The Ford Pinto
Case 2.2 The Ford Pinto
Th ere was a time wh en the “ made in Japan” label brought a predictable smirk of superiority to the face of most Americans. The quality of most Japanese products usually was as low as their price. In fact, few imports could match their domestic counterparts, the proud products of Yankee know- how. But by the late 1960s, an invasion of foreign- made goods chiseled a few worry lines into the coun-tenance of U. S. industry. In Detroit, worry was fast fading to panic as the Japanese, not to mention the Germans, began to gobble up more and more of the subcompact auto market. Never one to take a backseat to the competition, Ford Motor Company decided to meet the threat from abroad head- on. In 1968, Ford executives decided to produce the Pinto. Known inside the company as “ Lee’s car,” after Ford president Lee Iacocca, the Pinto was to weigh no more than 2,000 pounds and cost no more than $ 2,000.20 Eager to have its subcompact ready for the 1971 model year, Ford decided to compress the normal drafting- board- to-showroom time of about three- and- a- half years into two. The compressed schedule meant that any design changes typically made before production- line tooling would have to be made during it. Before producing the Pinto, Ford crash- tested various prototypes, in part to learn whether they met a safety stand-ard proposed by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration ( NHTSA) to reduce fires from traffic collisions. This standard would have required that by 1972 all new autos be able to withstand a rear- end impact of 20 mph without fuel loss, and that by 1973 they be able to withstand an impact of 30 mph. The prototypes all failed the 20- mph test. In 1970 Ford crash- tested the Pinto itself, and the result was the same: ruptured gas tanks and dangerous leaks. The only Pintos to pass the test had been modified in some way— for example, with a rubber bladder in the gas tank or a piece of steel between the tank and the rear bumper. Thus, Ford knew that the Pinto represented a serious fire hazard when struck from the rear, even in low- speed colli-sions. Ford officials faced a decision. Should they go ahead with the existing design, thereby meeting the production timetable but possibly jeopardizing consumer safety? Or should they delay production of the Pinto by redesigning the gas tank to make it safer and thus concede another year of subcompact dominance to foreign companies? Ford not only pushed ahead with the original design but also stuck to it for the next six years. What explains Ford’s decision? The evidence suggests that Ford relied, at least in part, on cost- benefit reasoning, which is an analysis in monetary terms of the expected costs and benefits of doing something. There were various ways of making the Pinto’s gas tank safer. Although the estimated price of these safety improvements ranged from only $ 5 to $ 8 per vehicle, Ford evidently reasoned that the increased cost outweighed the benefits of a new tank design. How exactly did Ford reach that conclusion? We don’t know for sure, but an internal report, “ Fatalities Associated with Crash- Induced Fuel Leakage and Fires,” reveals the cost- benefit reasoning that the company used in cases like this. This report was not written with the Pinto in mind; rather, it concerns fuel leakage in rollover accidents ( not rear- end collisions), and its computations applied to all Ford vehicles, not just the Pinto. Nevertheless, it illustrates the type of reasoning that was probably used in the Pinto case. In the “ Fatalities” report, Ford engineers estimated the cost of technical improvements that would prevent gas tanks from leaking in rollover accidents to be $ 11 per vehi-cle. The authors go on to discuss various estimates of the number of people killed by fires from car rollovers before settling on the relatively low figure of 180 deaths per year. But given that number, how can the value of those individu-als’ lives be gauged? Can a dollars- and- cents figure be assigned to a human being? NHTSA thought so. In 1972, it estimated that society loses $ 200,725 every time a person is killed in an auto accident ( adjusted for inflation, today’s figure would, of course, be considerably higher). It broke down the costs as follows:
Future productivity losses
Direct $ 132,000
Indirect 41,300
Medical costs Hospital 700
Other 425
Property damage 1,500
Insurance administration 4,700
Legal and court expenses 3,000
Employer losses 1,000
Victim’s pain and suffering 10,000
Funeral 900
Assets ( lost consumption) 5,000
Miscellaneous accident costs 200
Total per fatality $ 200,725
