The engineering problems that cause the Pinto to explode are listed in detail elsewhere here so I won't go into that here. The saddest part of the Pinto's bad reputation is, had it been built "as designed", it probably wouldn't have sold for the exact opposite reason. The car wouldv'e been percieved as "too safe" like a Volvo. The engineers saw the deficiencies in thier design, and added airbags, and a prototype fuel cell. They even crash tested the cell with amazing results , compared to the plain steel unit. So the engineering department saw the troubles looming BEFORE the car went into production.
The Ford brass NEEDED to be sued for releasing a KNOWN defective product. The engineers tried to get them to change the design, but that would've violated "the package" of under 2000Lbs & under $2000. the weight (my best guess) would've been about 150-200Lbs over (which it was overweight anyway), and the cost would've been about $45 over maybe more. Would you pay $100 more for the safety of a fuel cell, and airbags? That's the equivalent of the extra cost. (BTW you pay $300+ for airbags wether you like them or not)
I've rambled long enough here. I welcome support, or opposition to my views. What's a discussion group without lively discussion?
Hmmm
I havent given much thought about it. I was never scared of blowing up anyway. The car needs to be hit at the right speed and angle to explode. The Police version of the Crown Victoria is getting a rep. for exploding during a HIGH SPEED rearend wreck.
Im not too concerned with that either. I own a Grand Marquis. Im not sure if any civillian Panthers have exploded yet.
If this is about the Ford Brass going the cheap route than Im sorry to say its not the first time and wont be the last. Safety is in nowadays and thats good.
I read an article on the Crown Victorias exploding. And it turned out that in at least in SOME of the tests the cars were rigged in a way to make sure to puncture the fuel tank. A tire iron was welded to the jack and aimed at the fuel tank.
I know that the cop cars had a sort of pack that contained a lot of the equipment that they carried. I cannot imagine them aranging anything sharp so that it would point anywhere near the fuel tank!
As far as the Pinto. I would have happily payed the increased price for the fuel cell. Not the airbag though.
There are a lot of cars still being made that have the gas tank in the same place as the Pinto.
I have never worried about getting hit and exploding in any Pinto I have owned. And I am selling my Crown Victoria to find a Pinto to buy.
Wes
The Pinto problem was a bad move on the part of Ford for sure ...they knew about it and did nothing. The Crown Vic...it you hit any car (from hehind) going 60 plus mph theres a good chance of a fire. They now have a Kevlar tub for the trunk that carries the police equipment, and they are in trial runs of a foam fire supression system for the rear of the police cars, right under and infront of the fuel tanks. Ford no longer sells police cars to the departments that are suing them! I think Arizona highway patrol order 1000 cars...right after they launched a lawsuit....Ford said "i don't think so" and cancelled their order!
The Crown Vic police special runs a higher risk of being rear ended at high speeds. they usually sit behind the suspect vehicle with a pretty flashing beacon on top. This beacon is like the flame to a moth, IE a tired, or drunk driver.
In my research, (which was centered on getting #s of explosions) I've fount that it's agreed that the Pinto is most likely to explode when hit dead center at 35+MPH. I've only found 6 cases of explosions. In EVERY case someone was either killed or badly maimed. My point was that the engineers TRIED to make the car safe, but the brass refused to make, what they saw as, expensive changes. (BTW the airbags were dual stage bags, sound familiar?)
I realize that this is old, but here's my take on it...
10 years of production, and over 2 million pintos sold. According to a 1992 Rutger's Law study, known pinto deaths in fires came in at about 27, which is an equivalent safety record to ANY car of it's day, and even to cars of today.
The most famous Pinto fire was caused by a Chevy van driving onto the shoulder and hitting the rear of a parked pinto at 50 mph, with two people in it, kicking of the Mother Jones Magazine investigation and the string of anti_Ford lawsuits. Turns out that teh autopsy showed the passengeres died from the whiplash of being hit from behind at 50 mph, long before any fire engulfed them.
You can die in ANY car if you do something is such a way to cause unusual inputs. A guy on the BMW boards died in his M3 whan he hit a bridge abutment at 80 mph. The cars are capable of 150, so is BMW to blame for making a car that the driver could die in if it is used as designed? Of course not.
You cannot predict or prepare for every possible occurance. if Ford DID do those safety upgrades that 20/20 hindsight says they should have, then someone would hit a Pinto at 80 and end up with the same result.
