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1977 Pinto Cruizin Wagon

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Mint Original Black Rear Seat $275.00

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pinto floor mats??

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Why the Ford Pinto didn’t suck

Why the Ford Pinto didn't suckThe Ford Pinto was born a low-rent, stumpy thing in Dearborn 40 years ago and grew to become one of the most infamous cars in history. The thing is that it didn't actually suck. Really.

Even after four decades, what's the first thing that comes to mind when most people think of the Ford Pinto? Ka-BLAM! The truth is the Pinto was more than that — and this is the story of how the exploding Pinto became a pre-apocalyptic narrative, how the myth was exposed, and why you should race one.

The Pinto was CEO Lee Iacocca's baby, a homegrown answer to the threat of compact-sized economy cars from Japan and Germany, the sales of which had grown significantly throughout the 1960s. Iacocca demanded the Pinto cost under $2,000, and weigh under 2,000 pounds. It was an all-hands-on-deck project, and Ford got it done in 25 months from concept to production.

Building its own small car meant Ford's buyers wouldn't have to hew to the Japanese government's size-tamping regulations; Ford would have the freedom to choose its own exterior dimensions and engine sizes based on market needs (as did Chevy with the Vega and AMC with the Gremlin). And people cold dug it.

When it was unveiled in late 1970 (ominously on September 11), US buyers noted the Pinto's pleasant shape — bringing to mind a certain tailless amphibian — and interior layout hinting at a hipster's sunken living room. Some call it one of the ugliest cars ever made, but like fans of Mischa Barton, Pinto lovers care not what others think. With its strong Kent OHV four (a distant cousin of the Lotus TwinCam), the Pinto could at least keep up with its peers, despite its drum brakes and as long as one looked past its Russian-roulette build quality.

But what of the elephant in the Pinto's room? Yes, the whole blowing-up-on-rear-end-impact thing. It all started a little more than a year after the Pinto's arrival.

 

Grimshaw v. Ford Motor Company

On May 28, 1972, Mrs. Lilly Gray and 13-year-old passenger Richard Grimshaw, set out from Anaheim, California toward Barstow in Gray's six-month-old Ford Pinto. Gray had been having trouble with the car since new, returning it to the dealer several times for stalling. After stopping in San Bernardino for gasoline, Gray got back on I-15 and accelerated to around 65 mph. Approaching traffic congestion, she moved from the left lane to the middle lane, where the car suddenly stalled and came to a stop. A 1962 Ford Galaxie, the driver unable to stop or swerve in time, rear-ended the Pinto. The Pinto's gas tank was driven forward, and punctured on the bolts of the differential housing.

As the rear wheel well sections separated from the floor pan, a full tank of fuel sprayed straight into the passenger compartment, which was engulfed in flames. Gray later died from congestive heart failure, a direct result of being nearly incinerated, while Grimshaw was burned severely and left permanently disfigured. Grimshaw and the Gray family sued Ford Motor Company (among others), and after a six-month jury trial, verdicts were returned against Ford Motor Company. Ford did not contest amount of compensatory damages awarded to Grimshaw and the Gray family, and a jury awarded the plaintiffs $125 million, which the judge in the case subsequently reduced to the low seven figures. Other crashes and other lawsuits followed.

Why the Ford Pinto didn't suck

Mother Jones and Pinto Madness

In 1977, Mark Dowie, business manager of Mother Jones magazine published an article on the Pinto's "exploding gas tanks." It's the same article in which we first heard the chilling phrase, "How much does Ford think your life is worth?" Dowie had spent days sorting through filing cabinets at the Department of Transportation, examining paperwork Ford had produced as part of a lobbying effort to defeat a federal rear-end collision standard. That's where Dowie uncovered an innocuous-looking memo entitled "Fatalities Associated with Crash-Induced Fuel Leakage and Fires."

The Car Talk blog describes why the memo proved so damning.

In it, Ford's director of auto safety estimated that equipping the Pinto with [an] $11 part would prevent 180 burn deaths, 180 serious burn injuries and 2,100 burned cars, for a total cost of $137 million. Paying out $200,000 per death, $67,000 per injury and $700 per vehicle would cost only $49.15 million.

The government would, in 1978, demand Ford recall the million or so Pintos on the road to deal with the potential for gas-tank punctures. That "smoking gun" memo would become a symbol for corporate callousness and indifference to human life, haunting Ford (and other automakers) for decades. But despite the memo's cold calculations, was Ford characterized fairly as the Kevorkian of automakers?