Putting the NHTSA figures together with other statistical studies, the Ford report arrives at the following overall assessment of costs and benefits:
Benefits Savings: 180 burn deaths, 180 serious burn injuries, 2,100 burned vehicles
Unit cost: $ 200,000 per death, $ 67,000 per injury, $ 700 per vehicle
Total benefit: ( 180 × $ 200,000) + ( 180 × $ 67,000) + ( 2,100 × $ 700) = $ 49.5 million
Costs
Sales: 11 million cars, 1.5 million light trucks
Unit cost: $ 11 per car, $ 11 per truck
Total cost: 12.5 million × $ 11 = $ 137.5 million
Thus, the costs of the suggested safety improvements out-weigh their benefits, and the “ Fatalities” report accordingly recommends against any improvements— a recommendation that Ford followed. Likewise in the Pinto case, Ford’s management, whatever its exact reasoning, decided to stick with the original design and not upgrade the Pinto’s fuel tank, despite the test results reported by its engineers. Here is the aftermath of Ford’s decision: • Between 1971 and 1978, the Pinto was responsible for a number of fire- related deaths. Ford puts the figure at 23; its critics say the figure is closer to 500. According to the sworn testimony of Ford engineers, 95 percent of the fatalities would have survived if Ford had located the fuel tank over the axle ( as it had done on its Capri automobiles). • NHTSA finally adopted a 30- mph collision standard in 1976. The Pinto then acquired a rupture- proof fuel tank. In 1978 Ford was obliged to recall all 1971– 1976 Pintos for fuel- tank modifications. • Between 1971 and 1978, approximately fifty lawsuits were brought against Ford in connection with rear- end accidents in the Pinto. In the Richard Grimshaw case, in addition to award-ing over $ 3 million in compensatory damages to the victims of a Pinto crash, the jury awarded a landmark $ 125 million in punitive damages against Ford ( later reduced by the judge to $ 3.5 million) . • On August 10, 1978, the 1973 Ford Pinto that eighteen- year-old Judy Ulrich, her sixteen- year- old sister Lynn, and their eighteen- year- old cousin Donna were riding in was struck from the rear by a van near Elkhart, Indiana. The gas tank of the Pinto exploded on impact. In the fire that resulted, the three teenagers were burned to death. Ford was charged with criminal homicide. The judge in the case advised jurors that Ford should be convicted if it had clearly disregarded the harm that might result from its actions, and that disregard represented a substantial deviation from acceptable stand-ards of conduct. On March 13, 1980, the jury found Ford not guilty of criminal homicide. For its part, Ford has always denied that the Pinto is unsafe compared with other cars of its type and era. The company also points out that in every model year the Pinto met or surpassed the government’s own standards. But what the company doesn’t say is that successful lobbying by it and its industry associates was responsible for delaying for seven years the adoption of any NHTSA crash standard. Furthermore, Ford’s critics claim that there were more than forty European and Japanese models in the Pinto price and weight range with safer gas- tank position. “ Ford made an extremely irre-sponsible decision,” concludes auto safety expert Byron Bloch, “ when they placed such a weak tank in such a ridicu-lous location in such a soft rear end.” Has the automobile industry learned a lesson from Ford’s experience with the Pinto? Some observers thought not when twenty years later an Atlanta jury held the General Motors Corporation responsible for the death of a Georgia teenager in the fiery crash of one of its pickup trucks. Finding that the company had known that its “ side- saddle” gas tanks, which are mounted outside the rails of the truck’s frame, are dan-gerously prone to rupture, the jury awarded $ 4.2 million in actual damages and $ 101 million in punitive damages to the parents of the seventeen- year- old victim, Shannon Moseley. After the verdict, General Motors said that it still stood behind the safety of its trucks and contended “ that a full examination by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration of the technical issues in this matter will bear out our contention that the . . . pickup trucks do not have a safety related defect.” Subsequently, however, the Department of Transportation determined that GM pickups of the style Shannon Moseley drove do pose a fire hazard and that they are more prone than competitors’ pickups to catch fire when struck from the side. Still, GM rejected requests to recall the pickups and repair them, and later the Georgia Court of Appeals threw out the jury’s verdict on a legal technicality— despite ruling that the evidence