Speaker 1: Hey, everybody. We've already made our big tour announcement for
Speaker 1: the year, but this is a little different because we
Speaker 1: have added a show because Denver sold out, so we
Speaker 1: have added a second show in Denver. Nice. Yeah, we're
Speaker 1: going to be there on Wednesday. Then we added a
Speaker 1: show the day before the same place, Gothic Theater, Englewood, Colorado.
Speaker 1: And you can go to s y s K live
Speaker 1: dot com to get info and tickets for that show
Speaker 1: and all the rest of our shows to Chuck. That's right, Boston,
Speaker 1: April fourth, d C April five. St. Louis, May and Cleveland, Ohio.
Speaker 1: Come out and see us. Welcome to Stuff you Should
Speaker 1: Know from House Stuff Works dot com. Hey what, Actually,
Speaker 1: I shouldn't say that yet, Chuck, because we're going to
Speaker 1: start the podcast later. This is like a pre thing,
Speaker 1: that's right, a pre welcome to this episode, a very
Speaker 1: special episode of Stuff you should Know. That's right because
Speaker 1: well it's live, and not only that, where are we live.
Speaker 1: We are live in our beloved town of Atlanta's right, Hotlanta.
Speaker 1: Well no you don't. No one calls it that everybody,
Speaker 1: but we we did this special show at the Buckhead
Speaker 1: Theater sold it out by the way, UM, and it
Speaker 1: was a it was a benefit show. Yeah, it was
Speaker 1: pretty great. We toured this topic in quite a few
Speaker 1: cities last year. We had a lot of fun, and
Speaker 1: we decided, actually, is your idea, give you full credit. Hey,
Speaker 1: let's make this Atlanta local show a benefit show and
Speaker 1: give all of the dough to uh charities of our choice.
Speaker 1: So mine, Chuck was the National Down Syndrome Society UM,
Speaker 1: which is this great organization who advocate for people with
Speaker 1: Down syndrome obviously UM, but one of the things that
Speaker 1: the National Down Syndrome Society is dedicated to, especially right now,
Speaker 1: they have something called law Syndrome uh checkout law syndrome
Speaker 1: dot org. And basically they're trying to get the laws
Speaker 1: changed that make people with Down syndrome choose between pursuing
Speaker 1: like a career and actually being able to support themselves
Speaker 1: or uh not in staying at home and living with
Speaker 1: their parents but still getting access to the really great
Speaker 1: government Medicaid healthcare that they need. So UM, the n
Speaker 1: d s S is saying they shouldn't have to choose,
Speaker 1: that we should want both of them, uh want them
Speaker 1: to have both of them. So that's that's their push
Speaker 1: right now. Uh, and you can go to n d
Speaker 1: s S dot org and they have all sorts of
Speaker 1: ways for you to donate and you can do that
Speaker 1: and feel great about yourself. It's great. And they actually
Speaker 1: sent people from the society to the show and we
Speaker 1: met them and they were just they were wonderful and
Speaker 1: what it was a great place to uh to pick
Speaker 1: what a great way to donate your money people. Yeah,
Speaker 1: shout out to Colleen and Cale for coming to the show,
Speaker 1: Thank you very much. And for my charity, I picked
Speaker 1: the Lifeline Animal Project right here in Atlanta. They are
Speaker 1: a sort of local grassroots see animal rescue organization. Uh.
Speaker 1: They have a few locations in Atlanta there to terrific.
Speaker 1: They have low costs spaying neuter programs. Obviously you can uh,
Speaker 1: you can adopt, you can volunteer. Um. They're they're really
Speaker 1: just great and they do it all um not for
Speaker 1: fame or glory or money, but because Atlanta has a serious,
Speaker 1: serious problem with stray pets. And they're just the nicest people.
Speaker 1: So it's great that you guys are supporting them, and
Speaker 1: it's uh, it's very worthy cause they are who Emily
Speaker 1: and I are charitable with every year on our own anyway,
Speaker 1: and it was great to efficiently partner with them, uh
Speaker 1: and be able to combine with our regular donating and
Speaker 1: write them a big old fat check thanks to Stuff
Speaker 1: you Should Know listeners. Yeah, so, so here's the thing.
Speaker 1: We donated of our proceeds from that show, and we
Speaker 1: twisted every arm involved. Um, how stuff works, got T
Speaker 1: shirts made up. Legendary super fan and friend Aaron Cooper
Speaker 1: donated his time to design the T shirts. Uh. The
Speaker 1: people who made the T shirts donated them for free.
Speaker 1: All the proceeds from the T shirts went to National
Speaker 1: Down Syndrome Society and Lifeline Animal Rescue. So what we're
Speaker 1: trying to say now is we're releasing this episode and
Speaker 1: we are hoping that you are beloved Stuff you Should
Speaker 1: Know listeners, Well, take the time to go make a
Speaker 1: donation yourself in exchange for this free live episode that
Speaker 1: we're bringing you. That's right, And if you want to
Speaker 1: just donate regular style, you can go to Lifeline Animal
Speaker 1: dot org. That would be great, but they made it
Speaker 1: super easy and set up a text donation campaign, so
Speaker 1: all you have to do is text Lifeline whatever amount
Speaker 1: of money. So text Lifeline dollar sign five to five
Speaker 1: zero one five, and you have just donated five bucks
Speaker 1: or however much money you want to donate. It's really
Speaker 1: really easy, right, And you can go to the n
Speaker 1: d S S dot org website and you can donate there.
Speaker 1: Um and they make it pretty easy on you. I
Speaker 1: believe both donations are donations to both organizations are text deductible.
Speaker 1: It's got that bonus two. That's right. So one more
Speaker 1: time for Lifeline, you can text to the number five,
Speaker 1: text the words Lifeline dollar sign and whatever number you
Speaker 1: want to donate, and then that's n D S S
Speaker 1: dot org and away with the show. Hey, welcome to
Speaker 1: the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant.
Speaker 1: Jerry's not here, but we are with all these beautiful
Speaker 1: people live at the Buckhead Theater in our own Atlanta
Speaker 1: g A good wow. Hey yeah they are not too shabby. Everybody. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So let's start. Man, I feel great. So I feel great. Since, uh,
Speaker 1: since this is a live podcast and it's actually set
Speaker 1: a little further back in time, we thought we would
Speaker 1: all get into the way back machine. So for those
Speaker 1: of you who have seen us lie before, you know,
Speaker 1: The Way Back Machine is made up. It's not a
Speaker 1: real thing, you but it does take a twinkle in
Speaker 1: your eye and a heartful of magic to get into
Speaker 1: the way Back Machine. So I hope all of you
Speaker 1: have that going on right now. That was my best
Speaker 1: Sarah Silverman impression. It's pretty good. Thanks. So we're all
Speaker 1: on the way Back Machine, okay, and we're going back
Speaker 1: to Detroit, Michigan, back to like the mid sixties or
Speaker 1: something like that. We'll say, yeah, back when people still
Speaker 1: wanted to go to Detroit. I'm purpose sorry, ma'am. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I told you. And we're gonna fly in does and
Speaker 1: we're very small and invisible by the way, So we're
Speaker 1: gonna fly in over the shoulder of an up and
Speaker 1: coming auto executive with a beautiful head of hair named
Speaker 1: Lee I A Coca and Lee Lee. At the time,
Speaker 1: he was what you might call a young turk, up
Speaker 1: and coming, like ready to take on the world. Great
Speaker 1: guy um and he had a lot of cred around
Speaker 1: the company that he worked at called Ford Motor Company's
Speaker 1: tried his pre Chrysler right, and he had a lot
Speaker 1: of cred because he had designed the Mustang right. It
Speaker 1: was known as Lee's car even. Yeah. I mean if
Speaker 1: you if you are the guy in the lead of
Speaker 1: the Ford Mustang project, then you've kind of bought your
Speaker 1: ticket in the car industry. If you have a great car,
Speaker 1: do you make the car that Vanilla Ice will eventually love,
Speaker 1: You've done something quite right with your life, right. Did
Speaker 1: he have a Mustang rolling in my five point oh
Speaker 1: with the rag top down? That's a Mustang, buddy, is
Speaker 1: it sure? I think it's even in the video. I've
Speaker 1: never been more ashamed to not know the lyrics of
Speaker 1: a song. Yeah, because it's f and Vanilla Ice. So
Speaker 1: I don't feel like I should have known it. I
Speaker 1: just feel like a stooge. Oh no, it's fine. Now
Speaker 1: you've got a Wan shirt on, you probably should know
Speaker 1: those lyrics. But I know I know that lyric. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I didn't know. It's my understanding, right everybody. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: thought it was a Volkswagen Beetle. No. No, but that
Speaker 1: does come up starting now because Lee I Coca was
Speaker 1: one of the few people in Detroit at the time
Speaker 1: who realized that the American auto industry's lunch was being
Speaker 1: eaten in the subcompact market, mainly because no American car
Speaker 1: company was making subcompacts at the time. Right, we liked
Speaker 1: our cars very large, like land yachts. Yeah, okay, so
Speaker 1: Li said, the Germans are eating our lunch with their
Speaker 1: little Volkswagen Beetle Hitler's car. Look it up, I had
Speaker 1: two Volkswagen Beetles. Those were two Hitler's cars. You supported
Speaker 1: Hitler in a way. My mom is over there, she
Speaker 1: bought that car. She's going like uh. And then the
Speaker 1: Toyota Corolla was also killing people, right, killing Detroit, I
Speaker 1: should say, And so Lee said, we need to get
Speaker 1: a car to market. But I'm not the president. There's
Speaker 1: a man who is president. And what is his name, Chuck?