Perhaps not. In 1991, A Rutgers Law Journal report [PDF] showed the total number of Pinto fires, out of 2 million cars and 10 years of production, stalled at 27. It was no more than any other vehicle, averaged out, and certainly not the thousand or more suggested by Mother Jones.

Why the Ford Pinto didn't suck

The big rebuttal, and vindication?

But what of the so-called "smoking gun" memo Dowie had unearthed? Surely Ford, and Lee Iacocca himself, were part of a ruthless establishment who didn't care if its customers lived or died, right? Well, not really. Remember that the memo was a lobbying document whose audience was intended to be the NHTSA. The memo didn't refer to Pintos, or even Ford products, specifically, but American cars in general. It also considered rollovers not rear-end collisions. And that chilling assignment of value to a human life? Indeed, it was federal regulators who often considered that startling concept in their own deliberations. The value figure used in Ford's memo was the same one regulators had themselves set forth.

In fact, measured by occupant fatalities per million cars in use during 1975 and 1976, the Pinto's safety record compared favorably to other subcompacts like the AMC Gremlin, Chevy Vega, Toyota Corolla and VW Beetle.

And what of Mother Jones' Dowie? As the Car Talk blog points out, Dowie now calls the Pinto, "a fabulous vehicle that got great gas mileage," if not for that one flaw: The legendary "$11 part."

Why the Ford Pinto didn't suck

Pinto Racing Doesn't Suck

Back in 1974, Car and Driver magazine created a Pinto for racing, an exercise to prove brains and common sense were more important than an unlimited budget and superstar power. As Patrick Bedard wrote in the March, 1975 issue of Car and Driver, "It's a great car to drive, this Pinto," referring to the racer the magazine prepared for the Goodrich Radial Challenge, an IMSA-sanctioned road racing series for small sedans.

Why'd they pick a Pinto over, say, a BMW 2002 or AMC Gremlin? Current owner of the prepped Pinto, Fox Motorsports says it was a matter of comparing the car's frontal area, weight, piston displacement, handling, wheel width, and horsepower to other cars of the day that would meet the entry criteria. (Racers like Jerry Walsh had by then already been fielding Pintos in IMSA's "Baby Grand" class.)

Bedard, along with Ron Nash and company procured a 30,000-mile 1972 Pinto two-door to transform. In addition to safety, chassis and differential mods, the team traded a 200-pound IMSA weight penalty for the power gain of Ford's 2.3-liter engine, which Bedard said "tipped the scales" in the Pinto's favor. But according to Bedard, it sounds like the real advantage was in the turns, thanks to some add-ons from Mssrs. Koni and Bilstein.

"The Pinto's advantage was cornering ability," Bedard wrote. "I don't think there was another car in the B. F. Goodrich series that was quicker through the turns on a dry track. The steering is light and quick, and the suspension is direct and predictable in a way that street cars never can be. It never darts over bumps, the axle is perfectly controlled and the suspension doesn't bottom."

Need more proof of the Pinto's lack of suck? Check out the SCCA Washington, DC region's spec-Pinto series.

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My Somewhat Begrudging Apology To Ford Pinto

ford-pinto.jpg

I never thought I’d offer an apology to the Ford Pinto, but I guess I owe it one.

I had a Pinto in the 1970s. Actually, my wife bought it a few months before we got married. The car became sort of a wedding dowry. So did the remaining 80% of the outstanding auto loan.

During a relatively brief ownership, the Pinto’s repair costs exceeded the original price of the car. It wasn’t a question of if it would fail, but when. And where. Sometimes, it simply wouldn’t start in the driveway. Other times, it would conk out at a busy intersection.

It ranks as the worst car I ever had. That was back when some auto makers made quality something like Job 100, certainly not Job 1.

Despite my bad Pinto experience, I suppose an apology is in order because of a recent blog I wrote. It centered on Toyota’s sudden-acceleration problems. But in discussing those, I invoked the memory of exploding Pintos, perpetuating an inaccuracy.

The widespread allegation was that, due to a design flaw, Pinto fuel tanks could readily blow up in rear-end collisions, setting the car and its occupants afire.

People started calling the Pinto “the barbecue that seats four.” And the lawsuits spread like wild fire.

Responding to my blog, a Ford (“I would very much prefer to keep my name out of print”) manager contacted me to set the record straight.