To say that Ford NEEDED to be sued is like saying that 27 out of 2 million is a HUGE number. Percentagewise, it's extremely tiny, and the fact is that 99.999% of the cars never had any problems, and still don't. Pintos, after 30 years, have proven NOT to be rolling firebombs. At least, no more than any other model of mass produced car.
Everyone's received ideas about the fabled "smoking gun" memo are false. The actual memo did not pertain to Pintos, or even Ford products, but to American cars in general; it dealt with rollovers, not rear-end collisions; it did not contemplate the matter of tort liability at all, let alone accept it as cheaper than a design change; it assigned a value to human life because federal regulators, for whose eyes it was meant, themselves employed that concept in their deliberations; and the value it used was one that they, the regulators, had set forth in documents.
What gets me is the way people set out to put ford under over the whole deal. Now, they did know it was a problem and somethings should've been done before it was released, but does anyone remember the chevy trucks with the saddle-tanks? The tanks strattled the frame and a side impact would bust them open. An impact MUCH slower than a pinto.
Did you hear as much fuss about those? Nope.
I think it has something to do with the "cheap car means you're a poor worthless schmo" attitude a lot of people have. They see a car that has a low cost, so it MUST be a pice of crap. When something turns up, people (or the media if you want to get down to it) launch out like rabid dogs to do as much damage as they can by brainwashing people. And the sad thing is it works.
Pintos were great little cars. They handled well, had pretty good power, and were reliable. But the media did its thing and painted ALL pintos as firetraps (nevermind the problem was fixed in 76) and they dropped the car.
-Harry
Actually there was a huge outburst over teh side saddle tanks, too. In fact, it was the same "expert withness" that tried to do them in, Byron Bloch, who hleped stage the expose for Dateline, where he failed tio inform NBC that he had rigged the truck with an incendiary device, put on a mismatched gas cap, and tried numberous times before catching an explosion on film.
From the Wall Street Journal, 1993:
QuoteNBC had to eat two separate helpings of crow: first for producing the rigged video, then for holding out far too long in its defense. In doing so, it was led astray by its outside experts, especially Bruce Enz of The Institute for Safety Analysis, hired by NBC to conduct the crash tests, and Byron Bloch, interviewed as an expert on the "Dateline" segment and active at the crash-test scene:
Enz's group rigged the truck with hidden incendiary devices, detonated by remote-control radio. Later, Bloch and others defended the idea. This was "among accepted test procedures," noted Clarence Ditlow of the Center for Auto Safety, raising the eyebrows of many safety researchers.
Enz and Bloch assured NBC that the fire was actually set off by the filament of a broken headlamp, which conveniently meant there was no need to tell viewers about the Mother's-Little-Helper rockets. (According to Automotive News, GM scientists found in a super-slow-motion video analysis that the fire started near the rockets, not the headlamps.) The network also cited the experts as its source for having told viewers that a "small hole" had been poked in the GM gas tank at impact. Later tests showed the recovered tank fully intact.
And so forth. The use of a wrong-model, ill-fitting gas cap (it apparently popped out on impact) would have been noticed beforehand, if at all, presumably by those who groomed the truck for its big moment on film. NBC reporters would probably not have relied on their own direct observation to come up with what were later shown to be serious underestimates of the actual crash speeds. One bad decision was presumably wholly NBC's to make: showing only a brief snippet of the fire, which in fact burned out in about 15 seconds, after it exhausted the fuel ejected from the truck's filler tube. NBC's camera angle also made it hard for viewers to see that flames were not coming from inside the truck itself, as might have been expected had its gas tank really burst.
Given a fuller look, viewers might have concluded that you can get a fire from just about any vehicle if you bash it in a way that forces gas out of its filler tube and then provide a handy source of ignition.
What kind of experts did NBC use, anyway? Byron Bloch, for one, has an interesting set of professional specialties. On the one hand, he's a frequent network consultant on auto safety -- "a combination of source, field producer and technical adviser for ABC-TV in its auto safety coverage," reports Autoweek, which notes that he's assisted seven ABC segments on auto safety hazards, three of them since 1990.
When not doing paid media consulting, Bloch is perhaps the single best-known hired expert witness in injury lawsuits against automakers. He doesn't challenge reports that he lacks formal training in auto safety or engineering, and he acknowledged in a 1980 case that his resume' listed a degree he didn't have. Still, he's appeared in court to testify about alleged defects not just in cars but in products ranging from coffee pots to railroad cars. He also offers $ 400-per-person seminars for trial lawyers, promising the scoop on such topics as "Key Graphic Exhibits for Trial."