Speaker 1: I can't even remember, honestly, Oh no, I do remember.
Speaker 1: His name is Bunky Knudsen. If you're the president of
Speaker 1: car company and your name is Bunky Knudson, you gotta
Speaker 1: know you have a target on your back. Right, nobody's
Speaker 1: gonna let that stand for very long, especially not Lee.
Speaker 1: I a coca. Yeah. The only thing Bunky Ninson and
Speaker 1: that year would have been president of is the the
Speaker 1: super secret, super secret Treehouse Playboy magazine club led by
Speaker 1: Bunkie News, right or the local Union of the Guys
Speaker 1: who sell those like monkeys that play the symbols on
Speaker 1: the street, you know, the wind up ones. Alright. So
Speaker 1: regardless of that, Bunky Knutson was in charge and Leah
Speaker 1: Coca had his eight had sights set on that job.
Speaker 1: And so they settle things in the traditional way in
Speaker 1: the car industry at the time, which was arm wrestling. Serious.
Speaker 1: So Leaa Coca had this thing where um, and we
Speaker 1: think this is probably how he rose to power. He
Speaker 1: could rip the sleeve clean off of his shirt right
Speaker 1: at the shoulder, right before an arm wrestling match, right.
Speaker 1: It's very intimidating, and he always kept his arms oiled.
Speaker 1: Every morning he would oil him up and very gingerly
Speaker 1: put the shirt on over him so the oil wouldn't
Speaker 1: show too So it really had like a pronounced effect
Speaker 1: when he tore his shirtslee of off and went like that.
Speaker 1: So when he did this, the Bunky nuts in and
Speaker 1: Bunky saw that oil bicep. He knew his time running
Speaker 1: for a company had grown short. That's right, funky news,
Speaker 1: and knew what time it was that was totally made up.
Speaker 1: You all realized the stunt silence threw me off a
Speaker 1: little bit. It was back to the Treehouse for Bunky.
Speaker 1: So Leah Coca found himself in charge of Forward, and
Speaker 1: he said, we gotta get a subcompact going fast, dudes.
Speaker 1: So here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna get a
Speaker 1: project going. I'm even gonna give it a code name,
Speaker 1: which is really weird and sort of sman mark, kind
Speaker 1: of a Newts and move. But he named it Project Phoenix,
Speaker 1: which is very cute and a little ironic once you
Speaker 1: know what this is about. And he said, I want
Speaker 1: a car I want on the market, and what twenty
Speaker 1: four months? Yeah, and normally it took like forty three
Speaker 1: months dating car from concept to production. I cocy said, no,
Speaker 1: twenty four so super fast, and it can't weigh more
Speaker 1: than two thousand sounds and it can't cost a customer
Speaker 1: more than two thousand dollars. And he totally should have
Speaker 1: called it Project two thousand, so that would have been
Speaker 1: a super cool name. In the early nineteen seventies, that
Speaker 1: car would go on to be known as the Ford Pinto.
Speaker 1: For those of you who aren't going, like a couple
Speaker 1: of collaps, a couple of booze, a couple of groans,
Speaker 1: and a lot of like we're gonna fill the people
Speaker 1: in on this, Okay. Yeah, So the deal with the
Speaker 1: Ford Pinto was if you don't know, and you did
Speaker 1: grow up in the seventies, um, it had a problem.
Speaker 1: We don't know a lot about cars, but we know
Speaker 1: that the Ford Pinto had a problem. If you would
Speaker 1: hit the Ford Pinto from the rear going very very slow,
Speaker 1: sometimes it would burst into a fiery ball. And that
Speaker 1: is not a good thing for a car to do.
Speaker 1: It's asleep when you're still in the car. Has anyone
Speaker 1: seen the movie Top Secret? Remember that one? There's there's
Speaker 1: a scene where Valkimer I think, is on a motorcycle.
Speaker 1: He's being chased by Germans, and um, he somehow out
Speaker 1: maneuvers them and they swerve off the road and slam
Speaker 1: on their brakes and almost come to a complete stop
Speaker 1: right before hitting hitting a Pinto in the rear, but
Speaker 1: don't quite make it. It makes that crystal thing sound
Speaker 1: and then boom they just blow up into flames. Right
Speaker 1: And this is in the eighties. This was like at
Speaker 1: least ten years after the Pinto had this reputation. That's
Speaker 1: not that far from the truth, actually, we found from
Speaker 1: doing this research, so there's actually a lot of choice
Speaker 1: quotes that we found a lot of people love taking
Speaker 1: pot shots at the Pinto. Some have written some pretty
Speaker 1: great stuff. Um, you want to take the first one? Yeah.
Speaker 1: The first one was from Popular Mechanics magazine and they said,
Speaker 1: Argue dobably, the most dangerous fuel tank of all time
Speaker 1: was a rear mounted vessel installed on the seventy one
Speaker 1: through seventies Ford Pinto. It's possibly the best example of
Speaker 1: what happens when poor engineering meets corporate negligence. Good quote,
Speaker 1: I got one. There was this guy named Dr Leslie Ball.
Speaker 1: He was the chief safety officer for NASA's manned Space program.
Speaker 1: So this guy new safety. Right. Um, he said that
Speaker 1: the release to production of the Pinto was the most
Speaker 1: reprehensible decision in the history of American engineering. So there's
Speaker 1: a couple of things I wanted to try. A couple
Speaker 1: of things to note in this quote. One he said
Speaker 1: was the most reprehensible decision, not one of the and
Speaker 1: he also qualifies it with American engineering, not automotive engineering.
Speaker 1: He's including like, um, easy bake ovens and other stuff
Speaker 1: that have killed like millions people. You know, he's including
Speaker 1: everything ever built basically easy, big governance or death traps too.
Speaker 1: So the Pinto, it was kind of an issue for Ford.
Speaker 1: Is we're going to see But there's this one Tippitt
Speaker 1: we ran acrost that we just love. There was a
Speaker 1: radio spot for the Pinto in the seventies and Ford
Speaker 1: had to get there um their agency to get rid
Speaker 1: of it because it had the line the Pinto leaves
Speaker 1: you with that warm feeling for real, this is this
Speaker 1: is a fun one of research, alright. So again I
Speaker 1: want to reiterate, we don't know anything about the design
Speaker 1: of cars. You know how to drive cars, and that's
Speaker 1: about where it ends. But we do know this. The
Speaker 1: original design of the Pinto had a gas tank that
Speaker 1: started six inches from the rear bumper. I know that's
Speaker 1: not a good idea. If I was in Detroit, I
Speaker 1: would have said, well, that's weird, and why would you
Speaker 1: want to do that, because you know, accidents happen. No
Speaker 1: one thought about it. No. That's made even worse by
Speaker 1: the fact that a car critic would later call that
Speaker 1: bumper a little more than ornamentation, right, like cars supposed
Speaker 1: to have a bumper, just put that thing that looks
Speaker 1: like a bumper on it. Basically there was a later
Speaker 1: improved version of the bumper on the Pinto that could
Speaker 1: with stand a five impact. That was the improved version.
Speaker 1: And again, this is all happening six inches away from
Speaker 1: the gas tank. That's that's just one side of the
Speaker 1: fuel tank. There's a whole other side, and it had
Speaker 1: like its own issues. Basically, Yeah, there's there's something on
Speaker 1: a car called a differential. Uh. The mechanics say, we
Speaker 1: don't know what that is, but um, I did some
Speaker 1: research and here's what I'm gonna call it. It's the
Speaker 1: magic box that makes the car go room. It's pretty accurate.
Speaker 1: What's what's so funny is like we pride ourselves like
Speaker 1: chasing down every tidbit of information when it comes to cars.
Speaker 1: Were just like out no idea. Who would want to
Speaker 1: hear a live podcast about a car. So this magic
Speaker 1: box on the Ford Pinto had four protruding bolts facing
Speaker 1: the gas tank that uh see you're getting it now
Speaker 1: that uh in court later on, and this would end
Speaker 1: up in court that you see where this is going.
Speaker 1: Lawyers would call them can openers, and we're just gonna
Speaker 1: call them for this show, flaming death bolts. I wish
Speaker 1: we had a sound effect or like a jingle like
Speaker 1: Flaming Death Bolts, And we should totally trademark Flaming Death Bolts,
Speaker 1: I think so too, or at least that's a band name.