He says exploding Pintos were a myth that an investigation debunked nearly 20 years ago. He cites Gary Schwartz’ 1991 Rutgers Law Review paper that cut through the wild claims and examined what really happened.

Schwartz methodically determined the actual number of Pinto rear-end explosion deaths was not in the thousands, as commonly thought, but 27.

In 1975-76, the Pinto averaged 310 fatalities a year. But the similar-size Toyota Corolla averaged 313, the VW Beetle 374 and the Datsun 1200/210 came in at 405.

Yes, there were cases such as a Pinto exploding while parked on the shoulder of the road and hit from behind by a speeding pickup truck. But fiery rear-end collisions comprised only 0.6% of all fatalities back then, and the Pinto had a lower death rate in that category than the average compact or subcompact, Schwartz said after crunching the numbers. Nor was there anything about the Pinto’s rear-end design that made it particularly unsafe.

Not content to portray the Pinto as an incendiary device, ABC’s 20/20 decided to really heat things up in a 1978 broadcast containing “startling new developments.” ABC breathlessly reported that, not just Pintos, but fullsize Fords could blow up if hit from behind.

20/20 thereupon aired a video, shot by UCLA researchers, showing a Ford sedan getting rear-ended and bursting into flames. A couple of problems with that video:

One, it was shot 10 years earlier.

Two, the UCLA researchers had openly said in a published report that they intentionally rigged the vehicle with an explosive.

That’s because the test was to determine how a crash fire affected the car’s interior, not to show how easily Fords became fire balls. They said they had to use an accelerant because crash blazes on their own are so rare. They had tried to induce a vehicle fire in a crash without using an igniter, but failed.

ABC failed to mention any of that when correspondent Sylvia Chase reported on “Ford’s secret rear-end crash tests.”

We could forgive ABC for that botched reporting job. After all, it was 32 years ago. But a few weeks ago, ABC, in another one of its rigged auto exposes, showed video of a Toyota apparently accelerating on its own.

Turns out, the “runaway” vehicle had help from an associate professor. He built a gizmo with an on-off switch to provide acceleration on demand. Well, at least ABC didn’t show the Toyota slamming into a wall and bursting into flames.

In my blog, I also mentioned that Ford’s woes got worse in the 1970s with the supposed uncovering of an internal memo by a Ford attorney who allegedly calculated it would cost less to pay off wrongful-death suits than to redesign the Pinto.

It became known as the “Ford Pinto memo,” a smoking gun. But Schwartz looked into that, too. He reported the memo did not pertain to Pintos or any Ford products. Instead, it had to do with American vehicles in general.

It dealt with rollovers, not rear-end crashes. It did not address tort liability at all, let alone advocate it as a cheaper alternative to a redesign. It put a value to human life because federal regulators themselves did so.

The memo was meant for regulators’ eyes only. But it was off to the races after Mother Jones magazine got a hold of a copy and reported what wasn’t the case.

The exploding-Pinto myth lives on, largely because more Americans watch 20/20 than read the Rutgers Law Review. One wonders what people will recollect in 2040 about Toyota’s sudden accelerations, which more and more look like driver error and, in some cases, driver shams.

So I guess I owe the Pinto an apology. But it’s half-hearted, because my Pinto gave me much grief, even though, as the Ford manager notes, “it was a cheap car, built long ago and lots of things have changed, almost all for the better.”

Here goes: If I said anything that offended you, Pinto, I’m sorry. And thanks for not blowing up on me.

charging/starting problems

Started by mark78, June 06, 2007, 09:53:40 AM

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earthquake

The alternator is fine this is normal.I do car audio and we spend big bucks for alternators that charge at low rps.So don't worry but,as Pintony said make sure you have bullet proof grounds very important.
73 sedan parts car,80 crusin wagon conversion,76 F 250 460 SCJ,74 Ranchero 4x4,88 mustang lx convertable,and the readheaded step child 86 uhhh Chevy 4x4(Sorry guys it was cheap)

oldkayaker

I had a 71 with the 2.0 engine and a 38A alternator.  It worked fine even with A/C, electric radiator fan, lights, etc.  I did notice if the idle was low and the headlights were on, the lights would get brighter when the engine was sped up.  With the 1.6 engine, Ford may have underdriven it more than the 2.0 making this effect more pronounced (this may not be true).  So your 42A alternator should be fine unless you have increased the current draw a lot more than stock.