submit-ted in the case showed that GM was aware that the gas tanks were hazardous but, to save the expense involved, did not try to make them safer. Expense seems to be the issue, too, when it comes to SUV rollovers. After nearly three hundred rollover deaths in Ford Explorers equipped with Firestone tires in the late 1990s, Congress mandated NHTSA to conduct rollover road tests on all SUVs. ( Previously, the agency had relied on mathematical formulas based on accident statistics to evaluate rollover resistance, rather than doing real- world tests.) In August 2004 NHTSA released its results, and they weren’t pretty— at least not for several of Detroit’s most popular models. The Chevrolet Tahoe and the Ford Explorer, in particular, have between a 26 and a 29 percent chance of rolling over in a single- vehicle crash, almost twice that of models from Honda, Nissan, and Chrysler. The Saturn Vue couldn’t even finish the test because its left- rear suspension broke, leading General Motors to recall all 250,000 Vues. Ford and General Motors have the anti- rollover technology necessary to make their SUVs safer. The problem is that rollover sensors and electronic stability systems add about $ 800 to the price of a vehicle, so the companies have offered them only as options. The same is true of side- curtain airbags to protect occupants when a vehicle rolls over. They cost about $ 500. Improved design— wider wheel tracks, lower center of gravity, and reinforced roofs to protect passengers in a rollover— would also help. Embarrassed by the test results, the compa-nies promised to make more safety features standard equipment on new SUVs. Lawsuits by rollover victims are also prodding the companies to enhance their commitment to safety. Two months before NHTSA released its results, Ford had to pay $ 369 million in damages— one of the largest personal-injury awards ever against an automaker— to a San Diego couple whose Explorer flipped over four- and- a- half times when they swerved to avoid a metal object on the highway.
Discussion Questions
1. What moral issues does the Pinto case raise?
2. Suppose Ford officials were asked to justify their decision. What moral principles do you think they would invoke? Assess Ford’s handling of the Pinto from the perspective of each of the moral theories discussed in this chapter.
3. Utilitarians would say that jeopardizing motorists does not by itself make Ford’s action morally objectionable. The only morally relevant matter is whether Ford gave equal consideration to the interests of each affected party. Do you think Ford did this?
4. Is cost- benefit analysis a legitimate tool? What role, if any, should it play in moral deliberation? Critically assess the example of cost- benefit analysis given in the case study. Is there anything unsatisfactory about it? Could it have been improved upon in some way?
5. Speculate about Kant’s response to the idea of placing a monetary value on a human life. Is doing so ever morally legitimate?
6. What responsibilities to its customers do you think Ford had? What are the most important moral rights, if any, operating in the Pinto case?
7. Would it have made a moral difference if the savings resulting from not improving the Pinto gas tank had been passed on to Ford’s customers? Could a rational customer have chosen to save a few dollars and risk having the more dangerous gas tank? What if Ford had told potential customers about its decision?
8. The maxim of Ford’s action might be stated thus: “ When the cost of a safety improvement would hurt the bottom line, it’s all right not to make it.” Can this maxim be universalized? Does it treat humans as ends in them-selves? Would manufacturers be willing to abide by it if the positions were reversed and they were in the role of consumers?
9. Should Ford have been found guilty of criminal homicide in the Ulrich case?
10. Was GM responsible for Shannon Moseley’s death? Compare that case with the case of Ford and the Pinto.
11. Assess Ford’s and GM’s actions with respect to SUV roll-overs. Have the auto- makers met their moral obligation to consumers, or have they acted wrongly by not doing more to increase SUV safety? Should they be held either mor-ally or legally responsible for deaths from roll- overs that would not have occurred in other vehicles? What should automakers do to increase SUV safety?
12. Is it wrong for business to sell a product that is not as safe as it could be, given current technology? Is it wrong to sell a vehicle that is less safe than competing products on the market? Are there limits to how far automakers must go in the name of safety?
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