Speaker 1: Hi friends, It's me Josh, and for this week's select,
Speaker 1: I've chosen our episode live show really from twenty eighteen,
Speaker 1: back when Ford Pintos were flaming death traps. Now, this
Speaker 1: episode actually came out with an intro from me and Chuck,
Speaker 1: so it seems foolish to do an intro to an intro,
Speaker 1: even though that's what I'm doing.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 1: That's why I'm going to stop and just say, hope
Speaker 1: you enjoy.
Speaker 3: Welcome to stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hey, welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 4: I'm Josh Clark, There's Charles w Chuck Bryant. Jerry's not here,
Speaker 4: but we are with all these beautiful people live at
Speaker 4: the Buckhead Theater in our own Atlanta, GA.
Speaker 5: Good. Hey, yeah they are.
Speaker 4: Not too shabby, everybody. Yeah, So let's start.
Speaker 2: Man. I feel great.
Speaker 3: So I feel great.
Speaker 4: Since this is a live podcast and it's actually set
Speaker 4: a little further back in time, we thought we would
Speaker 4: all get into the Wayback Machine. So for those of
Speaker 4: you who have seen us live before, you know the
Speaker 4: Wayback Machine is made up. It's not a real thing,
Speaker 4: but it does take a twinkle in your eye and
Speaker 4: a heart full of magic. To get into the wayback machine.
Speaker 4: So I hope all of you have that going on
Speaker 4: right now. That was my best serious Silverman impression.
Speaker 5: It's pretty good.
Speaker 2: Thanks.
Speaker 4: So we're all on the way back machine, okay, and
Speaker 4: we're going back to Detroit, Michigan, back to like the
Speaker 4: mid sixties or something like that.
Speaker 3: We'll say, yeah, back when people still wanted to go
Speaker 3: to Detroit.
Speaker 2: On purpose.
Speaker 3: Sorry man, Yeah, I told you.
Speaker 2: And we're gonna fly in. That's the sounds, and.
Speaker 4: We're very small and invisible, by the way, So we're
Speaker 4: gonna fly in over the shoulder of an up and
Speaker 4: coming auto executive with a beautiful head of hair named
Speaker 4: Lee Aya Coca.
Speaker 2: And Lee Lee.
Speaker 4: At the time, he was what you might call a
Speaker 4: young turk, up and coming, like ready to take on
Speaker 4: the world. Great guy, and he had a lot of
Speaker 4: cred around the company that he worked at called Ford
Speaker 4: Motor Company.
Speaker 5: I tried its pre Chrysler right, and he.
Speaker 2: Had a lot of cred because he had.
Speaker 4: Designed the Mustang right. It was known as Lee's car.
Speaker 3: Even yeah, I mean, if you if you are the
Speaker 3: guy and the of the Ford Mustang project, then you've
Speaker 3: kind of bought your ticket in the car industry. If
Speaker 3: you have be a great car, do you make.
Speaker 4: The car that Vanilla Ice will eventually love, You've done something.
Speaker 2: Quite right with your life, right.
Speaker 5: Did he have a Mustang.
Speaker 4: Rolling in my five point oh with the rag top down?
Speaker 4: That's a Mustang, buddy, is it sure? I think it's
Speaker 4: even in the video.
Speaker 5: I've never been more ashamed.
Speaker 2: To not know the lyrics of a song.
Speaker 3: Yeah, because it's f and Vanilla Ice. So I don't
Speaker 3: feel like I should have known it. I just feel
Speaker 3: like a stooge.
Speaker 4: Oh no, it's fine. No, you got a Wean shirt on.
Speaker 4: You probably should know this. But I know I know
Speaker 4: that lyric though. Yeah, I didn't know a five point.
Speaker 2: Five point him? All right, it's my understanding, right everybody.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I thought it was a Volkswagen Beatle.
Speaker 4: No, no, but that does come up starting now because
Speaker 4: Leik Coca was one of the few people in Detroit
Speaker 4: at the time who realized that the American auto industry's
Speaker 4: lunch was being eaten in the subcompact market, mainly because
Speaker 4: no American car company was making subcompacts at the time.
Speaker 3: Right now, we liked her cars very large at time.
Speaker 2: Like land yachts.
Speaker 4: Yeah, okay, so Li said, the Germans are eating our
Speaker 4: lunch with their little Volkswagen Beetle Hitler's car.
