I just popped onto the Tahoo home page, to find the article "10 cars that sank Detroit". Good grief, nothing like dredging up the poor Pinto again for the downturn in American automobile production. I mean, it's not like Ford actually sold any.......!!! That's what the media will do for ANYTHING if it gets ahold of it. Take the recent election for example - but I digress. The article went like this:
Ford Pinto. This ill-fated subcompact came to epitomize the arrogance of Big Auto. Ford hurried the Pinto to market in the early 1970s to battle cheap imports like the Volkswagen Beetle that were selling for less than $2,000. Initial sales were strong, but quality problems emerged. Then came the infamous safety problems with exploding fuel tanks, which Ford refused to acknowledge. Message: The customer comes last. "The problems for the domestics really started in the '70s when they were offering cars like the Pinto up against higher-tech, better-built Toyota Corollas and Honda Civics," says Jack Nerad of Kelley Blue Book.
I sure do get tired of the Pinto bashing. This is why we see so few left - they were relegated to the crusher years ago, because they "had no value".
Chris
Yah, but that makes our Pinto's worth that much more!!!! There are probably very few left. So one day, ours will be collector items!!!
That's one of the other reasons I wanted to get a Pinto. It is the one car you very seldom see on the road!!!! In fact, I can't remember the last one I actually saw "on" the road!! Besides mine!! LOL I also have fond memory's of my parents Pinto as another reason to get into them!!! :)
Kim
By technicalities the Pinto and the Bobcat are "collector Items" to the right people.
1. Hummer
2. Escalade
3. Navigator
4. Excursion
5. Suburban
6. Explorer
don't forget the Expedition, Tahoe, Yukon or any other Large SUV they make.
The Pinto probably put as many Ford employees kids through college as the Mustang. They sold
something like 3,000,000 didn't they. There are plenty of other cars that contributed more to Detroit's problems(see above) than the Pinto.
Tercin
Yes, they forgot to mention the Corvair, Vega, Monza, Citation, Edsel and lots of others that they talked us into buying. Of course now that gas went way up the big three suddenly has no cars that the public wants. There are no American cars that get decent gas mileage and they estimate that it will take about five years to get 40 MPG cars to the market. GM doesn't think that it can make it to the end of the year without running out of cash. They will probably get some government money but they had better get some products in the dealerships that the public will buy!
Gee out of those 10 cars i or my family ownes and drives about half of them Did anyone look at the pic of the cars and notice where the pinto photo cam from?
Yes, I >too< drive an Expedition (2002 model). It is paid for. It has hail damage. It gets lousy gas mileage. But did I mention? It's paid for. Thank GOD I don't have a car payment, especially after being laid off - ack!!!
Chris
They praised the Toyota Corollas and Honda Civics but did they rear end them with a country squire station wagon going 45 miles an hour, like they did with the Ford Pinto. I read an article once that told of the comparison for fatality rates among one million cars sold and most of you know the pinto stacked up as well as the vega and better than the gremlin. However it also told that they compared mid size japanese imports because the sub compacts from japan had such high fatality ratings by comparisson. Now if shows like 60 minutes were so concerned about the American public, why didn't they post how dangerous the toyotas, Hondas and all other Japanese imports were, they just had to destroy the Pinto. :mad: :cheesy_n: :showback:
Don't forget about Chevy & the pickup trucks from the 80's that had fire issues. With the gas tank outside the frame rail those were death traps but did they get slammed as much as the Pinto? I don't think so. When it comes down to it, there is no good car to own, as they all have their issues. 1998-2001 Corollas have issues with engines sludging up & needing replaced... Vegas, well they were just junk... Chrysler Corp. K cars... Good cars but made so cheap within a couple years they fell apart..
With that said there is no reason to have a list that slams particular cars, other than to keep drumming up the negativity towards the same cars they always have. When it comes to the Pinto they don't like it, and probably never will so they slam it.
Getting off the soapbox now. :laugh:
Of course, Studebakers were near perfect. But they were made in South Bend. And look what happened to them anywho....
And how many of those rust-bucket piece of crap hondas and toyotas do you see on the road today??? And if you do see one, who cares? But drive your Pinto and pull into the gas station or 7-11 and watch people flock around it and ask if they can take a picture!!! Happens to me all the time, so this is what I think of Pinto's being on the list..... :showback:
it wasn't any vehicle that put them in the hole that they find themselves in. it was greed.
short term profits with that money spent for maximizing return in the 'current' marketplace instead of looking to the future.
these companies have 'forecasting' personnel that are every bit as good at what they do as any that you will see in any other government or private sector accounting or actuarial field.
if the money had been spent in RESEARCH the hole that they are now in would be very shallow indeed.
GREED
"Pinto up against higher-tech, better-built Toyota Corollas and Honda Civics,"
This is not true. In the early 70s Japanese cars had terrible quality and they were not engineered to withstand salt spray.