Speaker 1: I think we should at least call it out as
Speaker 1: that a right do you hear that the Flamings Faults
Speaker 1: behind us? That came out uh on the wrong night? So,
Speaker 1: like I said, there was there's a lot of good
Speaker 1: quotes out there, but probably the best of them, the
Speaker 1: best came from this journalist named Mark Dowie who figures
Speaker 1: big time into the story, and he probably got across
Speaker 1: the problem with the Pinto better than anybody. And if
Speaker 1: I may, okay, Mark Daway said, if you ran into
Speaker 1: a Pinto you were following it over thirty miles, the
Speaker 1: rear end of the car would buckle like an accordion
Speaker 1: right up to the back seat, and the tube bleeding
Speaker 1: to the gas tank cap would be ripped away from
Speaker 1: the tank itself and gas would immediately begin squashing onto
Speaker 1: the road around the car. Right the buckle. Gas tank
Speaker 1: would be jammed up against the differential housing, which contained
Speaker 1: four sharp protruding bolts, likely to gash holes in the
Speaker 1: tank and spill still more gas. Now, all you need
Speaker 1: is a spark from a cigarette. And this is me
Speaker 1: interjecting here. This is the seventies. So every single person
Speaker 1: in every single car was smoking every single second of
Speaker 1: every moment they were driving. There four lit cigarettes in
Speaker 1: every car at all times, with windows up. Barring that
Speaker 1: you could also get it from the ignition or scraping metal,
Speaker 1: and both cars would be engulfed in flames. If you
Speaker 1: gave that pin to a really good whack, say at
Speaker 1: forty miles per hour, chances are excellent that it's doors
Speaker 1: with jam and you would have to stand by and
Speaker 1: watch its trap passengers burned to death. You're let's not
Speaker 1: me saying this your additional what do you call that?
Speaker 1: Pantomiming acting? Uh, it's it's in the pantomime trade fantastic
Speaker 1: reading rainbow with Josh. Give LaVar Burton a run for
Speaker 1: his money, all right, So there was one thirty mile
Speaker 1: per hour crap dust with the pinto that found that
Speaker 1: all thirteen gallons, all thirteen gallons uh spilled out in
Speaker 1: less than sixty seconds. So we all drive here in
Speaker 1: Atlanta and you all pump gas. You know how fast
Speaker 1: when you're pumping gas it's coming out and you're like,
Speaker 1: oh my god, that's so fast coming out. It's so
Speaker 1: fast you can't pump or take a gas in sixty seconds.
Speaker 1: So the Pinto is spilling gas faster than you can
Speaker 1: pump gas. Think about that next time you go to
Speaker 1: the gas station. Yeah, I think, thank God, I'm not
Speaker 1: driving in early seventies Pinto. So the weird thing is this,
Speaker 1: despite the Pinto's reputation, whether it's from top secret, you
Speaker 1: learned about it from your older brother, who knows where
Speaker 1: you heard it from, but a lot most people, I
Speaker 1: would even say, know of the Pinto is a flaming
Speaker 1: death trap. It turns out in retrospect, the Pinto was
Speaker 1: really not much worse than any other car and it's
Speaker 1: class at the time, which is not to say that
Speaker 1: the Pinto wasn't a flaming death trap, but instead all
Speaker 1: cars were flaming death traps. At the time. The idea
Speaker 1: of being safe if you got into a crash was
Speaker 1: totally lost on Detroit at a time. It wasn't a thing.
Speaker 1: So we wondered, okay, well, how did the Pinto actually
Speaker 1: get this reputation? And to answer that question, we have
Speaker 1: to go to the Great Periodical Room in the sky,
Speaker 1: and we have to go back to the ninth we
Speaker 1: all have to die. No, No, that's the great part
Speaker 1: about it. You can go there alive. Usually when you
Speaker 1: say the great thing in the sky, that means you're
Speaker 1: totally dead. It's just in the sky. Okay, alright, Great,
Speaker 1: we're going to the Great Periodical in the sky and
Speaker 1: we're all living. All right, it's great. We're gonna go
Speaker 1: back to the nineteen seventy seven section and we're going
Speaker 1: to find the nineteen seventies seven year for Mother Jones Magazine.
Speaker 1: Has everyone ever heard of? Mother Jones Magazine is still
Speaker 1: around today. One might characterize it as slightly left at
Speaker 1: center maybe, and it was very much the same back
Speaker 1: of the day. And in this in this September October
Speaker 1: ninety seven issue of Mother Jones Magazine, there was an
Speaker 1: article by Mark Dowie. That's right, it's called Pinto Madness.
Speaker 1: You can still read this article today. It was one
Speaker 1: of the main sources we used. It's a great deep
Speaker 1: dive if you want to read some more stuff about
Speaker 1: the Pinto but um. Mark Dowie was the quote you
Speaker 1: read earlier, and he was a journalist there at the time,
Speaker 1: and uh, this is this is one reason you know.
Speaker 1: This is also the seventies when they released this article
Speaker 1: in a print magazine, they had a press conference about it,
Speaker 1: which is adorable when you think about it, especially through
Speaker 1: today's lens. So they even traveled. They went to Washington,
Speaker 1: d C. From San Francisco, held a big press conference
Speaker 1: there on Capitol Hill about a magazine article, and they
Speaker 1: invited Ralph Nader to attend, which, yeah, uh, if you
Speaker 1: don't know who Ralph Nader is, he is a great American.
Speaker 1: He uh it was a consumer crusader who cared really
Speaker 1: about one thing in life, and that is making sure
Speaker 1: that corporations didn't screw you over and they kept you safe.
Speaker 1: And he it's not like he got rich doing it.
Speaker 1: Ralph Nader was a great, great dude, right. He like
Speaker 1: lived like a hermit to show that it wasn't being
Speaker 1: influenced by one side or the other. He had like
Speaker 1: a mattress on the floor of like a studio apartment.
Speaker 1: I think he had a hot plate that he lived with. Ironically,
Speaker 1: it's very dangerous I think about it. It was like
Speaker 1: probably one of the safer hot places. But yeah, I
Speaker 1: bet it was the best hot plate on the market,
Speaker 1: you think so, but he bought it with his own money,
Speaker 1: he did so any Ralph Nader was there, They got
Speaker 1: everyone together and they had this big press conference in Washington,
Speaker 1: d C. And uh Dowie starts to poke around a
Speaker 1: little bit and do a little more research for this article,
Speaker 1: and uh say, you know, I need to go to
Speaker 1: these need to go to d O T and need
Speaker 1: to go what was the other one called the an
Speaker 1: h T S A once that stand for nationale man
Speaker 1: the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration. Correct some mouthful because
Speaker 1: a lot of common words, but when you put them
Speaker 1: together like that, it's tough. Uh So he went and
Speaker 1: started doing some investigating and he found out that Ford
Speaker 1: had been carrying out well they've been carrying out crash
Speaker 1: test in secret. And when you're carrying out crash tests
Speaker 1: in secret, that's probably not a good thing, right. It
Speaker 1: means that you didn't get the results you were hoping for,
Speaker 1: so you you suppressed the results you had. All the
Speaker 1: scientists murdered Lee, I coke its totally. Did He's like
Speaker 1: you see that He'd probably like it was like go
Speaker 1: to sleep forever. But that was just to get the
Speaker 1: ball rolling, he had goons kill the rest of uh
Speaker 1: and you then you filed the crash tests with the
Speaker 1: d O T that was the durable thing. So dawis
Speaker 1: sitting there going through all these file cabinets, and you know,
Speaker 1: there's all these bureaucrats going like, oh God, why does
Speaker 1: he keep saying, Eureka, here's the guy in there with
Speaker 1: a spy camera. And he figured out very very quickly
Speaker 1: that Ford was well aware of the notion that it's
Speaker 1: Pinto's were flaming death traps. Right, And from those forty
Speaker 1: crash tests, he found that eleven of them, and this
Speaker 1: is really important, eleven of those crash tests had been
Speaker 1: carried out before the Pinto, the first one, had ever
Speaker 1: rolled off of the production line. Right. He found in
Speaker 1: these crash tests that every single one of those forty
Speaker 1: crash tests, if it was a Pinto, that had not
Speaker 1: been altered, meaning it was the same one that you
Speaker 1: would buy it like the dealership, they lost gas and
Speaker 1: an impact of twenty miles an hour over Not very good, right,
Speaker 1: not good at all. So three of these cars passed
Speaker 1: the test, and all three of them had been um
Speaker 1: had been tweaked, for safety, like, these aren't the ones
Speaker 1: that you would end up buying. They changed three of
Speaker 1: them and they all three passed. Yet they still didn't
Speaker 1: use it. And here are the three things they did.
Speaker 1: They one was a plastic baffle, a little square plastic
Speaker 1: that costs one dollar and it weighed one pound and
Speaker 1: it went between the flaming death bolts and the gas
Speaker 1: sank solve the problem. Did not use it because remember
Speaker 1: two thousand pounds two thousand dollars, which I don't know
Speaker 1: what that is today. It's a two thousand pounds and
Speaker 1: twelve thousand dollars the pounds and change. Okay, gravity has
Speaker 1: read relatively the same. The other thing they did, and
Speaker 1: this ostensibly was a little heavier, they put a metal
Speaker 1: plate to reinforce that ornamental bumper. In other words, they
Speaker 1: gave it a bumper and that worked. And then they
Speaker 1: finally the final thing they did was they I think
Speaker 1: they line that was the inside of the outside of
Speaker 1: the gas tank, the inside of the gas to the
Speaker 1: inside of the gas sank with a rubber bladder and
Speaker 1: that worked. Uh, but no one likes saying the word
Speaker 1: bladder head forward. It's too gross. It works, but it's crody,
Speaker 1: So we're getting out. The point is they had three
Speaker 1: solutions before the ford was being rolled off the line, uh,
Speaker 1: and they chose to ignore all three of them, right,
Speaker 1: big point here right um. And in addition to this
Speaker 1: two thousand pounds two thousand dollar limitation that I Coca imposed,
Speaker 1: that radically shortened timeline also created a climate where really
Speaker 1: really dangerous engineering decisions were being made. Right. Normally, when
Speaker 1: you make a car, you sketch it out, um, somebody
Speaker 1: makes a model of it, some dude like works it
Speaker 1: in clay, You run it into like a couple of
Speaker 1: walls or something like if you figure out how many
Speaker 1: like light like a cigarette lighters are going to go
Speaker 1: into it. There's a lot of thought put into it.