Speaker 3: Look it up, I had two Volkswagen Beetles.
Speaker 2: Those were two Hitler's cars.
Speaker 4: You supported Hiller in a way.
Speaker 5: My mom is over there. She bought that car. I
Speaker 5: don't know.
Speaker 2: She's going like that.
Speaker 4: And then the Toyota Corolla was also killing people, right,
Speaker 4: killing Detroit. I should say, yeah, And so Lee said,
Speaker 4: we need to get a car to market. But I'm
Speaker 4: not the president. There's a man who is president. And
Speaker 4: what is his name, Chuck?
Speaker 3: I can't ever remember, honestly, Oh no, I do remember.
Speaker 3: His name is Bunkie Knudsen.
Speaker 4: If you're the president of a car company and your
Speaker 4: name's Bunkie Knudsen, you gotta.
Speaker 2: Know you have a target on your back.
Speaker 4: Right, Nobody's gonna let that stand for very long, especially
Speaker 4: not Leyah Coca.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 3: The only thing Bunkie Muson in that year would have
Speaker 3: been president of is the super Secret, super Secret Treehouse
Speaker 3: Playboy Magazine club.
Speaker 5: Led by Bunkie Knutson.
Speaker 4: Right, are the local union of the guys who sell
Speaker 4: those like monkeys that play the symbols on the street.
Speaker 2: You know, they wind up once, all right.
Speaker 3: So regardless of that, Bunkieknutson was in charge and Leah
Speaker 3: Coca had his sight set on that job, and so
Speaker 3: they settle things in the traditional way in the car
Speaker 3: industry at the time, which was arm wrestling.
Speaker 5: It's a little crazy serious.
Speaker 4: So Leiah Coca had this thing where we think this
Speaker 4: is probably how he rose to power. He could rip
Speaker 4: the sleeve clean off of his shirt right at the shoulder,
Speaker 4: right before an arm wrestling match.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 4: It's very intimidating, and he always kept his arms oiled.
Speaker 4: Every morning he would oil him up and very gingerly
Speaker 4: put the shirt on over him so the oil wouldn't
Speaker 4: show too So it really had like a pronounced effect
Speaker 4: when he tore his shirts leeve off and went like that.
Speaker 2: So when he did this, the Bunkie Nudsen and Bunkie
Speaker 2: saw that oil bicep. He knew his time running four
Speaker 2: Company had grown short.
Speaker 5: That's right, Bunky Newton knew what time it was.
Speaker 2: All that was totally made up. You all realized, right.
Speaker 2: The stun silence threw me off a little bit.
Speaker 5: It was back to the treehouse for Bunkie.
Speaker 3: So Leah Koka found himself in charge of Ford, and
Speaker 3: he said, we got to get a subcompact going fast, dudes.
Speaker 3: So here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna get a
Speaker 3: project going. I'm even gonna give it a code name,
Speaker 3: which is really weird and sort.
Speaker 2: Of Simon Mark, kind of a Nudsen move.
Speaker 3: But he named it Project Phoenix. Very cute and a
Speaker 3: little ironic once you know what this is about. And
Speaker 3: he said, I want a car, I want to on
Speaker 3: the market and what twenty four months?
Speaker 4: Yeah, and normally it took like forty three months dated
Speaker 4: car from concept to production. Iakoka said, nope, twenty four.
Speaker 3: Yeah, twenty four so super fast and it can't weigh
Speaker 3: more than two thousand pounds and it can't cost a
Speaker 3: customer more than two thousand dollars. And he totally should
Speaker 3: have called it Project two thousand, so that would have
Speaker 3: been a super cool name.
Speaker 5: In the early nineteen seventies.
Speaker 4: That car would go on to be known as the
Speaker 4: Ford Pinto. For those of you who aren't going, like, oh, colaps.
Speaker 3: Couple of booze, a couple of groans, and a lot
Speaker 3: of like what we're going to fill the people in
Speaker 3: on this Okay, Yeah, So the deal with the Ford
Speaker 3: Pinto was if you don't know, and you did grow
Speaker 3: up in the seventies, it had a problem. We don't
Speaker 3: know a lot about, but we know that the Ford
Speaker 3: Pinto had a problem. If you would hit the Ford
Speaker 3: Pinto from the rear going very very slow, sometimes it
Speaker 3: would burst into a fiery ball. And that is not
Speaker 3: a good thing for a car to.
