2013 Pinto Stampede stops at Jim Baier Ford in Fort Madison. (Pinto Stampede Facebook)
Never owned one or rode in one that I remember, same for Yugo, chevette, yes , once, vw beetle yes more than once..
If they can raise a few bucks for a good cause, more
power to them
To Hell and back.
Had a 71 and a 72. Both were practical and good looking cars. Had the gas tank recall performed on them.
Terrible in the snow.
I’ll drive a Vega there.
Yeah, for repairs.
Their charity is to buy them a better car??
Good car, I drove mine from California to Houston during the winter, and missing the driver’s side window, I did the driving in a mummy, military sleeping bag, with the zipper down the center.
Nothing like driving through sub-freezing temps at 70 mph, with no window, while just sitting there, but the car was dependable, and darned well better have been since I paid about $50, or $75 dollars for it.
I had a friend who years back went to the local Ford dealer and they put him in a Pinto. He told them after the settled on a price the only way he would buy it is if they threw in a set of rear fenders and quarter panels. They agreed to the deal...
They should take care they are not followed by a procession of Audis.
When we got home we had to crawl out the windows, since we couldn't open either door. We jacked it up in the middle and jumped up and down on the bumpers until the doors would open and close. Then my buddy found someone to sell it to and dumped it.
“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.
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.
I hear Jerry Lee Lewis wrote this years theme song.
Pintos were underrated cars. I had a station wagon and a sedan. Fast cars...
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...
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