing they did was they I think they line that was the inside of the outside of the gas tank, the inside of the gas to the inside of the gas sank with a rubber bladder and

that worked. Uh, but no one likes saying the word bladder head forward. It's too gross. It works, but it's crody, So we're getting out. The point is they had three solutions before the ford was being rolled off the line, uh, and they chose to ignore all three of them, right, big point here right um. And in addition to this two thousand pounds two thousand dollar 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, um, somebody makes a model of it, some dude like works it in clay, You run it into like a couple of walls or something like if you figure out how many like light like a cigarette lighters are going to go into it. There's a lot of thought put into it.

And then once all this stuff is pre production stuff, uh is done and you know what the car is gonna look like, then you begin this process called tooling. And tooling is where you make the machines that are going to make the car that you're manufacturing. Right with the Pinto, they didn't do that. They started designing the car and at about the same time they started making the machines that we're going to make that car. Before they even knew ultimately what the final design was going

to be. So by the time they figured out that they had a really dangerous fuel tank on their hands, it was too late. The tooling was underway, two million dollars worth of machines have been made, and Ford said, yeah, so when they discovered this, um, we have a couple of quotes here from actual engineers that worked there at the time, and they said, did anyone go to Lee I a coca and say, hey, we have a problem

on our hands with his gas tank? And this one engineer from the Mother Jones article said hell no. But if it was like so, we didn't say it like that, he went like, hell no. Right in my mind he went, hell no, no, uh, that person would have been fired. Safety wasn't a popular subject around for it in those days, and with Lee it was taboo or taboo like if you're a normal person, if you talk normally, mh to too, taboo, tattoo, taboo. Alright, deletrious,

that's a deep cut. Yeah, it was about twenty people in here they got that one. That's all right, all right? So I had Cook had a saying around for it at the time, which was safety doesn't sell Uh. And here's another quote from another engineer. Safety is in the issue trunk spaces. You have no idea how that the competition is over trunk space. Do you realize that if we put a safer gas tank in the Pinto, you can only get one set of golf clubs in the

trunk 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 out a thing being Yahoo, Yeah, doesn't have to be Google. Yeah, go to Netscape and uh or if you're a paranoid type duck duck go 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 Ford Pinto ads and they're all kinds of great ads from the old days. And there's one where there's this, uh, well, there's this couple that um, 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 for there's like a ditch. It's kind of weird looking. And it says this in the text, just split 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 back in your golf clubs, those groceries and those big pieces of luggage pack it all in. You make it sound really dirty. There's big room in your little Pinto. I'm the sick oh, because I'm using duck duck up. It's the sexiest ad

of the seventies, as read by me. I like old ads in old magazines because like you can smell them afterward, 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 fantastic smell. You mean, like musty. What magazines are you reading? Just any old magazine I pick up, just like alright, Jerry gout that part, shre No, I'm not doing my shot yet, and everybody calmed down. My niece left to go to bed.

So are there any other kids here. All right, you have a very deep voice, young boy. Right here. I'm seven beer 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. Alright, Chuck, we're over here listening and we're doing great. Frankly, this is going really well.

I agreed. So before we go to add break, everyone, we just want to say, uh, here's a quick reminder. Go to nd s S dot org to donate to the National Down Cynder Society, And Chuck, what's the number for Lifeline. You can text to the number of five zero one, text the word Lifeline, dollar sign and whatever amount you want to give. All right, and now we'll we're from our sponsor. M hm, hey everybody, we're back. Yeah, magical works. Yeah, thank you, sir. I am wearing me Andy's.

Oh you know what we should say this? That's a freebee man. Well we'll cut 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 rehearse tangents. You've heard him that. 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 Andy's to us for us to autograph so she could frame the underwear for her husband's Christmas gifts. Now that is a deep cut.

That's a true fan. At least she wasn't like, and you wear them first, Yeah, each of you pass it off to the other one, then mail them back to me. Both of those are like, oh yeah, send him in totally do that. I sent smell like an old magazine, you know. Right when she got that in the mail? Ah, chuck, uh chuck, I said, I didn't what guys, what why would you do that? No one else saw that. I wish you probably edited this part out to jaire this guy right here. So I send that email to our

head of sales though, and he was so delighted. He's like, oh, I can't wait to send this to me Andy's. They're you're autographing underwear. They're not gonna believe it. That's that's like David Lee Roth level, except we're autographing me Andy's for a fan, some dude, it's not David Lee Roth right, all right, everybody, we're back. I'm kind of thinking, sure you do it again, though, because you just said that, Hey, everybody, we're back. I think I just stepped on you. And