Speaker 1: And then once all this stuff is pre production stuff,
Speaker 1: uh is done and you know what the car is
Speaker 1: gonna look like, then you begin this process called tooling.
Speaker 1: And tooling is where you make the machines that are
Speaker 1: going to make the car that you're manufacturing. Right with
Speaker 1: the Pinto, they didn't do that. They started designing the
Speaker 1: car and at about the same time they started making
Speaker 1: the machines that we're going to make that car. Before
Speaker 1: they even knew ultimately what the final design was going
Speaker 1: to be. So by the time they figured out that
Speaker 1: they had a really dangerous fuel tank on their hands,
Speaker 1: it was too late. The tooling was underway, two million
Speaker 1: dollars worth of machines have been made, and Ford said, yeah,
Speaker 1: so when they discovered this, um, we have a couple
Speaker 1: of quotes here from actual engineers that worked there at
Speaker 1: the time, and they said, did anyone go to Lee
Speaker 1: I a coca and say, hey, we have a problem
Speaker 1: on our hands with his gas tank? And this one
Speaker 1: engineer from the Mother Jones article said hell no. But
Speaker 1: if it was like so, we didn't say it like that,
Speaker 1: he went like, hell no. Right in my mind he went,
Speaker 1: hell no, no, uh, that person would have been fired.
Speaker 1: Safety wasn't a popular subject around for it in those days,
Speaker 1: and with Lee it was taboo or taboo like if
Speaker 1: you're a normal person, if you talk normally, mh to too, taboo, tattoo, taboo. Alright, deletrious,
Speaker 1: that's a deep cut. Yeah, it was about twenty people
Speaker 1: in here they got that one. That's all right, all right?
Speaker 1: So I had Cook had a saying around for it
Speaker 1: at the time, which was safety doesn't sell Uh. And
Speaker 1: here's another quote from another engineer. Safety is in the
Speaker 1: issue trunk spaces. You have no idea how that the
Speaker 1: competition is over trunk space. Do you realize that if
Speaker 1: we put a safer gas tank in the Pinto, you
Speaker 1: can only get one set of golf clubs in the
Speaker 1: trunk And that's a real quote. Yeah. And here's something
Speaker 1: that you can do when you get home. You can
Speaker 1: go and look up Ford Pinto ad and search Google
Speaker 1: images or being images is out a thing being Yahoo, Yeah,
Speaker 1: doesn't have to be Google. Yeah, go to Netscape and
Speaker 1: uh or if you're a paranoid type duck duck go
Speaker 1: That even flew over my head. Uh, it's like they
Speaker 1: don't like track or use cookies or anything like that.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, so you're creep, I guess. I guess are
Speaker 1: you stockpile weapons or something? Gotcha? So anyway, you can
Speaker 1: look up Ford Pinto ads and they're all kinds of
Speaker 1: great ads from the old days. And there's one where
Speaker 1: there's this, uh, well, there's this couple that um, I
Speaker 1: guess is unpacking for like a camping trip from their Pinto.
Speaker 1: But it doesn't look like anywhere you would want to go. Camping.
Speaker 1: It's just kind of like a field for there's like
Speaker 1: a ditch. It's kind of weird looking. And it says
Speaker 1: this in the text, just split down the runabout's rear seat.
Speaker 1: The Runabout was one of the Pinto models. Open up
Speaker 1: the big back door, which we call a hatchback these days,
Speaker 1: and the big back room makes packing easy back in
Speaker 1: your golf clubs, those groceries and those big pieces of
Speaker 1: luggage pack it all in. You make it sound really dirty.
Speaker 1: There's big room in your little Pinto. I'm the sick oh,
Speaker 1: because I'm using duck duck up. It's the sexiest ad
Speaker 1: of the seventies, as read by me. I like old
Speaker 1: ads in old magazines because like you can smell them afterward,
Speaker 1: you know what I'm saying, Like if you go into
Speaker 1: Google images, the ads there, but not the smell. But
Speaker 1: you know what an old magazine smells like fantastic smell.
Speaker 1: You mean, like musty. What magazines are you reading? Just
Speaker 1: any old magazine I pick up, just like alright, Jerry
Speaker 1: gout that part, shre No, I'm not doing my shot yet,
Speaker 1: and everybody calmed down. My niece left to go to bed.
Speaker 1: So are there any other kids here. All right, you
Speaker 1: have a very deep voice, young boy. Right here. I'm
Speaker 1: seven beer me screw. So everybody, I think we can
Speaker 1: all agree this is going pretty well. You're not gonna
Speaker 1: like this. That means that we need to put an
Speaker 1: ad break in here. Calm down, we'll be right back
Speaker 1: right after these messages. Alright, Chuck, we're over here listening
Speaker 1: and we're doing great. Frankly, this is going really well.
Speaker 1: I agreed. So before we go to add break, everyone,
Speaker 1: we just want to say, uh, here's a quick reminder.
Speaker 1: Go to nd s S dot org to donate to
Speaker 1: the National Down Cynder Society, And Chuck, what's the number
Speaker 1: for Lifeline. You can text to the number of five
Speaker 1: zero one, text the word Lifeline, dollar sign and whatever
Speaker 1: amount you want to give. All right, and now we'll
Speaker 1: we're from our sponsor. M hm, hey everybody, we're back. Yeah,
Speaker 1: magical works. Yeah, thank you, sir. I am wearing me Andy's.
Speaker 1: Oh you know what we should say this? That's a
Speaker 1: freebee man. Well we'll cut this part out too, but uh,
Speaker 1: I have to share this. We got. This is a
Speaker 1: legit tangent like you know, like all of them, the
Speaker 1: heavily scripted and rehearse tangents. You've heard him that. We
Speaker 1: got an email yesterday. You saw it. I did where
Speaker 1: a woman This is so weird. A woman wanted to
Speaker 1: send a new pair of me Andy's to us for
Speaker 1: us to autograph so she could frame the underwear for
Speaker 1: her husband's Christmas gifts. Now that is a deep cut.
Speaker 1: That's a true fan. At least she wasn't like, and
Speaker 1: you wear them first, Yeah, each of you pass it
Speaker 1: off to the other one, then mail them back to me.
Speaker 1: Both of those are like, oh yeah, send him in
Speaker 1: totally do that. I sent smell like an old magazine,
Speaker 1: you know. Right when she got that in the mail? Ah, chuck,
Speaker 1: uh chuck, I said, I didn't what guys, what why
Speaker 1: would you do that? No one else saw that. I
Speaker 1: wish you probably edited this part out to jaire this
Speaker 1: guy right here. So I send that email to our
Speaker 1: head of sales though, and he was so delighted. He's like, oh,
Speaker 1: I can't wait to send this to me Andy's. They're
Speaker 1: you're autographing underwear. They're not gonna believe it. That's that's
Speaker 1: like David Lee Roth level, except we're autographing me Andy's
Speaker 1: for a fan, some dude, it's not David Lee Roth right,
Speaker 1: all right, everybody, we're back. I'm kind of thinking, sure
Speaker 1: you do it again, though, because you just said that, Hey, everybody,
Speaker 1: we're back. I think I just stepped on you. And
Speaker 1: stop laughing, everybody, we need to clean I said, stop laughing. Hey, everybody,
Speaker 1: we're back. Thanks for hanging there on. Thank you. That
Speaker 1: was a really long appe. We know where we were. Now, Well,
Speaker 1: I got it, I got it right, I got creepy
Speaker 1: right before I know that, I know, all right, I
Speaker 1: got you. Hey, everybody, we're back. Everyone's gonna be like,
Speaker 1: what the hell happened in Atlanta? That's good enough. We're
Speaker 1: leaving that in so by now, everybody, you may be saying, Chuck, Josh, wtf,
Speaker 1: how how could this possibly be going on? How could
Speaker 1: Ford be doing this kind of stuff. We're gonna tell
Speaker 1: you w TF. It turns out that back in the sixties,
Speaker 1: the American auto industry was like the last great unregulated
Speaker 1: industry in the entire country. And the reason why was
Speaker 1: because most Americans considered the auto industry the backbone of
Speaker 1: the American economy. Right, so everyone said we should probably
Speaker 1: just let the auto industry decide what's best for it
Speaker 1: and us it's consumers because we don't want to mess
Speaker 1: with them. Yeah. Big corporations love to look out for
Speaker 1: everyday Americans, all right, But at the time there was
Speaker 1: a fatality rate a k A death rate on the
Speaker 1: America's highways, reaching fifty thousand people a year. We did
Speaker 1: the math. That's a lot. That is a lot. Ralph
Speaker 1: Nader had a book called Unsafe at Any Speed That
Speaker 1: was a big hit. Uh. He also had one called
Speaker 1: hot Plates Unsafe at Any Temperature. So so quite as well.