Put a home AC powered charger on the battery to bring it back to normal.  With the home charger off and the engine off, the battery should be around 12 to 13 volts (maybe higher if the home charger has just been removed).  With the engine running at 2,000 rpm (or raise speed until battery voltage stabilizes), the voltage should be around 13.5 to 14.5 volts.  If it is below 13 or over 15 volts when running at speed, I would replace the regulator.  According to the parts page (see link below), the same regulator is used for the 38, 42, 55, and 61A regulators.  Looks like you have a choice between electromechanical (cheap) and electronic regulators.
http://www.partsamerica.com/ProductList.aspx?PartType=204&PTSet=A&SearchFor=Alternator+Voltage+Regulator

If you have a electromechanical regulator (tall cover) and if it is bad, you could try to repair it.  Drill out the two cover rivets to gain access.  Clean the relay contacts.  To adjust the voltage you have to play with the relay spring tensions via either twisting screws or bending tabs (its been too long for me to remember).

You may also have a battery on its last leg.  After bring the battery back to normal charge with a home AC powered charger, check the battery voltage (at the battery posts) while cranking the engine.  It should not drop below 8 to 9 volts.  Another test I like is to leave the head lights on for say 20 minutes with engine off and then try cranking it.  If the cranking is noticeably slower, I would take the battery in for testing.



Jerry J - Jupiter, Florida

mark78

At first, i'd like to thank you for your answers ;)

I would like to add some more info.I had a bad , old alternator which didn't charge the battery but the lights on the car were stable when engine was running.
With the old altrnator and the engine running, the battery had 12.4 volts which I guess meant that the alternator was faulty.
Light in the dash didn't come on when engine was running, but it was working  when engine was off and switch was on.
The car was running properly only problem was that it didn't start sometimes unless I used cables from another car.
I bought a remanufactured alternator and installed it.the man who tested both alternators said the new one was OK.
Now the voltage on the battery is higher, the new one is charging, and car starts at most times.
The problem is that when the engine is running in low RPM and I push the gas pedal, all lights in the car (including dash lights and dome light) are getting brighter, and if I use the car at night and headlights are on , sometimes it still doesn't start.

If I had bad grounds, wouldn't I have the non-stable lights problem with the old alternator also?
I am thinking of 2 explanations.Either the new alternator is not enough to cover the losses so I have to buy a bigger one (this one is 42A the old one I am not sure but I am suspecting it is a 61), or I have a bad voltage regulator.Am I missing anything?
what I don;t know is what voltage regulator to buy.Is it different having a 42 or a 61 A alternator when it comes to voltage regulator or any voltage regulator for a pinto as it is sold in online stores should fit properly?

Thanks again,

Mark
my pinto lives in Greece since 1973...

Pintony

Hello mark78,
I have the answer!
Have you replaced the neg. battery cable from stock???
Make sure your neg. cable goes to the body first and then down to the block.
Or just install a grounding strap to the body.
Rember that the alt is on the block but the regulator is on the fire-wall - Core support
Both the alt. and reg. need to have a good ground to function properly.
Also try cleaning behind the nuts near the headlights to make sure the headlight ground has a good connection.
From Pintony

dave1987

I had a problem charging my battery which gave me a similar problem. It turned out my stator wire wasn't connected correctly on the alternator. It could your voltage regulator to though, I had that go bad on me as well, but my alternator light was coming on which gave it away.
1978 Ford Pinto Sedan - Family owned since new

Remembering Jeff Fitcher with every drive in my 78 Sedan.

I am a Pinto Surgeon. Fixing problems and giving Pintos a chance to live again is more than a hobby, it's a passion!

mark78

Hello everyone.
I need a little help/advice.
I have the following problem with my 1973 1.6 pinto: many times the engine doesn't start, especially at night, when headlights are on.The starter doesn't start at all.
I noticed that the battery is not charging very well, so the problem should be from the alternator.
I checked this in a store and found that the battery has about 12 v with the engine running.
So I ordered a 42A remanufactured alternator from USA.When I installed it and checked it, I saw that the new alternator is charging well, but the problem is that when headlights are on, they are not stable , but the get brighter when the rpm goes higher.
The man in the repair shop says that this is OK, I don't feel that way.
I wonder if this could be from the voltage regulator.
The car doesn't have A/C , so the 42 A should be ok, or maybe not?
Is there any difference in the voltage regulator you have to use if you install a 42 or a 61A alternator?because i am suspecting that the old alternator is a 61...

thanks everyone in advance!

my pinto lives in Greece since 1973...