You're one hundred percent wrong on that one. You may be thinking of the Pacer, or the Gremlin. Stylishly, the Pinto and Vega were pretty hip cars. While many teens had a car, they were usually family hand-me-downs between 5 and 10 years old. For a teenager in the early 70s, a NEW car was a big deal and most were small. After all, not many teens had enough money to afford more (parents seldom bought cars for their children in those days!)
My first new car was a fully loaded 1973 Pinto with a stick shift, that cost me $2,323. I loved that car! It was well-made, easy to maintain and got good gas mileage (30+ mph).
I later learned during my first year of college in one of my engineering classes that Ford execs had overruled their safety engineers and put the car into full production before a flaw in the gas tank filler-neck design was corrected. Although the engineers explained that the car would likely burn or explode in a rear impact, the Ford execs decided that they could more afford any losses from lawsuits than they could from the lost sales if they failed to beat the Chevy Vega on to the market.
A year later when the lawsuits started to appear, we knew the inside story and hoped Ford would be bankrupted for its callous disregard for lives.
They redesigned the car starting in 1974, and although they corrected the gas tank problem, they also cheapened the quality with a lot of plastic parts. The assembly quality also began to tank about then. By 1980, they had cars with WARPED dashboards in the SHOWROOMS!! I was a GM man by then. GM had problems with their cars also at that time, but they never seemed to sink quite as low as Ford or Chrysler.
IMO, much of the poor quality in vehicles in those days was due to the manufacturers experimenting with new materials to keep weight down to meet Government MPG standards; using new, unproven production processes to keep costs down due to increasingly outrageous union labor costs; and the general indifference to quality by that union workforce.
You nailed it!