In 1968, Ford began designing a new subcompact. The idea came from Lee Iacocca, then a Ford vice president, and according to the California appeals court that later reviewed the evidence, the objective was simple: a car “at or below 2,000 pounds to sell for no more than $2,000.” It became the Pinto.
It was a rush project. Usually, the court wrote, marketing surveys and engineering studies come before a new car is styled. On the Pinto, styling came first and dictated the engineering. One thing it dictated was where the fuel tank went. European and Japanese makers then preferred to put the tank over the rear axle in small cars. The Pinto’s styling put it behind the axle, leaving only 9 or 10 inches of crush space, far less than in any other American car. The bumper was little more than a chrome strip.
During development, Ford crash-tested prototypes from the rear. At 21 miles per hour, the tank was driven forward and punctured. A production Pinto run into a fixed barrier at 21 miles per hour had its fuel neck torn off and its tank pierced by a bolt head on the differential housing. Fixes were on the table. In the evidence the court summarized, a reinforced rear structure, a smoother axle housing, a better bumper and more crush space would have cost $15.30 a car and made the tank safe at 34 to 38 miles per hour.
The project went ahead. Engineers signed off to their supervisors, who signed off to theirs, up to Iacocca. A former Ford executive who had run its crash-testing program testified that two engineers knew of the defects but told him they were powerless to change the rear-end design. At an April 1971 meeting, managers discussed a report recommending that Ford put off fuel tank protection in all its cars, the Pinto included, for two years. The protection cost $4 to $8 a car. The delay would save $20.9 million.
On May 28, 1972, a six-month-old Pinto stalled in the middle lane of Interstate 15. A Ford Galaxie hit it from behind at somewhere between 28 and 37 miles per hour. The Pinto caught fire. The driver died a few days later. Her passenger, a 13-year-old boy, survived only through what the court called heroic medical measures.
After a six-month trial, a jury awarded the boy $125 million in punitive damages, which the trial judge cut to $3.5 million. In 1981 the appeals court upheld the judgment.
The court was clear about how it had told the story: it viewed the evidence in the light most favorable to the side that won. Ford had tried to show the jury a Washington State Patrol study suggesting the Pinto was no more likely than other cars to cause injury or death by fire. The judge kept it out, and the appeals court agreed, partly because it covered only a small number of Pinto fires.
In 2009, four management scholars opened a paper on goals gone wrong with the Pinto as one of three warning examples. The goals were met, they wrote, at the expense of other important features that were not specified.