stop laughing, everybody, we need to clean I said, stop laughing. Hey, everybody, we're back. Thanks for hanging there on. Thank you. That was a really long appe. We know where we were. Now, Well, I got it, I got it 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 in 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 w TF. It turns out that back in the sixties, the American auto industry was like the last great unregulated industry in 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. Big corporations love to look out for everyday Americans, all right, But at the time there was a fatality rate a k A 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. Uh. He also had one called hot Plates Unsafe at Any Temperature. So so quite as well. Has anyone actually read Unsafe in Any Speed? Don't feel bad, We haven't either, Okay, good? So he released his book in nine 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. 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 gonna open up like a ripe candle op when it comes in contact with it, right, yeah. And the reason that this would happen for both instances because there's no such thing as seatbelts right. So he goes to the it was your right. And that's how you knew, like a really dedicated mom in the in

the sixties because she was missing an arm. That's like her kid was all messed up at a DNA 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. So Ralph Nader makes this makes writes this book, and it gets released and it becomes like a bestseller almost immediately, and it has so much of an impact that the next year Congress passed the Highway Safety Act of Yeah, and then this is another way you knew. It was a day from way back in the day. Uh. The House and the Senate passed it unanimously. That's so coaint. 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 that went yeah, pretty sweet, pretty sweet time, pretty sweet. So they passed this thing. In the upshot of it was that now the auto industry would be regulated. It was just the way it was gonna 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 actually

undertake any regulations you proposed? Deal? And the d O T and n H T s A was like, well no in the auto industry went like that, And the d O T was like, all right, fine, fine, we don't want to arm wrestle over this one. Fine cost benefit analysis for everybody. 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?

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, 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, no way around it. Right.

So the nht s A 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 and they came back to work. And what they came up with the actually did it. There was a nineteen seventy two document that said, everybody, this is the value of a human life and figured it out two hundred thousand, seven hundred and twenty five dollars. And what they did was, yeah, really, I thought mine was half that.

So what they did was they figured out um, the the average lifespan or the average age I guess of a person who dies in a car wreck, and then subtracted it from the average lifespan of of the Americans at the at the time in the Iraq, such as UM, and they came up with They came up with thirty seven years, and those people who die in a car wreck would have lived thirty seven more years. And then they say, well, how much would those people make in

that time? And they said, well, two hundred thousand, seven five dollars. The problem with this is is that it really what they calculated was the cost to society and lost productivity if it's just wages, right, They didn't take into account some very important stuff like the value that the individual places on his or her own life, or whether their family wants him to come home after a car wreck, stuff like that. But they came up with this dollar amount and they said, there there. We'll get

better at it over time. But here's what it is. And it's a primitive step exactly again, the cruelest of all analyzes. So Mark Dowie is sorting through all the file cabinets of the d OT 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. Uh So he's starting through all this stuff. He's going through

file cabinets. Everyone's worried, and he comes across the document of memo called fatalities associated with crash and duced fuel leakage and fires. And over the years people come to think like, this is the smoking gun. This is 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 the rounded down the value of a human life, just you know, to make the math easier. Yeah, they made a two d grand. They cut off the seven five dollars, just made it a straight up two. Right. So they estimated like a hundred and eighty fatalities and a hundred and eighty injuries in car fires post collision

car fires every year in the US. And they said, well, that would cost society, uh, forty nine million dollars in lost productivity. But if you want us to do this eleven dollar per car safety improvement that would save those lives and those injuries, well it cost us the auto industry a hundred and thirteen million dollars, so I don't have to do it, right, great, see it Racketball's head. That was kind of 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, and Ford, thanks to Dowie, had just been caught red handed with one of these submitted in the public record. Alright, So part of the Motor Vehicle Safety Act was was something in 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 oh 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 gonna say, Detroit, but we've talked about we feel very strongly about this. We feel less reasonable. Democrats pushed for thirty, Republicans pushed for ten. They met in the middle at twenty. There are people from Cough County here.