Honda's would blow head gaskets.
Toyota's did not want to start in cold weather.
Toyota's always had frozen brake adjusters
We all know how they rust!
They only sold on low price, not quality.
Now the Pinto did have the gas tank issue, however if you take that out of the equation it was a more reliable vehicle than Toyota and Honda in that timeframe. The Pinto 2000 & 1600 was a solid drivetrain.
Overtime Toyota & Honda did a good job of continuous improvement to bring them to the quality level that they are at today. Somehow this perception is carried over to their older cars which is not true.
Amen Starliner,
They were not quality cars, they were lighter which made them much more dangerous in an accident, and to some extent this still holds true today in terms of longevity. The japanese imports are lighter (due to lack of a steel industry in Japan) just the simple laws of physics will tell you less weight means less wear and tear over the same distance. If you weigh 100 pounds (japanese import) and you put an extra 50 pounds on your back (american steel) it will require more horsepower and more wear and tear to go an equal distance. Does that make the lighter one better? If you want to just get somewhere, then yes, but some of us like to enjoy the ride.
Datsun had a bad rep. as well, they even ditched the name.
Bill
Starliner said: "Now the Pinto did have the gas tank issue, however if you take that out of the equation...."
This is a good post string to clarify the gas tank issue as told to me by someone close to the case. First, the Pinto did not have a death rate higher than most of the small cars of the day that were in the same weight class. Second, I worked at a job for a while with the daughter of one of the lead prosecuting attorneys involved in the case, the MAJOR ISSUE was NOT the tank it's self, but the FILLER NECK. The tank shield was more of a feel good fix than effective. In a rear end accident, two things generally had happen to cause the incineration of the occupants. First, when the car was hit in the rear with a drivers side bias, the crushing action of the accident separated or pulled out the filler neck AT THE TANK. Second, the unibody sheet metal and door frame would distort and become locked together if the impact was hard enough. Just add a spark source and...... :sleep:
In the news at the time, it was much more dramatic to talk about exploding gas tanks than separating filler necks....
71HANTO
Quote from: 71HANTO on November 28, 2008, 11:42:56 AM
Starliner said: "Now the Pinto did have the gas tank issue, however if you take that out of the equation...."
This is a good post string to clarify the gas tank issue as told to me by someone close to the case. First, the Pinto did not have a death rate higher than most of the small cars of the day that were in the same weight class. Second, I worked at a job for a while with the daughter of one of the lead prosecuting attorneys involved in the case, the MAJOR ISSUE was NOT the tank it's self, but the FILLER NECK. The tank shield was more of a feel good fix than effective. In a rear end accident, two things generally had happen to cause the incineration of the occupants. First, when the car was hit in the rear with a drivers side bias, the crushing action of the accident separated or pulled out the filler neck AT THE TANK. Second, the unibody sheet metal and door frame would distort and become locked together if the impact was hard enough. Just add a spark source and...... :sleep:
In the news at the time, it was much more dramatic to talk about exploding gas tanks than separating filler necks....
71HANTO
x2
The gas tank in my Pinto(s) is made of a non-explosive material: STEEL. The fact that the gas tank itself was never changed as part of the recall speaks volumes...
Bill
Quote from: Starliner on November 28, 2008, 10:21:35 AM
"Pinto up against higher-tech, better-built Toyota Corollas and Honda Civics,"
This is not true. In the early 70s Japanese cars had terrible quality and they were not engineered to withstand salt spray.
Honda's would blow head gaskets.
Toyota's did not want to start in cold weather.
Toyota's always had frozen brake adjusters
We all know how they rust!
They only sold on low price, not quality.
Now the Pinto did have the gas tank issue, however if you take that out of the equation it was a more reliable vehicle than Toyota and Honda in that timeframe. The Pinto 2000 & 1600 was a solid drivetrain.
Overtime Toyota & Honda did a good job of continuous improvement to bring them to the quality level that they are at today. Somehow this perception is carried over to their older cars which is not true.
I found the phrase "higher tech, better built Japanese cars" to be particularly telling in this article. Early 70's Japanese cars, with the possible exception of the Datsun Z (which has it's own problems) were utter crap. Crude engineering, unattractive styling, bodies which rusted so fast you'd think it was a time-lapse film, glacial acceleration, floppy handling...the list goes on. The author of the article is clearly far more interested in perpetuating the "American cars are bad" myth...and it is a myth...than reporting anything resembling facts. I will happily put my 2003 Dodge SRT-4 daily driver against anything that author owns for reliabilty and sheer driving enjoyment. I've got a feeling the guy is a big Prius fan...
I love how they dig this stuff back up. As you can see, I posted on it as "first" seen on Yahoo in November of last year. Geeze, so the Pinto helped sink Detroit. I guess selling 2+ million cars AFTER the gas tank incident cars means that there were 2+ million idiots out there that bought one.