Interestingly enough, the "secret ford video footage" that this site has (which was promoted by Mother Jones magazine) was actually a university study to see what happens if a fire is caused by a rear end collisions, and it also was started by an incendiary device, as it's extremely hard to GET an explosion from a crash.
QuoteIf ABC really analyzed those UCLA test reports, it had every reason to know why the Ford in the crash film burst into flame: there was an incendiary device under it. The UCLA testers explained their methods in a 1968 report published by the Society of Automotive Engineers, fully ten years before the 20/20 episode. As they explained, one of their goals was to study how a crash fire affected the passenger compartment of a car, and to do that they needed a crash fire. But crash fires occur very seldom; in fact, the testers had tried to produce a fire in an earlier test run without an igniter but had failed. Hence their use of the incendiary device (which they clearly and fully described in their write-up) in the only test run that produced a fire.
You have teh video on this site. In it, a CHEVY crashes into the back of a pinto. hardly teh way a FORD test would have been conducted. And yet, it's said to be a secret Ford test, and then they say they have documents in their possession (which they conveniently NEVER have produced) to prove that it was in fact one of over 40 such tests.
The problem is that Byron Bloch, who wrote the engineering piece reproduced on this site, haz zero engineering ability himself (and lied about having a degree). And Mother Jones magazine blatantly fabricated the "data" they said they have.
Why?
Because they represent the trial lawyers who stood to make a mint off of litigation.
These SAME people cased the hype over the Audi "unintended accelleration" that has turned out to be a hox, as well.
My take (meaning nada in the real world anyway):
Perception or reality, I like the fact people think if they rear end my car they'll go boom.
For instance:
Back in the mid-90s, I owned a 1975 F100 with a 302 yanked from a '69 Boss. Every body panel was rusted through somewhere; it was spray painted from a can with Krylon "Forest Green." One of the pipes had fallen off so I was running headers with a pipe and glass pack on one side and nothing on the other. The farmer who chased coyotes with it before my tenure as owner had welded a pipe that sent exhaust meant to go back to the air filter straight down the back of the engine and out behind the front axle. The pop valve was gone from the valve cover, so smoke billowed out from under the hood (on those rare occasions that I happened to have the hood bolted on). Pretty much it looked like hell, sounded like a demon being shot from a cannon in hell, and smoked like, well, you know. People stayed out of my way because they could see I had nothing to lose in the event of an accident.
I'd pull out on the main street on my way to work. I was on top of a hill and my place of employment was about 10 blocks away at the bottom of the hill. I'd gun that beast and, this is no lie, traffic would clear the lane all the way to the stop light at the bottom of the hill. I felt like Moses parting the Red Sea. Never had to worry about being late to work.
I'd go to Wal-Mart and park way out at the far end of the parking lot (you know, where all those hot shots with their fancy-pants sports cars took eight spaces to park because they didn't want their precious baby to get scratched or dinged). I'd wheel in and park 3" from the driver's door, crawl out my passenger side, and go spend three hours browsing in the store. What were they going to do? Kick my truck? Make it so next time I parked 4" closer and took off the side of their car? Yeah, I was (am?) a jerk, but I seriously hate people who think they're "all that" because they bought a factory car.
My point?
People left me alone. They got out of my way. They didn't rev their engines when they pulled up beside me at a light because they didn't want me to remember their car the next time I rolled into Wal-Mart.
I want it to be that way with my Pinto. I want people to give me a bit more space on the road. I want people to be distracted from their cell phone long enough to see a chartreuse (sp?) Pinto wagon and think, "Hmmm...best not bump into him."
Perception or reality, I don't really care. Maybe Ford and the Pinto got a bad rap. Maybe not. At least I hope to get a bit more attention on the street than your average Joe.
Until later, happy motoring.
Okay. Now I've downloaded an updated version of Adobe Acrobat and can read through the documents. Here's a more serious take:
QuoteNow all you need is a spark from a cigarette, ignition, or scraping metal, and both cars would be engulfed in flames. — Dowie
Hmmm...Who the heck is smoking a cigarette under a car that's being rear-ended at "say" 30 to 40 mph? Perhaps someone at the accident scene decides to flick a butt into a puddle of leaking gas. Ignition? Oh, I've just been involved in an accident, let me restart my car over this puddle of gas. Unfortunately, that sounds like something more than a few drivers might do. Scraping metal is logical, but while gas "immediately sloshing all over the place" is hazardous, it's the fumes, not gasoline in a liquid state, that ignite.