Speaker 1: Has anyone actually read Unsafe in Any Speed? Don't feel bad,
Speaker 1: We haven't either, Okay, good? So he released his book
Speaker 1: in nine and it was basically like a chapter by
Speaker 1: chapter really wonky detailed description of how your car was
Speaker 1: ready and willing to murder you, right, not kill you,
Speaker 1: murder you. They were like chapters on like the steering
Speaker 1: column it's going to impale you, or that dashboard it
Speaker 1: ain't padded and your head's gonna open up like a
Speaker 1: ripe candle op when it comes in contact with it, right, yeah.
Speaker 1: And the reason that this would happen for both instances
Speaker 1: because there's no such thing as seatbelts right. So he
Speaker 1: goes to the it was your right. And that's how
Speaker 1: you knew, like a really dedicated mom in the in
Speaker 1: the sixties because she was missing an arm. That's like
Speaker 1: her kid was all messed up at a DNA on
Speaker 1: his head or whatever because it didn't quite work, because
Speaker 1: her arm came clean off when they both went forward,
Speaker 1: but he was still alive. She didn't have an arm.
Speaker 1: It was a badge of honor back then. So Ralph
Speaker 1: Nader makes this makes writes this book, and it gets
Speaker 1: released and it becomes like a bestseller almost immediately, and
Speaker 1: it has so much of an impact that the next
Speaker 1: year Congress passed the Highway Safety Act of Yeah, and
Speaker 1: then this is another way you knew. It was a
Speaker 1: day from way back in the day. Uh. The House
Speaker 1: and the Senate passed it unanimously. That's so coaint. They
Speaker 1: all got together and said, well, this is what's good
Speaker 1: for the American people. So this is our job to
Speaker 1: do this. And that went yeah, pretty sweet, pretty sweet time,
Speaker 1: pretty sweet. So they passed this thing. In the upshot
Speaker 1: of it was that now the auto industry would be regulated.
Speaker 1: It was just the way it was gonna be okay,
Speaker 1: and the auto industry said, okay, okay, fine, fine, but
Speaker 1: what about this? Why don't we agree to use something
Speaker 1: called a cost benefit analysis to decide if we actually
Speaker 1: undertake any regulations you proposed? Deal? And the d O
Speaker 1: T and n H T s A was like, well
Speaker 1: no in the auto industry went like that, And the
Speaker 1: d O T was like, all right, fine, fine, we
Speaker 1: don't want to arm wrestle over this one. Fine cost
Speaker 1: benefit analysis for everybody. Yeah, So if you don't know
Speaker 1: what a cost benefit analysis is, we call it the
Speaker 1: cruelest of all analyzes because it's basically just a math problem.
Speaker 1: You plug in numbers and you say, I plug in this,
Speaker 1: I plug in this. Is it worth it to do this?
Speaker 1: Which works great in a lot of circumstances if you're
Speaker 1: talking about I don't know, like a like what's a
Speaker 1: good example, or like, like if you're trying to figure
Speaker 1: out whether to go with tire distributor A or tire distributor,
Speaker 1: be kind of easy, right exactly, But if you're talking
Speaker 1: about replacing a fuel tank because it's killing people, it
Speaker 1: gets a little sticky because one of the inputs on
Speaker 1: those math problems has to be the value of a
Speaker 1: human life. There's no getting around, no way around it. Right.
Speaker 1: So the nht s A said, well, I guess we
Speaker 1: should go ahead and figure out how to quantify a
Speaker 1: human life. They all went home and like kissed their
Speaker 1: children and they came back to work. And what they
Speaker 1: came up with the actually did it. There was a
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy two document that said, everybody, this is the
Speaker 1: value of a human life and figured it out two
Speaker 1: hundred thousand, seven hundred and twenty five dollars. And what
Speaker 1: they did was, yeah, really, I thought mine was half that.
Speaker 1: So what they did was they figured out um, the
Speaker 1: the average lifespan or the average age I guess of
Speaker 1: a person who dies in a car wreck, and then
Speaker 1: subtracted it from the average lifespan of of the Americans
Speaker 1: at the at the time in the Iraq, such as UM,
Speaker 1: and they came up with They came up with thirty
Speaker 1: seven years, and those people who die in a car
Speaker 1: wreck would have lived thirty seven more years. And then
Speaker 1: they say, well, how much would those people make in
Speaker 1: that time? And they said, well, two hundred thousand, seven
Speaker 1: five dollars. The problem with this is is that it
Speaker 1: really what they calculated was the cost to society and
Speaker 1: lost productivity if it's just wages, right, They didn't take
Speaker 1: into account some very important stuff like the value that
Speaker 1: the individual places on his or her own life, or
Speaker 1: whether their family wants him to come home after a
Speaker 1: car wreck, stuff like that. But they came up with
Speaker 1: this dollar amount and they said, there there. We'll get
Speaker 1: better at it over time. But here's what it is.
Speaker 1: And it's a primitive step exactly again, the cruelest of
Speaker 1: all analyzes. So Mark Dowie is sorting through all the
Speaker 1: file cabinets of the d OT and the the National
Speaker 1: Highway Transportation Safety Administration. It's no faster to say it abbreviated.
Speaker 1: I know, I would just mess it up though. Uh
Speaker 1: So he's starting through all this stuff. He's going through
Speaker 1: file cabinets. Everyone's worried, and he comes across the document
Speaker 1: of memo called fatalities associated with crash and duced fuel
Speaker 1: leakage and fires. And over the years people come to
Speaker 1: think like, this is the smoking gun. This is pinto.
Speaker 1: It was about pinto fires from getting hit in the rear,
Speaker 1: and that's what it is. It really wasn't that. What
Speaker 1: it was was it was about all cars in the
Speaker 1: United States and whether they caught on fire when they
Speaker 1: rolled over. However, the one damning thing in this memo
Speaker 1: was that Ford used that number, well almost that number
Speaker 1: to quantify the value of a human life. But Ford
Speaker 1: rounded down the rounded down the value of a human life,
Speaker 1: just you know, to make the math easier. Yeah, they
Speaker 1: made a two d grand. They cut off the seven
Speaker 1: five dollars, just made it a straight up two. Right.
Speaker 1: So they estimated like a hundred and eighty fatalities and
Speaker 1: a hundred and eighty injuries in car fires post collision
Speaker 1: car fires every year in the US. And they said, well,
Speaker 1: that would cost society, uh, forty nine million dollars in
Speaker 1: lost productivity. But if you want us to do this
Speaker 1: eleven dollar per car safety improvement that would save those
Speaker 1: lives and those injuries, well it cost us the auto
Speaker 1: industry a hundred and thirteen million dollars, so I don't
Speaker 1: have to do it, right, great, see it Racketball's head.
Speaker 1: That was kind of do you guys see fight Club?
Speaker 1: Remember Edward Norton's job. That was kind of what he
Speaker 1: did right a little bit. Yeah, he had to kind
Speaker 1: of calculate whether or not it was worth taking a recall,
Speaker 1: and Ford, thanks to Dowie, had just been caught red
Speaker 1: handed with one of these submitted in the public record. Alright,
Speaker 1: So part of the Motor Vehicle Safety Act was was
Speaker 1: something in all these bills. This gets a little wonky,
Speaker 1: but bear with me. They're all broken down into subcategories,
Speaker 1: and one of them was called Vehicle Safety Standard three
Speaker 1: oh one. And three oh one was basically our government
Speaker 1: getting together and saying, you know what, we feel like,
Speaker 1: you should be able to get hit from the rear
Speaker 1: at like twenty miles an hour and not explode it
Speaker 1: into a fiery ball. We've talked about it. We know
Speaker 1: what you're gonna say, Detroit, but we've talked about we
Speaker 1: feel very strongly about this. We feel less reasonable. Democrats
Speaker 1: pushed for thirty, Republicans pushed for ten. They met in
Speaker 1: the middle at twenty. There are people from Cough County here.
Speaker 1: They are not happy with you right now. They are
Speaker 1: going to let us know via email after this show,
Speaker 1: angry that the way you feel about life. So they
Speaker 1: settled in twenty miles an hour and that was Safety
Speaker 1: Standard three oh one. But here's the here's the rub
Speaker 1: for the Ford and the Pinto is they had a
Speaker 1: problem on their hands. They knew they couldn't understand twenty
Speaker 1: miles an hour. They could barely withstand five. So this
Speaker 1: would have meant a complete redesign on the Pinto. So
Speaker 1: they come up with a plan basically too shall we
Speaker 1: say delay the process? Yeah, I kill it, killed it,
Speaker 1: think killed it standard three oh one. I hate it.
Speaker 1: And they were happy because they didn't have to kill
Speaker 1: a human right for once. So oh yeah, I didn't
Speaker 1: even mean to say that. But so here's what they did.