Rubbish.
The whole green effort, Prius, Hybrids, etc. is more rubbish than the Pinto ever was. Yes, I do not dismiss the terrible tragedy of the gas tank issue, BUT, like we have all seen, there are other cars that suffered the same fate, and the mismanagement and union practices that have occurred for years have had a far greater impact on the industry.
Ridiculous liberal advertising, again.
Chris
I have to say that article was pretty biased. Keep in mind, I'm publishing a magazine about Pintos for a group of people who own Pintos, so I'm not very pleased with what they wrote. However, I saw an article online just last week about the fuel tank issue; it was posted about eighteen months ago and there were around a dozen comments after the article. One of the posts said something to the effect that "it was a shame those people had to die because they were poor and couldn't afford a better car.." I just about lost my mind. I'm a history professor, and I love my Pintos, but that comment just shows the lack of depth people have about issues where they read a headline and not the article beneath it and equate that with knowledge. Pintos were not expensive new cars, but they were new cars. No one bought a Pinto because they were poor people. Poor people don't buy new cars, they buy used cars. What they don't understand is the $2,000 price goal because today that isn't much money, certainly not for a new car. But in 1971 that was a decent amount of cash when the minimum wage was well under $3 an hour. I need to find that poster so I can beat them about the head and shoulders with a rubber hose packed with sand and closed off with tiny radiator clamps...
Apparently I took that comment personally!
The only thing that sank the American automotive industry was their own shortsightedness and greed. Just because you make 10-15k on a pickup or suv doesn't mean you can't build a quality high mileage car that people will buy and only make $500 on. Just because the industry is selling every car they can make doesn't mean the unions should beat management senseless and stage wildcat strikes over non issues. When the industry struggled management shouldn't have sought their revenge just because they could. Everyone involved was looking no further than the end of the nose in the middle of their face and what has happened was as predictable as the sunrise. I live just north of Dayton and 3,500 families at the truck assembly plant in Moraine got handed their walking papers in December; their kids are my students and they've seen it coming for a few years. Those high paying jobs are most likely gone forever. The government should let GM go bankrupt; they would void all their union contracts and start from scratch. And if they go under, they go under. That is how the market adjusts itself, just like the real estate market should be doing now. Of course government intervention is going to prevent that, and we will still be cruising on an artificial bubble just waiting for the pop or the slow fizzle.
The author of that article must have been a sorry @$$ japanese b@stard. Japanese cars back then were total crap. There is absolutly nothing wrong with a pinto. Its been said that only about two dozen people have actually died in pintos because of the fuel tank/filler issue. And as far as reliability and longevity goes. Well lets put it this way. I have 3 pintos. They all run and drive. However, i bought all 3 of them nonrunning. The 76 needed a control module (it had the original one on it, it was 26 years old at the time). Then i got my 74 (after the 76 had a rear end collision, altho is was more in the passengers corner than straight in the rear but... hmm... guess what im still alive) and it needed a new shear pin in the drive gear at the bottom of the distributor. It was about 32 years old at that time. Then my 79 was given to me. It was about 12 years old when it busted a piston, then sat in a garage for 15 years before i got it. Who knows why it busted a piston but ive never seen that happen in a 2.3 before. The 2.3 was a great engine, thats why it was used up until 1999 or so. Aside from all this, yes i have had to do work on these cars from time to time but hell they are all 30 years old or older. And AFTER the wreck in my 76, i took it on a 1,000 mile roadtrip to the southern edge of texas almost to MEXICO. If it was such a horrible car, it would not have carring me, two friends of mine and a bunch of our crap 16 hours one way at 70 MPH two times in one week. This is the same car that I was driving when i was 17, you know how rough teens are on cars. That poor pinto has had the holy living sh!t revved out of it (seen 8k on the tach momentarily a few times), used to run 230 degrees frquently, been run low enough on oil to make the engine light come on around corners many many times, lost a ujoint at 100mph once, and who only knows what else ive done to that poor thing over the years. On my way home from south texas in that 76, I did run the transmission out of gear oil (did have to change the transmission after losing that ujoint, it cracked the case on the old one. The replacement trans leaks a little bit around the front). I stopped for the night in southern oklahoma because it had been a long day. Got in the next day and took off and the transmission would make horrible noise is any gear other than first. I feared I would not make the other 400 or so miles home. However I stopped and put in a quart of gear oil and drove it on home. Still driving it today. Amazing.
Man thats such a piece of junk huh? I really hate when people trash talk these things, you couldnt ask for a better car. I feel less nervous taking my pinto out on the open road than I do a newer vehicle, because atleast if it breaks down no matter what it is you can pretty much fix it on the side of the road for $20 and be on your way.