Now, when we get to the court case document and get the graphic of the accident that seems to be the root cause of the uproar, we find some interesting facts. First the Pinto in that accident had many problems, primarily that it stalled due to a carb problem. This is why it is sitting at 0 mph in the middle of the highway. In short, that specific *car*, which happened to be a Pinto, shouldn't have been on the road considering it was a safety hazard due to stalling. It also gets rear ended by a Galaxie 500 that was braking heavily. That *force* (
weight and momentum) is considerable. The articles make much of
speed at impact, but neglect to mention that a heavy, full-size car like a 60's Galaxie 500 skidding at highway speed will crumple just about anything it hits. The gasoline spraying into the passenger compartment is unfortunate, but no mention is made as to what the ignition source was.
Why do the condescending tones of Dowie and the "Engineering Disaster" articles sound a) less than professional; and b) less than the scientific "proof" they wish to convey? (See that long silvery object? That's a gas tank. Can you say "gas tank?" Sure, I knew you could. And: "differential" that's a big automotive technical term for the bulge in the rear axle. What's an axle? Why, it's that pipe-looking thingy between your wheels. Wheels? They're those rubbery things filled with air. No, sillies, not your heads...on the car!)
Some comments struck me as odd, such as that Lee Iacocca (who promoted seat belts in mass produced vehicles with the Mustang) wasn't safty conscious because he said, "Safety doesn't sell." ("Safety doesn't sell" and "Hey, let's make rolling bombs" aren't necessarily one and the same. Safety *doesn't* sell. You use other aspects to sell a product.) Furthermore, from the court case article we see:
QuoteTo Mr. Iacocca's credit, however, it should be said that Chrysler Corporation was the first domestic automobile manufacturer to include at least one air bag in all its domestically manufactured automobiles. The air bag is clearly one of the greatest safety innovations the automobile industry has ever had. Furthermore, Mr. Iacocca appears to have pushed more vigorously than the chief executives of other domestic automobile manufacturers for the incorporation of air bags into different types of vehicles. Of course, the industry could have taken that action in the 1970's. However, it didn't, and, eventually, Chrysler did. Perhaps the suffering inflicted by the Pinto was not in vain.
Another odd statement revolves around the "fact" that Ford "assumed" this or that about the cost-benefits of safety (that's called a Straw Man argument: putting your words into the other guy's mouth and then attacking the other guy for "saying" them). Somehow the comment about golf clubs in the trunk seems off. Perhaps as if a tongue-in-cheek remark were taken seriously (or entirely fabricated).
Oh, and lets get totally outrageous: 400,000 cars are burning up in accidents each year. What percentage were Pintos? If 400,000 cars are experiencing this situation, why bag on the Ford Pinto so hard? This argumentative fallacy is known as
equivocation: making one source of data appear to relate to an argument without an actual connection. BTW, anyone else getting tired of the italicized emphasis on nearly
everything in this article?
Why does Dowie say "exploding gas tank and all" when the issue was that the tank would *rupture* and leak gasoline? The tank didn't explode (the ignition source is not inherent in the tank), leaking fuel ignited...and the mysterious and variable ignition sources create some questionable argumentation.
Now we get a number on Pintos: 500 (but let's nearly double that without evidenciary support and say it "could be nearly 900"). Remember that 400,000 cars are catching fire every year and of those 3000 people are being severly burned. Okay. Over *8* years, the Pinto is involved in 500 such incidents. Over the same period, using their average figures that they continue to emphasize, 3,000 (people per year) x 8 (years) = 24,000 victims. 500 / 24,000 = 2%. Yeah,
two percent! Statistical significance is considered to be 4%. Hmmm...could that be why the author "supposes" a number like 900? To get close to statistical significance?
So, while tragic, the Pinto accidents were not a significant amount of the total such incidents. Something the articles, for some reason, fail to mention. Hmmmm.... I wonder why that would be?