Speaker 1: They got the attorneys on the case and they said,
Speaker 1: here's what you'll do. You're gonna you're gonna file these
Speaker 1: arguments on the last day that you can file an argument,
Speaker 1: and you're gonna get all this data together and you're
Speaker 1: gonna shove it in their face and say here's an argument.
Speaker 1: D o t uh. And now you gotta look through
Speaker 1: all the stuff and have to satisfy that argument. So
Speaker 1: they may not have even cared if the argument held
Speaker 1: up or not. The point was they just wanted to
Speaker 1: delay things so they could keep selling the very dangerous Pinto.
Speaker 1: So they did this, and they didn't they didn't file
Speaker 1: them concurrently all at once, which is sort of what
Speaker 1: you usually do in the law in court. Uh, they
Speaker 1: would file one, they would go look for them, and
Speaker 1: this holds water, it doesn't. They go great, They wait
Speaker 1: till the next deadline and file another one, and all
Speaker 1: of a sudden, they have delayed this process for nine years.
Speaker 1: Nine years. They started arguing against it in nineteen and
Speaker 1: standard three oh one went into effect in nineteen seventies seven. Right, yeah,
Speaker 1: boom so um. There's kind of like a silver lining
Speaker 1: to this whole thing. And that Ford's objections actually forced
Speaker 1: the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration to study the problem
Speaker 1: of car fires to answer Fords the objections and say, no, actually,
Speaker 1: you're wrong, they're kind of a problem. Yeah. They were
Speaker 1: giving them reams of data and then they went, oh,
Speaker 1: we just gave them reads. Right, But the n h
Speaker 1: t s A also had to like contract with people
Speaker 1: to study this stuff. And what they were finding was
Speaker 1: that car fires in America were way way more of
Speaker 1: a problem than even Ford I think realized at the time.
Speaker 1: They turned up some stats like four hundred thousand cars
Speaker 1: were burning up on the American Highway every year, burning
Speaker 1: more than three thousand people at death. Is that high?
Speaker 1: Four hundred thousand cars. Yeah, maybe it's a little high.
Speaker 1: I don't know, but this is what they turned up.
Speaker 1: It sounds high. Here's a here's one uh of all
Speaker 1: calls to all fire departments in the United States, and
Speaker 1: the nineteen sixes were cars on fire. And that nuts
Speaker 1: just the last time, you guys, just car on fire.
Speaker 1: This would be like an like you would see one
Speaker 1: in a couple of miles later, there's another one. Well,
Speaker 1: and yeah, and this was people didn't have cell phones,
Speaker 1: so you would have to see a car on fire,
Speaker 1: have a dime in your pocket, be near enough to
Speaker 1: a payphone to report it, right, And that was and
Speaker 1: have made the judgment that there was a chance that
Speaker 1: the person was going to make it in the time
Speaker 1: that you went to the pay phone. You know, there's
Speaker 1: a lot of factors here seems high. Like if you
Speaker 1: had a Christmas parade in your town, there's a pretty
Speaker 1: good chance a couple of those cars were just gonna
Speaker 1: catch fire in the middle of the parade. This is insane.
Speaker 1: And this is what the nhc s A was finding
Speaker 1: from studying this problem. There's a University of Miami study.
Speaker 1: They found that rear end impact fires were quote a
Speaker 1: clear and present hazard to all Pinto owners. That was
Speaker 1: the cane saying that. All right, so wait, wait, wait,
Speaker 1: we're going to take another end brake. Everybody, We'll be
Speaker 1: right back. Don't get up, we'll be right back right
Speaker 1: after these messages. Alright, Chuck, last ad break, it's going
Speaker 1: pretty well. Just a hot crowd. You got that straight, buddy.
Speaker 1: And before we go to ad break, we just wanted
Speaker 1: to remind you again go to n DSS dot org
Speaker 1: to donate to the National Down Syndrome Society and Chuck,
Speaker 1: that's right. Or you can text to the number five
Speaker 1: zero one text lifeline dollar sign and the amount you
Speaker 1: want to give. And it's that easy. Yeah, And it
Speaker 1: doesn't need to be an ORR proposition. It could be
Speaker 1: an and proposition to Speaking of propositions, here's a word
Speaker 1: from our sponsor. M hm, hey, everybody, we're back. It's
Speaker 1: a lot better live. Huh. They get it now. So
Speaker 1: the original draft of the Motor Vehicle Safety Act had
Speaker 1: uh had a part that provided it was very controversial.
Speaker 1: It provided for criminal sanctions, criminal sanctions against executives of
Speaker 1: auto companies and these uh, well, let's be honest, these
Speaker 1: white dudes that were executives that these auto companies said, well,
Speaker 1: I I think I don't think you really mean that, right,
Speaker 1: but that means we could go to prison, you understand,
Speaker 1: I like, I think we should. Uh, we have some
Speaker 1: lobbyists on the case. And so they they put the
Speaker 1: lobbyists on the case and they did get that lobbied
Speaker 1: out of the Safety Act. Unfortunately. Yeah, I say unfortunately,
Speaker 1: that's me talking, and well, you're speaking for both of us, buddy, um.
Speaker 1: And they end up with like five or ten thousand
Speaker 1: dollars yea in seven money, which today translates to like
Speaker 1: forty grant. So if you were an auto executive who
Speaker 1: knowingly put a dangerous car out on the American market,
Speaker 1: you could facifying a forty dollars And from what we understand,
Speaker 1: that's like once one time. Fine, that was it. So
Speaker 1: it would be up to the media and the courts
Speaker 1: to force forward to do something about It's Pinto and
Speaker 1: and boy did they ever The drumbeats started, isn't that right? Yeah?
Speaker 1: It started with Dowie, right, Like Mark Dowie gets this
Speaker 1: gets a lot of credit for um for the Pinto article,
Speaker 1: and definitely he definitely had a big impact, but he
Speaker 1: gets some undo credit for getting Standard three oh one
Speaker 1: to come into effect because it came into effect pretty
Speaker 1: shortly after the Pinto madness article came out. It turns
Speaker 1: out later research turned up that UM, the n h
Speaker 1: T s A had said, Ford were so sick of
Speaker 1: you arguing against standard three oh one. How long will
Speaker 1: it take for you guys to get your cars up
Speaker 1: to standard three oh one level, which again is a
Speaker 1: twenty mile an hour rear impact that doesn't lead to
Speaker 1: fuel loss, and for its like, I don't know, it
Speaker 1: seems like a big job, right, uh four years And
Speaker 1: the n h T s A was like, you know,
Speaker 1: it took you two years to design the car from scratch, right,
Speaker 1: They're like, yeah, this is huge, massive improvements to make
Speaker 1: it safe. So four years. So the NHTSA said, fine, fine,
Speaker 1: in seven it'll come into effect. So it was just coincidence.
Speaker 1: But Dawi's article did have a big impact in the
Speaker 1: way of like shaping public opinion. Yeah, for sure. So
Speaker 1: what happens is they're they're starting to be uh some
Speaker 1: lawsuits people that are getting burned alive in Pinto's and
Speaker 1: other cars, UM say well maybe maybe we could see
Speaker 1: somebody and that is that a ducka duck in the house. Well, okay,
Speaker 1: let's get back on tracks. Back on track works, doesn't it.
Speaker 1: You're all charmed? Thank you for can that one for us?
Speaker 1: Chuck Jerry cut cut that art? Alright? So, uh, why
Speaker 1: that's delicious, it's good. Yeah, bullet bullet brand bourbon. It's
Speaker 1: called buzz marketing everyone. They don't even pay us for
Speaker 1: that yet. So uh. There are these people that have
Speaker 1: this job where they recreate accidents, um for sometimes it's
Speaker 1: for court, for attorneys for the state, sometimes it's for
Speaker 1: insurance companies. But they recreate these accidents kind of show
Speaker 1: what went down. And some of them started to say,
Speaker 1: and again it was a radical notion, started to say,
Speaker 1: wait a minute, I think that if you get in
Speaker 1: a car wreck, you maybe should be able to live
Speaker 1: through it. It's a radical idea, but like maybe they
Speaker 1: should make cars safer. Yeah, they're never going back to
Speaker 1: San Diego, hippie. Well the notion from from America. Everyone
Speaker 1: sort of agreed to this thing where like, if you
Speaker 1: get in the car wreck and die like you got
Speaker 1: in the car wreck, it's your fault. It was the
Speaker 1: driver's fault. It's a driver's fault. You can't make cars
Speaker 1: safer in the case of an accident. It seems weird
Speaker 1: now because it's all we think about as auto safety,
Speaker 1: but it was just not on the radar. Lea Coca
Speaker 1: was not the only one, but that was thanks to Detroit,
Speaker 1: like saying, it's your fault, you're a dummy. But everyone
Speaker 1: agreed to it. Everyone But in in Detroit's defense, at
Speaker 1: the time, everybody was wrong while they were driving. It's
Speaker 1: way more than today, so they kind of had a point.
Speaker 1: But still they could still make the cars safer and
Speaker 1: should have even even more back then. Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 1: So these I don't know what we call them, accident recreationists,
Speaker 1: reconstruction reconstructionists. Recreationists are the Civil War dudes? Does anyone
Speaker 1: here do that? Any Civil War reenactors. There's three who
Speaker 1: are just sitting there like that's right now, all right?