Huh. When was the last time those yahoos who are forever blasting Pintos saw a Yugo-living or dead? How about an old-school Toyota Celica like my brothers had? Or a Datsun B210? Or a Pontiac Sunbird/Chevy Monza? As rare as they are, I still occasionally see a running Pinto. Crap my arse! :showback:
FlyerPinto, Pintoguy76, I am with you. I'll even hold down that fool who said what they said about poor people. Lucky I'm not Queen of the World... they'd know what poor was! >:(
I agree with every word you said but, Becky, believe it or not, I actually met a dark blue Yugo on the road Monday afternoon. I almost wrecked doing a double-take! I guess one actually survived! :lol:
Dwayne :smile:
The only thing that sank Detroit was a lack of innovation and living for today strategy. In the auto market, you need to look ahead, as foreign carmakers did, sometimes as much as 10 years ahead. You also need change. The 'don't fix it if it ain't broke' mentality doesn't work well with the auto market... even if it is fine you have to find a way to make it better, and don't run the same exact thing for a decade, especially when you re-badge a car that doesn't have any other real changes (i.e- Chevy Cavalier/Pontiac Sunfire, Chevy Trailblazer/GMC Envoy) The real hogs of the U.S. Auto market is GM with their parallel brands that are exactly the same just re-badged and their wastes of money such as the Chevy SSR and the Hummer. Ford is staying a little bit ahead, and Chrysler has some good ideas but no money to make it happen. As far as the Pinto goes, it was better than the foreign cars and it was practical and it was innovative, yet Americans still want to criticize the success of the market. Ford just ruined it when they didn't do anything to address the minor, yes minor gas tank flaw and basically slapped American consumers in the face. The Pinto met bad timing because the Henry Ford that had control of the company was losing his mind and you could tell when he fired Lee Iacocca in 1978. Cars are my specialty, I could go on and on but I'll stop here...
-beegle55
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The Pinto should be dropped from that old list since it made Ford millions of dollars during the run.
How about we replace it with the Volt! The real turkey outta Detroit. A car that costs $90,000 each to build, needs taxpayer subsidies to survive but still wont sell at $35,000 which is a loss of $55,000 per car. In 5 years this T-U-R-D has sold a whopping 3,000 units of which most were purchased by goverment agencies under orders from a dictator.
The worst part is they seem to catch fire randomly after any collision repairs are completed. The fact that it only travels 45 minutes on a full charge before the engine takes over & barely beats a well tuned Pinto in the mpg department coupled with the environmental impact of the battery disposal every 10 years puts this pig from Government Motors at number 1 on my list of CARS THAT SANK DETROIT!!
HEAR! HEAR!
And yet I see Volts popping up all over. Here's a good take.. We don't like our cars being judged so why judge other cars? I don't care what type it is there is always a chance it will cause a problem with the automakers if it doesn't sell. Pinto, Vega, Yugo, Crown Vic, Prius, Camry, Corvair.... Not one single car kills a manufacturer. The reputation & lack of sales is what does.
Quote from: r4pinto on January 10, 2013, 08:03:03 PM
And yet I see Volts popping up all over. Here's a good take.. We don't like our cars being judged so why judge other cars? I don't care what type it is there is always a chance it will cause a problem with the automakers if it doesn't sell. Pinto, Vega, Yugo, Crown Vic, Prius, Camry, Corvair.... Not one single car kills a manufacturer. The reputation & lack of sales is what does.
Normally I would be in complete agreement with you but the Volt is what happens when the government involves itself with private industry. The Volt is not a product of consumer demand, it was created because taxpayer dollars were given to GM so they could create the "PEOPLES CAR"....
BTW, Hitler was the last guy to give the people the "Peoples Car". Ford was smart enough to know there was no market for this type of car so they stayed away from it. When GM was dying the government threw billions of dollars at the unions to prop them up & continue the laundering of cash from the union to the democrat party. Instead of dealing with legacy costs & union demands that are the real reason GM is broke they used my tax money to save the UAW. Part of that deal was to shove the Volt down our throats whether we want it or not. Remember the ad campaign claiming the Volt was the future of the American auto industry? (SPITS ON FLOOR!) Yeah, we see the future all right, GM stock is half of what it was when my money was thrown away, the union is stilll writing the rules, those legacy costs are about to bite them in the rear & they are quietly lobbying for another bailout!
The Volt is an example of how NOT TO DO THINGS in America, a not really free country anymore, but instead is reminiscent of the former Soviet Union.....
At a car show a couple years ago a classic mustang owner said to me "That is stupid man, why would anybody restore a pinto." I gestured to his car and replied, "Well I have one of those at home, When was the last time you saw one of these?"
Did anybody catch the pathetic American top gear that had the samuri, vega and pinto. They had to firebomb the pinto to make it explode. The other two performed true to their reputations without assistance.
OhSix'