And how about this as a statement with no weight based on evidence:
QuoteAlthough this particular story is about the Pinto, the way in which Ford made its decision is typical of the U.S. auto industry generally. There are plenty of similar stories about other cars made by other companies. But this case is the worst of them all. — Dowie
So bag on a specific company when it was an industry-wide problem. Then back off with a throw away line. Heck, even doing that, "Ford" and "Pinto" are still specifically mentioned while "other cars" and "other companies" are glossed terms.
And how does 2% = "worst case." Were no other car models involved in 2% or more of the incident total? Even so, being "worst" still does not make it "significant" enough to defame a company or 5 million cars and their drivers.
More rhetoric makes the artical (and its author, for that matter) laughable. How does trying to build a car "under 2,000 lbs and under $2,000" heighten the so-called anti-safety pressure? What exactly is "anti-safety pressure" anyway?
"Yo, dudes, what are you doing? I said put spikes on the dashboard, not padding! You idiots are all fired!"
Or, perhaps the author means "anti-regulatory" pressure. In which case, the auto industry is hardly the only American entity that doesn't want governmental intrusion into how it does business. But people die in cars, so the industry gets a fat target on its back. Does the industry need safety regulations? Certainly. But the government (and the pork-barrel politicians that form government agencies and committees) is notorious for sticking all it's fingers (and a couple toes) into other people's pies. "It's good for the people," is the argument. The irony is that the govenment's record on "public safety intervention" isn't exactly logical. Example: The gov. lets people kill themselves slowly with cigarettes and alcohol poisoning, but you'd better wear your seat belt.
While significant mention is made that safety wasn't in the "top-secret green book" (everyone ooooh in awe), did production guidelines for other cars by Ford and competing manufacturers make safety a high priority? Apparently not if 400,000 (on average) cars were catching on fire each year. (Remember: only 63 of them [on average] were Pintos).
And while Dilweed, er Dowie, et al, keep insisting Ford valued a life at $200,000, suddenly we learn it was the NHTSA (pressured by the
auto industry), neither specifically nor directly Ford, that created that figure. Ford just used it and "foolishly let it slip into public records." So, that makes *Ford* the bad guy...how?
Sorry to not just let this go, but I feel the need to elaborate on a couple things I briefly mentioned in my previous post.
First, the Ford Pinto was one of the first "subcompact" American cars. This means that it was one of the smallest, lightest vehicles on the road at the time. If it were rear-ended by a much larger, heavier vehicle, naturally it would take a severe crumpling. Look at a mini-van that's been rear-ended by a semi; it's pretty bad off. That's not necessarily the manufacturer's fault. The problem is that no one chooses who is going to rear-end them, when, where, how hard, or with what. When everything on the road is bigger than you are, you don't stand much of a chance. So part of the Pinto's "problem" was a "time frame" issue. At the time it was introduced to the American road, it was at a disadvantage against almost every other vehicle when it came to collision protection, simply due to size.
This leads me to my second point, specifically Mr. Iacocca. The articles claim Iacocca was terse with his designers when they approached him about safety. What the author most likely is unaware of is that Mr. Iacocca was practicing a management philosophy that was new to American industry in the 1970s: Total Quality Management.
For those not aquainted with it, TQM was an American idea that didn't catch on initially in America. Instead, post-WWII Japan used the philosophy in its time of industrial rebuilding to go from wooden fighter planes to automotive exporting giants.
TQM is based on the manufacturer finding out what the consumer wants, then providing that product to the consumer. Profit comes from a) meeting demand; and b) finding the most efficient means of manufacture. Sounds simple, right?
Now think about American industrial practices in the '50s, '60s, and '70s (and '80s and '90s and yet today to some extent). Industrial leaders decided what they thought the consumer wanted, then manufactured that. The consumer, with no choices, purchased what was available. As a result, the industrial leaders looked like freaking mind-reading geniuses!
Then came the imports that met consumer desire for a smaller, driveable, parkable, economical, grocery-getter. What did the Big 3 do? Laugh. And then when they lost sales to the VW Bug and Japanese imports, they decided that maybe they needed to give the American consumer what he wanted instead of what they *thought* he wanted.
Remember the old Ford motto of the '70s and '80s? "Quality is Job 1." That is the essence of TQM. The American consumer demanded a quality automobile that wouldn't be in the scrap heap in 3 years, so Ford was looking to meet that demand.