They are not happy with you right now. They are going to let us know via email after this show, angry that the way you feel about life. So they settled in twenty miles an hour and that was Safety Standard three oh one. But here's the here's the rub for the Ford and the Pinto is they had a problem on their hands. They knew they couldn't understand twenty miles an hour. They could barely withstand five. So this

would have meant a complete redesign on the Pinto. So they come up with a plan basically too shall we say delay the process? Yeah, I kill it, killed it, think killed it standard three oh one. I hate it. And they were happy because they didn't have to kill a human right for once. So oh yeah, I didn't even mean to say that. But so here's what they did. They got the 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. D o t uh. And now you gotta look through all the stuff and have to satisfy that argument. So they may not have even cared if the argument held up or not. The point was they just wanted to delay things so they could keep selling the very dangerous Pinto.

So they did this, and they didn't they didn't file them concurrently all at once, which is sort of what you usually do in the law in court. Uh, they would file one, they would go look for them, and this holds water, it doesn't. They go great, They wait till the next deadline and file another one, and all of a sudden, they have delayed this process for nine years. Nine years. They started arguing against it in nineteen and

standard three oh one went into effect in nineteen seventies seven. Right, yeah, boom so um. 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 Fords the 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 reads. Right, But the n h t s A 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 at 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 uh of all calls to all fire departments in the United States, and the nineteen sixes were cars on fire. And that nuts just the last time, you guys, just car on fire. This would be like an like you would see one

in a couple of miles later, there's another one. Well, and 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 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 pay phone. You know, there's

a lot of factors here seems high. Like if you had a Christmas parade in your town, there's a pretty good chance a couple of those cars were just gonna catch fire in the middle of the parade. This is insane. And this is what the nhc s A was finding from studying this problem. There's a University of Miami study. They found that rear end impact fires were quote a clear and present hazard to all Pinto owners. That was the cane saying that. All right, so wait, wait, wait,

we're going to take another end brake. Everybody, We'll be right back. Don't get up, we'll be right back right after these messages. Alright, Chuck, last ad break, it's going pretty well. Just a hot crowd. You got that straight, buddy. And before we go to ad break, we just wanted to remind you again go to n DSS dot org to donate to the National Down Syndrome Society and Chuck, that's right. Or you can text to the number five zero one text lifeline dollar sign and the amount you

want to give. And it's that easy. Yeah, And it doesn't need to be an ORR proposition. It could be an and proposition to Speaking of propositions, here's a word from our sponsor. M hm, 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 uh had a part that provided it was very controversial.

It provided for criminal sanctions, criminal sanctions against executives of auto companies and these uh, well, let's be honest, these white dudes that were executives that these auto companies said, well, I I think I don't think you really mean that, right, but 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 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, and well, you're speaking for both of us, buddy, um. And they end up with like five or ten thousand dollars yea in seven money, which today translates to like forty grant. So if you were an auto executive who knowingly put a dangerous car out on the American market, you could facifying a forty dollars And from what we understand,

that's like once one time. Fine, that was it. So it would be up to the media and the courts to force forward to do something about It's Pinto and and boy did they ever The drumbeats started, isn't that right? Yeah? It started with Dowie, right, Like Mark Dowie gets this gets a lot of credit for um for the Pinto article, and definitely he definitely had a big impact, but he gets some undo credit for getting Standard three oh 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 UM, the n h T s A had said, Ford were 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 oh one level, which again is a twenty mile an hour rear impact that doesn't lead to fuel loss, and for its like, I don't know, it seems like a big job, right, uh four years And the n h T s A was like, you know, it took you two years to design the car from scratch, right, They're like, yeah, this is huge, massive improvements to make

it safe. So four years. So the NHTSA said, fine, fine, in seven it'll come into effect. So it was just coincidence. But Dawi's article did have a big impact in the way of like shaping public opinion. Yeah, for sure. So what happens is they're they're starting to be uh some lawsuits people that are getting burned alive in Pinto's and other cars, UM say well maybe maybe we could see somebody and that is that a ducka duck in the house. Well, okay,

let's get back on tracks. Back on track works, doesn't it. You're all charmed? Thank you for can that one for us? Chuck Jerry cut cut that art? Alright? So, uh, why that's delicious, it's good. Yeah, bullet bullet brand bourbon. It's called buzz marketing everyone. They don't even pay us for that yet. So uh. There are these people that have this job where they recreate accidents, um for sometimes it's for court, for attorneys for the state, sometimes it's for

insurance companies. But they recreate these accidents kind of show what went down. And some of them started to say, and again it was a radical notion, started to say, wait a minute, I think that if you get in a car wreck, you maybe should be able to live through it. It's a radical idea, but like maybe they should make cars safer. Yeah, they're never going back to

