Mark Dowie, Pinto Madness. Mother Jones, 1 September 1977. “For seven years the Ford Motor Company sold cars in which it knew hundreds of people would needlessly burn to death.”
Excerpt from story:
An extensive investigation by Mother Jones over the past six months [March-August 1977] has found…:
- Fighting strong competition from Volkswagen [3] for the lucrative small-car market, the Ford Motor Company rushed the Pinto into production in much less than the usual time.
- Ford engineers discovered in pre-production crash tests that rear-end collisions would rupture the Pinto’s fuel system extremely easily.
- Because assembly-line machinery was already tooled when engineers found this defect, top Ford officials decided to manufacture the car anyway—exploding gas tank and all—even though Ford owned the patent on a much safer gas tank.
- For more than eight years afterwards, Ford successfully lobbied, with extraordinary vigor and some blatant lies, against a key government safety standard that would have forced the company to change the Pinto’s fire-prone gas tank….