Today, as I started the prep work needed to change the color of the car, I noticed that my Tan Pinto was made in Canada (only took 7 years for me to see the stickers). As much as I know about these cars, I don't know much about where they were made. I did read that some were made in Canada (at least one anyway), and NJ (I think), and maybe somewhere else too. Does anyone know how many Pintos were made in Canada and sold in the US?
Bill
Quote from: 77turbopinto on December 02, 2007, 08:55:15 PM
Does anyone know how many Pintos were made in Canada and sold in the US?
Bill
All the ones that were imported! ;D
Quote from: Pintony on December 02, 2007, 09:01:06 PM
All the ones that were imported! ;D
Wow, that many?
Maybe "de-ported" would be a better term.....
Bill
I live a couple of hours away from where Pintos were manufactured in St. Thomas, Ontario. They made a lot of them there along with Mavericks. They also made them in New Jersey and California. I saved an article that explains something about exporting Pintos from here into the US. Written in 1977. Here is a part of it:
To everyone's surprise, the 1977 Pinto recently passed a rear- end crash test in Phoenix, Arizona, for NHTSA. The agency was so convinced the Pinto would fail that it was the first car tested. Amazingly, it did not burst into flame. "We have had so many Ford failures in the past," explained agency engineer Tom Grubbs, "I felt sure the Pinto would fail." How did it pass? Remember that one-dollar, one-pound metal baffle that was on one of the three modified Pintos that passed the pre-production crash tests nearly ten years ago? Well, it is a standard feature on the 1977 Pinto. In the Phoenix test it protected the gas tank from being perforated by those four bolts on the differential housing. We asked Grubbs if he noticed any other substantial alterations in the rear-end structure of the car. "No," he replied, "the [baffle] seems to be the only noticeable change over the 1976 model." But was it? What Tom Grubbs and the Department of Transportation didn't know when they tested the car was that it was manufactured in St. Thomas, Ontario. Ontario? The significance of that becomes clear when you learn that Canada has for years had extremely strict rear-end collision standards. Tom Irwin is the business manager of Charlie Rossi Ford, the Scottsdale, Arizona dealership that sold the Pinto to Tom Grubbs. He refused to explain why he was selling Fords made in Canada when there is a huge Pinto assembly plant much closer by in California. "I know why you're asking that question, and I'm not going to answer it," he blurted out. "You'll have to ask the company." But Ford's regional office in Phoenix has "no explanation" for the presence of Canadian cars in their local dealerships. Farther up the line in Dearborn, Ford people claim there is absolutely no difference between American and Canadian Pintos. They say cars are shipped back and forth across the border as a matter of course. But they were hard pressed to explain why some Canadian Pintos were shipped all the way to Scottsdale, Arizona. Significantly, one engineer at the St. Thomas plant did admit that the existence of strict rear-end collision standards in Canada "might encourage us to pay a little more attention to quality control on that part of the car." The Department of Transportation is considering buying an American Pinto and running the test again. For now, it will only say that the situation is under investigation. Whether the new American Pinto fails or passes the test, Standard 301 will never force the company to test or recall the more than two million pre-1977 Pintos still on the highway.
Thanks, great info; the only bad part is that now I will NEVER know any more on this subject than I do right now.
Bill
Bill,
If the facts in this article are correct, at least you can be confident that your Canadian built '77 Pinto is "safe".
Another general rule of thumb about U.S./Canada import and export is that Canada uses 10 percent of the cars manufactured because our population is about 10 percent of the U.S. When you see stats like Ford built 100 SCJ Mach I cars in 1969, we assume that 10 of them came to Canada. Therefore, a large number of the Canadian built Pintos did go to the states.
However, all of this does not answer your original question about how many imported there. Except to say that one could assume that many thousands of them were.
Kevin.