San Diego, hippie. Well the notion from from America. Everyone sort of agreed to this thing where like, if you get in the car wreck and die like you got in the car wreck, it's your fault. It was the driver's fault. 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 as auto safety, but it was just not on the radar. Lea 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 But in in Detroit's defense, at the time, everybody was wrong while they were driving. It's way more than today, so they kind of had a point. But still they could still make the cars safer and should have even even more back then. Yeah, for sure. So these I don't know what we call them, accident recreationists, reconstruction reconstructionists. Recreationists are the Civil War dudes? Does anyone

here do that? Any Civil War reenactors. There's three who are just sitting there like that's right now, all right? Quicksidebar Emily and I went hiking at you guys ever go to Sweetwater State Park see local show. Emily remember this.

We went hiking and Sweetwater and there were some Civil War reenactors, but it wasn't like what I know about Civil war reenactors is 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, uh 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 Quarter 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 in in their outfits and they were cooking like I guess, like a squirrel on a spit. That's Huckaby style. It was no organized thing, and I was just hiking buy it was like a year ago. I was like, well, that's weird. Did you guys just like back slowly into the way, don't make eye contacted. I guess I approved because it wasn't war,

so that's kind of cool. It was they were prepping for war, so okay, they were gathering their strength from squirrels. Feint very strange. Don't go to Sweetwaters by the way, don't go there. No, not after that, Okay, I didn't know. If there's something else, like there's a lot of abandoned tires in the ravine or something. All right, cut that 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? The great period? This guy? All right,

so this recreationists, That's where I was. You 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 pentol 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 accidents are happening at really low speed. Maybe it's actually a design flaw with Ford. And so the lawyers are 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 forwards like bring it. We're forward. You know, juries are made up of like upstanding registered voters, Right, we're gonna be just fine. And Ford one a couple

at first, and then they started losing them. Um and Ford was still kind of like, we're still we're still taking the jury trial on. But the whole thing turned earned on this one trial in ninety seven in Orange County, California, Um and Ford lost big time actually in a Pinto case. Yeah, they lost, and this was in seventy seven. They lost a hundred and twenty five million dollars and damages to a boy named he's thirteen years old, Richard Grimshaw was

it's very sad. He's burned very badly and the driver of the car died and a hundred 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 ton of money and it later gets reduced. But all they care about is that the media knows that they got hit with this ton of money. That was sort of the case here. It got reduced to what three and a half million bucks.

Just still it's still pretty still a lot of money back then, of course. Um, but that initial figure like really made a point and sent shock waves 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. Um, 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. Jerry is a just too sentimental. They see those charred remains and forget the evidence. No, sir, will settle. Thanks for that. That is a He wasn't overheard saying that, right. A TV reporter stuck up a microphone in his face and he said that that was his quote. That like Amazon Alexa didn't overhear him saying that to his wife at home later exactly. So Ford was like, Okay, kill that guy, that lawyer. We're gonna start settling. And so

they did start settling. There's some benefits to settling, well, there's some drawbacks to One is that it tells the entire world that you know, your case is terrible, but it says, um, while there's gonna be lower payouts to the lawyers, um, 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 of legal access to any in all documents that you have that proved their case

against you. Right, So with all these jury trials, there was this steady trickle or flow even of Yeah, it wasn't even a trickle. It was a flow of damning evidence coming out of Ford going into the hands of lawyers who were happily turning it around and handing it to the media who were reporting on this stuff, which was getting the public just good. And and that drum that Chuck was talking about it started to really pick up, and like people were really looking at Ford like in

this weird, like unsettling, non blinky way. You know, everyone took their shirts off and they put like war paint on, and just forbus starting to get a little nervous. They were like like us America said you so that got a little weird, Yeah, thank you. Thank you, buddy. You get a shirt that bordered on uh performance art, did it? I think had I taken my shirt off and would have been perfect, Oh my god, do it out of your mind, cheer 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 like my off, which would be uh yeah, that does feel good. Though, now we've reached David Lee roth level. I wish I had another shot. Oh my god, alright, so shy. That's just having common values. Not taking your shirt off in public when people tell you too. That's normal stuff. Man, you well you did good. Is one of thank you Jerry cut out the last

shame on all of you. Hometown show. Alright. So finally in ninety seven, UH safety three o one came into effect. What we talked about, would you should be able to hit a car from twenty miles an not be a flaming death ball And the nineteen seventy seven new Pinto debuted with a very brand new safety feature that one dollar one pound piece of plastic in between the flaming death bolts and the gast egg that they've known since night would save lives. Boom, thank you, so um lea Coca.