Speaker 1: Quicksidebar Emily and I went hiking at you guys ever
Speaker 1: go to Sweetwater State Park see local show. Emily remember this.
Speaker 1: We went hiking and Sweetwater and there were some Civil
Speaker 1: War reenactors, but it wasn't like what I know about
Speaker 1: Civil war reenactors is is that they throw a big
Speaker 1: battle party or whatever it's called, and they act like
Speaker 1: it's a big war and they go bang you die
Speaker 1: or don't die and bang bang, and then that's sort of,
Speaker 1: uh what happens. I have no idea what they do,
Speaker 1: but it's a big show, like on a field, like
Speaker 1: I went to one when I was a kid. I
Speaker 1: remember that. But these dudes were just hanging out in
Speaker 1: the woods at Sweet Quarter State Park. They were like
Speaker 1: they had a fire going and it was it was
Speaker 1: like three or four people. It was a couple of
Speaker 1: dudes and a couple of ladies in in their outfits
Speaker 1: and they were cooking like I guess, like a squirrel
Speaker 1: on a spit. That's Huckaby style. It was no organized thing,
Speaker 1: and I was just hiking buy it was like a
Speaker 1: year ago. I was like, well, that's weird. Did you
Speaker 1: guys just like back slowly into the way, don't make
Speaker 1: eye contacted. I guess I approved because it wasn't war,
Speaker 1: so that's kind of cool. It was they were prepping
Speaker 1: for war, so okay, they were gathering their strength from squirrels.
Speaker 1: Feint very strange. Don't go to Sweetwaters by the way,
Speaker 1: don't go there. No, not after that, Okay, I didn't know.
Speaker 1: If there's something else, like there's a lot of abandoned
Speaker 1: tires in the ravine or something. All right, cut that
Speaker 1: cut that whole story. I don't know. I think it
Speaker 1: was a good story. I think we should keep it. Jerry,
Speaker 1: is she dead? The great period? This guy? All right,
Speaker 1: so this recreationists, That's where I was. You are saying, uh,
Speaker 1: maybe you should sue the car company, like because cars
Speaker 1: should be safer, And people went, oh, well, that's not
Speaker 1: a bad idea. Yeah, because every revolutionary idea these guys
Speaker 1: were saying. With the pentol in particular, I'm starting to
Speaker 1: notice a lot of charred bodies that are otherwise in
Speaker 1: perfect shape look great aside from the charred part, right,
Speaker 1: Like they don't have any contusions, they don't have any
Speaker 1: broken bones. So like these accidents are happening at really
Speaker 1: low speed. Maybe it's actually a design flaw with Ford.
Speaker 1: And so the lawyers are like, that sounds great, and
Speaker 1: they started circling the courthouses like the flying Monkeys and
Speaker 1: the Wizard of Oz and dropping lawsuits down on the
Speaker 1: Ford's head. And at first forwards like bring it. We're forward.
Speaker 1: You know, juries are made up of like upstanding registered voters, Right,
Speaker 1: we're gonna be just fine. And Ford one a couple
Speaker 1: at first, and then they started losing them. Um and
Speaker 1: Ford was still kind of like, we're still we're still
Speaker 1: taking the jury trial on. But the whole thing turned
Speaker 1: earned on this one trial in ninety seven in Orange County, California,
Speaker 1: Um and Ford lost big time actually in a Pinto case. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they lost, and this was in seventy seven. They lost
Speaker 1: a hundred and twenty five million dollars and damages to
Speaker 1: a boy named he's thirteen years old, Richard Grimshaw was
Speaker 1: it's very sad. He's burned very badly and the driver
Speaker 1: of the car died and a hundred million bucks back.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's a lot of money now, but back then,
Speaker 1: it's a ton of money. And it's what they call,
Speaker 1: you've heard of like a symbolic award, where they'll just
Speaker 1: hit a company with a ton of ton of money
Speaker 1: and it later gets reduced. But all they care about
Speaker 1: is that the media knows that they got hit with
Speaker 1: this ton of money. That was sort of the case here.
Speaker 1: It got reduced to what three and a half million bucks.
Speaker 1: Just still it's still pretty still a lot of money
Speaker 1: back then, of course. Um, but that initial figure like
Speaker 1: really made a point and sent shock waves through the
Speaker 1: auto industry, and so Ford changed its tactics. They're like, okay,
Speaker 1: well maybe we'll start settling. And we got another quote
Speaker 1: and Chuck reads it way better than me, So if
Speaker 1: you don't mind, Yeah, this was an attorney for Ford. Um,
Speaker 1: and I'll read it in the voice of Lionel Hunts
Speaker 1: of the Simpsons, the great Phil Hartman. Uh, here we go.
Speaker 1: We'll never go to a jury again. Not in a
Speaker 1: fire case. Jerry is a just too sentimental. They see
Speaker 1: those charred remains and forget the evidence. No, sir, will settle.
Speaker 1: Thanks for that. That is a He wasn't overheard saying that, right.
Speaker 1: A TV reporter stuck up a microphone in his face
Speaker 1: and he said that that was his quote. That like
Speaker 1: Amazon Alexa didn't overhear him saying that to his wife
Speaker 1: at home later exactly. So Ford was like, Okay, kill
Speaker 1: that guy, that lawyer. We're gonna start settling. And so
Speaker 1: they did start settling. There's some benefits to settling, well,
Speaker 1: there's some drawbacks to One is that it tells the
Speaker 1: entire world that you know, your case is terrible, but
Speaker 1: it says, um, while there's gonna be lower payouts to
Speaker 1: the lawyers, um, and there's going to be lower payouts
Speaker 1: to the defendants. And it also cuts down on discovery.
Speaker 1: So discovery, if you go to jury, the plaintiff, the
Speaker 1: person filing the case, has of legal access to any
Speaker 1: in all documents that you have that proved their case
Speaker 1: against you. Right, So with all these jury trials, there
Speaker 1: was this steady trickle or flow even of Yeah, it
Speaker 1: wasn't even a trickle. It was a flow of damning
Speaker 1: evidence coming out of Ford going into the hands of
Speaker 1: lawyers who were happily turning it around and handing it
Speaker 1: to the media who were reporting on this stuff, which
Speaker 1: was getting the public just good. And and that drum
Speaker 1: that Chuck was talking about it started to really pick up,
Speaker 1: and like people were really looking at Ford like in
Speaker 1: this weird, like unsettling, non blinky way. You know, everyone
Speaker 1: took their shirts off and they put like war paint on,
Speaker 1: and just forbus starting to get a little nervous. They
Speaker 1: were like like us America said you so that got
Speaker 1: a little weird, Yeah, thank you. Thank you, buddy. You
Speaker 1: get a shirt that bordered on uh performance art, did it?
Speaker 1: I think had I taken my shirt off and would
Speaker 1: have been perfect, Oh my god, do it out of
Speaker 1: your mind, cheer until blood comes out of your mouths.
Speaker 1: And I still wouldn't take my shirt off. There's nothing
Speaker 1: you can do to make me take my shirt. Actually,
Speaker 1: I would probably be like my off, which would be
Speaker 1: uh yeah, that does feel good. Though, now we've reached
Speaker 1: David Lee roth level. I wish I had another shot.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, alright, so shy. That's just having common values.
Speaker 1: Not taking your shirt off in public when people tell
Speaker 1: you too. That's normal stuff. Man, you well you did good.
Speaker 1: Is one of thank you Jerry cut out the last
Speaker 1: shame on all of you. Hometown show. Alright. So finally
Speaker 1: in ninety seven, UH safety three o one came into effect.
Speaker 1: What we talked about, would you should be able to
Speaker 1: hit a car from twenty miles an not be a
Speaker 1: flaming death ball And the nineteen seventy seven new Pinto
Speaker 1: debuted with a very brand new safety feature that one
Speaker 1: dollar one pound piece of plastic in between the flaming
Speaker 1: death bolts and the gast egg that they've known since
Speaker 1: night would save lives. Boom, thank you, so um lea Coca.
Speaker 1: By this time in Ford in general were scared to
Speaker 1: death of the PR crisis that had been growing and growing,
Speaker 1: and the whole thing again was started by Dowie's article.
Speaker 1: Not only did he get the Mother Jones readership involved,
Speaker 1: he really kind of awakened the mainstream media to the things.
Speaker 1: So everybody was reporting on this. People were suing Ford.
Speaker 1: It was a huge, big problem, and I had Coca
Speaker 1: told everybody clam up. That's actually a direct quote from
Speaker 1: his book, his book. I used to think in a
Speaker 1: happier time that was called straight talk. But that's a
Speaker 1: Dolly Parton movie. It's called talking Straight. I gotta say,
Speaker 1: you sent me this initial Josh said this wrote this show,
Speaker 1: and he sent it and he said straight talk. And
Speaker 1: I was like that Dolly Parton play les. It's still
Speaker 1: it's still said that. I never corrected it. I never
Speaker 1: saw the movie that would be great. You never saw
Speaker 1: a straight talk. I don't know. It's shamed. Is that
Speaker 1: gonna be your movie? Crush pick? Oh? Maybe that's buzz marketing.
Speaker 1: Now I have to do with no, no, no no.
