We want a Porsche, but buy a Ford. We want a Porsche, but buy a Ford.Actually, I do like the look of the Pinto. Too bad about the Ralph Nader-generated hysteria surrounding the gas tank:
The most famous Ford Pinto product liability case resulted in a judicial opinion that is a staple of remedies courses in American law schools. In 1981 in Grimshaw v. Ford Motor Co.,[11] the California Court of Appeal for the Fourth Appellate District reviewed Ford's conduct, and upheld compensatory damages of $2.5 million ($5.86 million today) and punitive damages of $3.5 million ($8.2 million today) against Ford. It also upheld the judge's reduction of the punitive damages from the jury's original verdict of $125 million ($293 million today). Of the two plaintiffs, one was killed in the collision that caused her Pinto to explode, and her passenger, 13-year old Richard Grimshaw, was badly burned and scarred for life.
However, a 1991 law review paper by Gary Schwartz[12] argued that the case against the Pinto was less clear-cut than commonly supposed. The number who died in Pinto rear-impact fires, according to Schwartz, was well below the hundreds cited in contemporary news reports and closer to the twenty-seven recorded by a limited National Highway Traffic Safety Administration database. Given the Pinto's production figures (over 2 million built), this was not substantially worse than typical for the time. Schwartz argued that the car was no more fire-prone than other cars of the time, that its fatality rates were lower than comparably sized imported automobiles, and that the supposed "smoking gun" document that plaintiffs claimed showed Ford's callousness in designing the Pinto was actually a document based on National Highway Traffic Safety Administration regulations about the value of a human life rather than a document containing an assessment of Ford's potential tort liability.
The NHTSA put pressure on Ford to recall the Pinto. The NHTSA was largely motivated by public outcry and pressure from groups such as the Center for Auto Safety. Initially the NHTSA did not feel there was sufficient evidence to demand a recall due to incidences of fire. The 27 deaths attributed to Pinto fires is the same number of deaths attributed to a transmission problem in the Pinto. That same transmission problem resulted in 180 total deaths in Ford vehicles. In 1974 the NHTSA ruled that the Pinto had no "recallable" problem. (All the information in this paragraph is from a single reference [13])