The issue is not that a problem could not happen. The issue is the over exagerrated 800-900 cars per year as stated by Mother Jones resulting in fire related deaths.
Here is a crash test that did not result in an exploding Pinto, fuel did leak though. These imapcts are so forceful that the people in the car would most likely not survive the impact. Multiple Pintos were wrecked to get the right footage. Cars of the day were heavier and had huge steel bumpers. It wasn't a matter of wheather or not this could happen as much as it would have had a similar effect on any other sub-compact car of the day and that the numbers were grossly exagerrated to sell magazines and boost tv ratings.
They then sped up the car and used an ignition source to get the desired effect. They then put the video into ultra slow motion to play the test everyone is familiar with. This gives the effect that the Pinto would explode if Parking it.
I guess if we used the same train of thought Mother Jones did we would have banned the big bulky Chevy Impala for having a week windshield bracing as seen here.
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or because it might hit a smaller car and kill someone, Pintos were not the only small cars of the day!
As for the rear end issue, Ford did do a recall on the Pinto and extended the filler neck and installed a plastic shroud around the tank, there is dispute over wheather they chose to ignore the repair and figured human life was not worth as much as the repair. I can only assume this was a manufactured story by the media because Ford won the case. If the smoking gun and the ignorance of $11 dollar repairs were true, i amsure they would have lost on that alone. However the Pinto was not the worse car in terms of fatalities or fires from crashes, many of the Japenese imports as well as some of the American counterparts had a worse track record for fatalities and fire. But here are the pinto facts. The NHTSA in 1976 stated 27 people by that point had died in Pinto related fires, that is all fires, not just rear end collisions. I understand their was a bigger issue with transmission fires, but that is another story. In 1976 2,351,802 Pintos were on the road. If you went by Mother Jones story of 800-900 per year that number of 27 quickly becomes 4,800-5,400, just a slight exageration over 27 posted by the agency that actually keeps the records. The average for a fatality due to fire is 1 in every 87,103 Pinto's made at that time. To put that into perspective that is like going into a fully sold out football stadium alongside a fully sold out baseball stadium and saying someone in these two places will die in a fiery crash at some point in their lifetime. By comparisson, if you went by the Mother Jones numbers,(5400) they claim 1 person in every 435 Pintos sold would die in a fire related death in their lifetime. Those odds I don't like, those are the odds they sold America. A violent collision weather read end, side impact or head on usually ends in death. Especially if you put a big heavy vehicle against a compact car. The fault is not the car as much as driver who is not paying attention. You can be driving a tank, if you drive off a cliff the tank is not at fault. If you are driving a pinto and crash head on into an Isetta it will be like a mosquito hitting the windshield and the fault will not be Isetta design.
Now one more mathematical equation before we end, try to keep up on this one. Mopther Jones report Ford would not repair the vehicle for $11 each because it was cheaper to pay for the fatalities. Correct? Well then the numbers they gave don't add up. If it was an average of $12,000 buyout in court at the time (the so called smoking letter) and we established that In 1976 2,351,802 Pintos were on the road. If you did an $11 dollar repair on all those cars the total would be. $25,869,822.00, OK? Now divide that by the number of fatalities Mother Jones reports to have happened by that date in time 5,400 and the buyout is $4,790.00 So what Mother Jones is saying is that Ford executives cannot do math and want to lose more money and kill people who buy their product! That is why Mother Jones lied about the amount of Pintos on the road as well stating their were over 6 million built by 1976. What? Over a million units a year, WOW! I think their would be a record book somewhere discussing how Ford sold over a million Pintos a year for six years straight. But their isn't one, because it never happened that way. If hit hard enough the gas filler neck could break free, this was a bad design, no worse thatn any hundred manufactured designs that had the gas tank filler in the rear or behind the license plate, most of these had a rubber clamped connection that would break free in a rear end collision. Numbers don't lie, unless you are Mother Jones!