By this time in 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 things. So everybody was reporting on this. People were suing Ford. It was a huge, big problem, and I had Coca told everybody clam up. That's actually a direct quote from his book, his book. I used to think in a

happier time that was called straight talk. But that's a Dolly Parton movie. It's called talking Straight. 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 that Dolly Parton play les. It's still it's still said that. I never corrected it. I never saw the movie that would be great. You never saw a straight talk. I don't know. It's shamed. Is that gonna be your movie? Crush pick? Oh? Maybe that's buzz marketing.

Now I have to do with 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 then he says, like we were so afraid of um, the 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 that I was just taking the wrong way, it would be seen as an admition of guilt. The problem was to the public um 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 Morley 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 there. It's so funny, is I used to love sixty minutes but when when I was like thirteen, it's so such a weird show to watch as a kid.

It's sophisticated. I was not sophisticated. Apparently you were. That was not I don't know what I like a little right, And then after that you're just like all right, I'll turn the channel. Well. And and also another thing about I think it came on after either like the Wonderful World of Disney or that was great or Wold Kingdom or something, and I don't know what that is, sir. That was like Full House was on that that was like the nineties. You're way off. Yeah, I'm so old.

Do you see this? Beard? So much gray? Like the Davy Crockett Story Hour? Was that one? Well, I'm not that old night writer. That was a good that had a good theme song that this is devolved into like shout out your favorite old thing. And we're almost done. Everybody called them all right, we're hit in the end.

So uh. In June, um 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, they'll they'll 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 Writer's car and Stranger Things too. Oh yeah, I haven't seen it. I don't was it her car and Stranger Things? Why? I don't remember, but they featured 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 Pencil alone, but also another car they had, right, the Mercury Bobcat, which was it's like more luxurious but equally deadly twin. And we're not

quite sure, like what made it so luxurious. Maybe it had like an onboard like blow dryer brush to like feather your hair with while you're going home. What we're the back You sit in the back seat and they just have the thing from the hair place. They just lowers over your That is the pinnacle of luxury that we can think of for the god the seventies. Alright.

The bad news is, though 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 and they said, all right June, we'll do this September we announced it to the public. In those few months, uh, there was a very very sad crash rear rear rear end you need another shot, No, a rear end impact

where uh where some young women died. And there was a prosecutor in Indiana named Michael Constantino that said, uh, you know what, I've had it, I've done, I know the deal. I'm gonna bring these dudes on trial for murder. Murder, Like he filed criminal homicide charges against the executives that Ford for that crash. Yeah, very big deal. Yeah so um, And that 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 they 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, um, despite all this, despite the fact that the Pinto wasn't flaming death trapped to a certain extent, when you look at the numbers today and when you look at the real statistics, uh, 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 Gremlin. They would kill you, right, So we tried to figure out and actually, it turns out there was this article in Harvard Law Review where

this guy said, Um, I've done the math. I've actually figured it out, and here's the number I came up with. It was 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, Um, it was way less than I think Mother Jones said like five hundred and nine hundred. 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 article said, no, it's probably twenty seven actually exactly. So uh. 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 is 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've got an a rear end 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 to death. The American public said, dope, that can't happen.

It doesn't matter, and so thanks to Dowie's article, um and sixty minutes, eventually 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 pins it took the real impact, but not 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. Yeah. Uh so Indian Mr Lee I A. Coca would go on to write his legend with the christ Or Corporation by bringing them back from um kind of the brink of bankruptcy into huge success in the nineties and the eighties. And uh he was named I think by Portfolio magazine as the eighteenth gradest CEO of all time, just ahead of Oprah, which is both yes

Team Oprah up here. I wrote a couple of books, wrote that biography that Josh talked about that Dolly Parton did not star in, and another call where how have all the Leaders Gone? And Mr Iacca is still alive today, The Rifled Age of ninety two and 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, ye, well that one

pretty well, chuck. Yeah. If you want to get in touch with us for any reason, you can tweet to us at s Y s K podcast. I'm at Josh um Clark and I also have a website called are You Series Clark dot com. Chuck's on Facebook at Charles W. Chuck Bryant, or at Stuff you Should Know. UH. You can email us and Jerry to stuff podcast at how stiff Works dot com and has always joined us at Home on the Web Stuff you Should Know dot com For more on this and thousands of other topics. Is

it how staff works dot com. M