That's also where Lee Iacocca was going with the designers of the Pinto in 1970. In short, his job was to find out what the consumer wanted from an automobile. He then gave that to the project designers in the form of the "green-book." The designers job was to find the best answer to the consumer demands, then present that *package* to Iacocca. Iacocca did *not* want to have to do an item-by-item approval of every nut and bolt. That wasn't his job. So when the designers came to him with safety concerns, he turned it back to them. "The consumer wants a small vehicle (under 2000 lbs) and an economical vehicle (under $2000). Design it."
Now, as a consumer what do *you* look for primarily in a vehicle? Most people look at exterior stylings, interior comforts, fuel mileage, and cost. Which does the American consumer spend more time debating about: safety appliances such as seatbelts, number of airbags, antilock brakes, and what will happen when rear-ended by a 1964 Galaxie 500 or the vehicle's color?
I know the honest answer.
So, when Iacocca says, "Safety doesn't sell," he's right on the money. As long as the vehicle meets current federal safety regulations, the consumer usually won't give safety much thought. This doesn't mean that industry should or does ignore safety concerns.
Sometimes, products aren't used as intended. The result is that really bad things frequently happen. Sometimes products malfunction, not by poor design, but by unfortunate manufacturing errors (and failure to find those deficiencies in quality assurance checks at the factory). It's a grim reality; and sometimes really bad things happen (this, I believe, is the root cause of the accident so graphically described in the article. The Pinto had carb problems that caused it to be at a standstill in the middle lane of a highway). Unfortunately, even when products are used as intended, bad things still occasionally happen.
This is equally true for ladders, chainsaws, hair dryers, toasters, Ford Pintos, and the other 3,199,500 vehicles (over 8 years) that the articles fail to identify by make and model.
8)rule #1 people die
rule #2 people die in cars
rule #3 NOTHING the government or the automakers can do can change rules 1 and 2.
dont like it? tough, live with it, i do. when i had my 80 pinto, people would always ask if i was scared to drive the car. at first i would tell them about the improvements ford made to the design and the problem was virtually eliminated. after a while i would just tell people, if you dont want to get sued for every penny you ever had, now have or ever will have, DONT HIT MY CAR. they would just walk away shaking their heads.
Quoterule #1 people die
rule #2 people die in cars
rule #3 NOTHING the government or the automakers can do can change rules 1 and 2.
Yup. Living is risky.
Right after I posted my last response I came across an article on espn.go.com about a football player trying to save a guy in a burning car (a Ford, no less). Somehow the guy had gone off the road, become airborne and wedged his car between two trees. The car was elevated between the trees (maybe 3' or so) and the doors wouldn't open because they were wedged. The guy was still alive in his burning car and couldn't get out. His airbag deployed and caught fire right in his face. Very graphic details.
Eventually the fire was extinguished and the guy cut out of the car, but he died at the hospital.
Now, this is not to make light of another unfortunate individual's death, but you know there will be law suits. Perhaps legislation will be passed that trees are to be grown no closer together than 10' when within 250' of a highway. Perhaps cars must now be designed with escape hatches in their roofs (like NASCAR and NHRA funny cars) or floors (like tanks) in case the vehicle is somehow wedged between two trees and off the ground.
It's a fascinating topic to discuss.
The Pinto was designed like many other cars of its time in that the fuel tank is behind the rear axle. Evidently Ford knew of midmounted fuel tanks, but did not do it for cost or design reasons. Did car companies design for crashes back then? You had 5mph bumpers and a dashboard that wasnt all metal and you had seat belts. I think that probably what everyone expected in a car. I've read various stories about this but like everything, there's two sides to a story and then the truth.
Bear in mind, there is/was issues with the crown vic and SN95 type Mustang that also had potential fuel leakage after being hit, but has not recieved widespread derision like the Pinto got. I seem to remember yet another car that had problems after getting hit because the fuel tank filler pipe would fall out causing a big leak.
I do have contempt for executive management and I'm willing to bet they knew of potential problems but decided not to do anything for fear of late announcement/delivery of the car, and extra expense needed to engineer and implement a solution. Plus, like most human minds, they probably thought they could get away with it and nothing would ever happen. (like I do with speeding) Kinda ironic the solution was pretty simple!
I acutally bought a driveable 1980 sedan for parts and it was rear ended in the back corner. Not critical damage, but got hit pretty good. Fuel tank was not even close to being touched by anything and was still intact after I removed the saleable parts and used the chassis to ram and then yank out a tree stump I wanted removed.
Seems it's all to easy to whip the general populace into a frenzy over something. "think of the children!"