Speaker 1: So yeah, it was called talking straight in the end,
Speaker 1: I think straight talk might have been the working title. Okay,
Speaker 1: but then he says, like we were so afraid of um,
Speaker 1: the this PR crisis bankrupting forward. If you could imagine
Speaker 1: that that they just said, no one talked, don't talk
Speaker 1: to anybody, just clam up. And they thought that if
Speaker 1: somebody said something the wrong way and like there was
Speaker 1: a scary turn of phrase or something that I was
Speaker 1: just taking the wrong way, it would be seen as
Speaker 1: an admition of guilt. The problem was to the public
Speaker 1: um that the fact that they weren't talking was seen
Speaker 1: as an admission of guilt more than anything. Yeah, it
Speaker 1: was a big deal. Like sixty Minutes was literally knocking
Speaker 1: at the door, like Morally safer? Was it Ford knocking
Speaker 1: at the door And he said, I'm Morley Safer and
Speaker 1: if you're not intimidated, now, I got ed Bradley with me.
Speaker 1: We've sent two of our best dudes, so you should
Speaker 1: be pretty worried. And Ford was crouched down under their
Speaker 1: window there. It's so funny, is I used to love
Speaker 1: sixty minutes but when when I was like thirteen, it's
Speaker 1: so such a weird show to watch as a kid.
Speaker 1: It's sophisticated. I was not sophisticated. Apparently you were. That
Speaker 1: was not I don't know what I like a little right,
Speaker 1: And then after that you're just like all right, I'll
Speaker 1: turn the channel. Well. And and also another thing about
Speaker 1: I think it came on after either like the Wonderful
Speaker 1: World of Disney or that was great or Wold Kingdom
Speaker 1: or something, and I don't know what that is, sir.
Speaker 1: That was like Full House was on that that was
Speaker 1: like the nineties. You're way off. Yeah, I'm so old.
Speaker 1: Do you see this? Beard? So much gray? Like the
Speaker 1: Davy Crockett Story Hour? Was that one? Well, I'm not
Speaker 1: that old night writer. That was a good that had
Speaker 1: a good theme song that this is devolved into like
Speaker 1: shout out your favorite old thing. And we're almost done.
Speaker 1: Everybody called them all right, we're hit in the end.
Speaker 1: So uh. In June, um they started their own recall
Speaker 1: proceedings in sixty minutes, was on the on the door,
Speaker 1: they're knocking, they're knocking, and Ford says, you know what,
Speaker 1: We're gonna undertake a voluntary recall if anyone believe that,
Speaker 1: they'll they'll make us look so good of one point four.
Speaker 1: And I don't know if we mentioned the Pinto was
Speaker 1: a big, big seller, Like, despite all this, it was
Speaker 1: a super super popular car. It was like the best
Speaker 1: selling subcompact of the seventies. It very much was. It
Speaker 1: was It's Winona Writer's car and Stranger Things too. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: I haven't seen it. I don't was it her car
Speaker 1: and Stranger Things? Why? I don't remember, but they featured
Speaker 1: the Pinto and Stranger Things too, night Rider spoiler thanks
Speaker 1: a lot, right now, I know what car she drives,
Speaker 1: all right, So they undertake a one point four million
Speaker 1: car recall on just the Pencil alone, but also another
Speaker 1: car they had, right, the Mercury Bobcat, which was it's
Speaker 1: like more luxurious but equally deadly twin. And we're not
Speaker 1: quite sure, like what made it so luxurious. Maybe it
Speaker 1: had like an onboard like blow dryer brush to like
Speaker 1: feather your hair with while you're going home. What we're
Speaker 1: the back You sit in the back seat and they
Speaker 1: just have the thing from the hair place. They just
Speaker 1: lowers over your That is the pinnacle of luxury that
Speaker 1: we can think of for the god the seventies. Alright.
Speaker 1: The bad news is, though this is very sad to
Speaker 1: stop laughing, between the time four decided to undergo that
Speaker 1: recall in June and the time it told consumers like
Speaker 1: internally and they said, all right June, we'll do this
Speaker 1: September we announced it to the public. In those few months, uh,
Speaker 1: there was a very very sad crash rear rear rear
Speaker 1: end you need another shot, No, a rear end impact
Speaker 1: where uh where some young women died. And there was
Speaker 1: a prosecutor in Indiana named Michael Constantino that said, uh,
Speaker 1: you know what, I've had it, I've done, I know
Speaker 1: the deal. I'm gonna bring these dudes on trial for murder. Murder,
Speaker 1: Like he filed criminal homicide charges against the executives that
Speaker 1: Ford for that crash. Yeah, very big deal. Yeah so um,
Speaker 1: And that it wasn't just like a flash in the
Speaker 1: pan like this trial actually or these charges went to trial.
Speaker 1: It was over like three years. And over the three years,
Speaker 1: everybody was reporting on Ford executives on trial for murder
Speaker 1: every day and they the charges got dismissed, but the
Speaker 1: public criminalizing of Ford's executives were it was huge. Like
Speaker 1: it was a bad PR crisis before that. It couldn't
Speaker 1: get worse than that your executives on trial for murder, right, yeah,
Speaker 1: for sure. So, um, despite all this, despite the fact
Speaker 1: that the Pinto wasn't flaming death trapped to a certain extent,
Speaker 1: when you look at the numbers today and when you
Speaker 1: look at the real statistics, uh, it was not much
Speaker 1: worse and sometimes better than other cars on the market
Speaker 1: at the time that would kill you from fire, like
Speaker 1: the Vega or the Gremlin. They would kill you, right,
Speaker 1: So we tried to figure out and actually, it turns
Speaker 1: out there was this article in Harvard Law Review where
Speaker 1: this guy said, Um, I've done the math. I've actually
Speaker 1: figured it out, and here's the number I came up with.
Speaker 1: It was seven twenty seven people is probably the number
Speaker 1: of people who died in low speed rear collision impact
Speaker 1: fires in Pintos. And it's over like ten years, like
Speaker 1: millions of cars. Twenty seven it's not that bad, actually, right, Um,
Speaker 1: it was way less than I think Mother Jones said
Speaker 1: like five hundred and nine hundred. And this is so
Speaker 1: Mother Jones. They said that was a conservative estimate that
Speaker 1: we just made up. And then I think sixty minutes,
Speaker 1: Chuck's beloved sixty minutes said, like, thousands of people had
Speaker 1: died in Pinto's no one knew, so they were just
Speaker 1: making up numbers. But this article said, no, it's probably
Speaker 1: twenty seven actually exactly. So uh. In the end, we
Speaker 1: look back and the Pinto was even though it could
Speaker 1: have been a flaming death trap, what it really was
Speaker 1: was a very bad victim of pr Yeah, you know, yep. So,
Speaker 1: like the problem was is that the way you could
Speaker 1: die in a Pinto was just too bad to be
Speaker 1: allowed to continue. Right. The idea that, like, if you've
Speaker 1: got an a rear end collision and the passenger compartment
Speaker 1: filled up with gas, that's bad enough. But the idea
Speaker 1: that it could happen at such a low speed that
Speaker 1: you would still be conscious when you caught fire and
Speaker 1: burned to death. The American public said, dope, that can't happen.
Speaker 1: It doesn't matter, and so thanks to Dowie's article, um
Speaker 1: and sixty minutes, eventually the Pinto was basically laid to
Speaker 1: waste as far as the American public was concerned, and
Speaker 1: still has a bad reputation today. That's right. In the end,
Speaker 1: the pins it took the real impact, but not not
Speaker 1: in the good way, not in the good way, in
Speaker 1: every kind of bad. You know, that's true. I never
Speaker 1: thought about that. Yeah. Uh so Indian Mr Lee I A.
Speaker 1: Coca would go on to write his legend with the
Speaker 1: christ Or Corporation by bringing them back from um kind
Speaker 1: of the brink of bankruptcy into huge success in the
Speaker 1: nineties and the eighties. And uh he was named I
Speaker 1: think by Portfolio magazine as the eighteenth gradest CEO of
Speaker 1: all time, just ahead of Oprah, which is both yes
Speaker 1: Team Oprah up here. I wrote a couple of books,
Speaker 1: wrote that biography that Josh talked about that Dolly Parton
Speaker 1: did not star in, and another call where how have
Speaker 1: all the Leaders Gone? And Mr Iacca is still alive today,
Speaker 1: The Rifled Age of ninety two and bel Air neighborhood
Speaker 1: of Los Angeles, California, where there is nary a Pinto
Speaker 1: to be found. That's right, and that is the story
Speaker 1: of the Ford Pinto. Yeah. Thanks, ye, well that one
Speaker 1: pretty well, chuck. Yeah. If you want to get in
Speaker 1: touch with us for any reason, you can tweet to
Speaker 1: us at s Y s K podcast. I'm at Josh
Speaker 1: um Clark and I also have a website called are
Speaker 1: You Series Clark dot com. Chuck's on Facebook at Charles W.
Speaker 1: Chuck Bryant, or at Stuff you Should Know. UH. You
Speaker 1: can email us and Jerry to stuff podcast at how
Speaker 1: stiff Works dot com and has always joined us at
Speaker 1: Home on the Web Stuff you Should Know dot com
Speaker 1: For more on this and thousands of other topics. Is
Speaker 1: it how staff works dot com. M