Posted on 07/20/2014 1:48:02 PM PDT by BenLurkin
“up to 10,000 “road-worthy” Pintos left in the U.S.”
Had a friend in high school that had one. We nicknamed it the Cherry Bomb.
More power to them for the charity but can’t believe anyone would cherish those exploding caskets on wheels.
Vega’s didn’t hold up well to even slow crashes.
Pintos, Vegas, and Pacers were all horrid little vehicles.
Several years after that fiasco, there was an tiny bit in the newspaper, perhaps 50 words, that after the feral government investigated it, that the Pinto was actually safer in a rear end collision than its Japanese competitors of that era.
Of course, they buried on page 32D so as not to tarnish that Japanese quality myth that Consumer Reports and their ilk trumpeted.
Yes the Pinto and Vega were junk, but everything coming out of Japan was too.
My sister had a ‘73 back in the day.
She drove around L.A. in that stripped-down car. No power steering or air conditioning in her little blue Pinto.
It didn’t climb hills too well, either. I remember being a passenger in that Pinto while my sister tried to drive up a hilly street in the San Fernando Valley. The car wasn’t going very fast. Other cars passed us. The passenger in one of the cars, a bitchy looking woman, gave us a dirty look as her vehicle passed us.
Once, my sister left the Pinto parked on the driveway in front of our parent’s house in Santa Barbara for three or four days while we all drove another vehicle to Lake Tahoe and the California Gold Country. It was early summer, and when we got back, there was a crack down the middle of the Pinto’s dashboard that resembled the San Andreas fault.
From that day up to and including the present, my sister has always used sunshades on every vehicle she ever owned.
1974 Vega - that was the one you had to strap groceries in a seatbelt if they were in the front seat! LOL
The delivery company I worked for bought ONE - it sat in the lot as the extra car. Unlucky me, it was the one available for me to drive when working between semesters in school.
NOBODY wanted to drive that car!
I hear Jerry Lee Lewis wrote this years theme song.
Pintos were underrated cars. I had a station wagon and a sedan. Fast cars...
Ford’s version of the Yugo...
My first car was a ‘74 Pinto 2-door with a 2.0L OHC four and four-speed manual transmission. My parents bought it in 1980 from our neighbors, who were moving away to Alaska. It was the car I learned to drive in at the tender age of 13.
Living out in the country, my dad could just take me out to a lightly-traveled back road and let me work on the finer points of getting it started without stalling, upshifting and downshifting smoothly, and all that. As I remember, it was not difficult to stall that car off the line, and Dad would rip me a new one every time I did so.
It wasn’t the greatest car ever, but it served me quite well and was pretty decent on the whole.
As a side note, there’s a fellow I know who’s a fellow SCCA member who used to race a Pinto in their Improved Touring B class. He still has the car; it’s been sitting in the garage with a blown engine for the last decade or so.
I worked at a Ford garage in the early ‘80s and was given keys and a repair order on a Pinto for the filler neck recall. Drew the kit, pulled the car into my stall and saw the body was rusted away 2 inches around where the filler was supposed to attach. Showed the service manager who sent it back to the body shop. Wiggly-wiggly...
Back in the 70’s i had a choice. Which of my two vehicles would i take to work in the snow. The Pinto? Or the Honda CB350?
I usually took the Honda and let hubby have the Pinto.
LOL! That’s what I was looking for! That is the best part of that movie.
I drove Pintos on several occassions and had no trouble.Really wanted to buy the excellent condkition used 1976? Rallye Pinto wagon with V6 from a local lot sometime around 1985?; but someone else bought it while I was trying to scrape up the money. And they wrecked it very soon afterwards. The V6 Pintos had plenty of power for hills.I wouldn’t be ashamed or afraid to drive a Pinto today if it was in good condition.
I don’t care what any one else may say. I had two and drove the heck out of them lost one to a rear end collision (no it did not explode) ran the other for 120k miles. It was a good little car you could work on yourself and was a good safe if not powerfully drive. The @&$!!??&@$ tort lawyers killed the car and I say F them all
I owned one. The last American made car I ever owned; for good reason.
I had a red Bobcat, the Mercury Pinto.
I love the way the woman in the Pacer ad is dreamily staring, not at the car but at her own reflection!
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