Speaker 2: Do, especially when you're still in the car.
Speaker 5: That's right.
Speaker 2: Has anyone seen the movie Top Secret?
Speaker 5: Remember that one? There's Alkilmer.
Speaker 4: There's a scene where Valcimra, I think, is on a motorcycle.
Speaker 4: He's being chased by Germans and he somehow out maneuvers
Speaker 4: them and they swerve off the road and slam on
Speaker 4: their brakes and almost come to a complete stop right
Speaker 4: before hitting a Pinto in the rear, but don't quite
Speaker 4: make it. It makes that crystal thing sound and then
Speaker 4: boom they just blow up into flames.
Speaker 3: Right, And this was in the eighties, This was like
Speaker 3: at least ten years after the Pinto had this reputation.
Speaker 3: That's not that.
Speaker 4: Far from the truth, actually, we found from doing this research.
Speaker 4: So there's actually a lot of choice quotes that we
Speaker 4: found a lot of people love taking potshots at the Pinto.
Speaker 4: Some have written some pretty great stuff. You want to
Speaker 4: take the first one.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the first one was from Popular Mechanics magazine, and
Speaker 3: they said, arguably the most dangerous fuel tank of all
Speaker 3: time was a rear mounted vessel installed on the seventy
Speaker 3: one through seventy six Ford Pinto. It's possibly the best
Speaker 3: example of what happens when poor engineering meets corporate negligence.
Speaker 3: Good quote, I got one.
Speaker 4: There's this guy named doctor Leslie Ball. He was the
Speaker 4: chief safety officer for NASA's manned Space program.
Speaker 2: So this guy knew safety, right.
Speaker 4: He said that the release to production of the Pinto
Speaker 4: was the most reprehensible decision in the history of American engineering.
Speaker 4: So there's a couple of things I want your right.
Speaker 4: A couple of things to note in this quote. One
Speaker 4: he said was the most reprehensible decision, not one of
Speaker 4: the and he also qualifies it with American engineering, not
Speaker 4: automotive engineering. He's including like easy bake ovens and other
Speaker 4: stuff they have killed like millions of people.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 3: He's including everything ever built basically, Yeah, easy bake ovens
Speaker 3: or death traps too.
Speaker 2: So the Pinto.
Speaker 4: It was kind of an issue for Ford is we're
Speaker 4: going to see but there's this one tibit we ran
Speaker 4: a cost that we just love. There was a radio
Speaker 4: spot for the Pinto in the seventies and Ford had
Speaker 4: to get their their agency to get rid of it
Speaker 4: because it had the line the Pinto leaves you with
Speaker 4: that warm feeling for real, this is this is a
Speaker 4: fun one of research, all right.
Speaker 3: So again I want to reiterate, we don't know anything
Speaker 3: about the design of cars. You know how to drive cars,
Speaker 3: and that's about where it ends.
Speaker 5: But we do know this.
Speaker 3: The original design of the Pinto had a gas tank
Speaker 3: that started six inches from the rear bumper. I know
Speaker 3: that's not a good idea. If I was in Detroit,
Speaker 3: I would have said, well, that's weird, and why would
Speaker 3: you want to do that? Sure, because you know, accidents happened, right,
Speaker 3: No one thought about it.
Speaker 4: No. That's made even worse by the fact that a
Speaker 4: car critic would later call that bumper little more than ornamentation, right, like,
Speaker 4: car's supposed to have a bumper, just put that thing
Speaker 4: that looks like a bumper on it. Basically, there was
Speaker 4: a later improved version of the bumper on the Pinto
Speaker 4: that could with stand a five mile an hour impact.
Speaker 2: That was the improved version.
Speaker 4: And again, this is all happening six inches away from
Speaker 4: the gas tank.
Speaker 2: That's that's just one side of the field tank.
Speaker 4: There's a whole other side, and it had like its
Speaker 4: own issues.
Speaker 3: Basically, Yeah, there's there's something on a car called a differential.
Speaker 2: Uh, we mechanics say it.
Speaker 3: We don't know what that is, but I did some
Speaker 3: research and here's what I'm gonna call it. It's the
Speaker 3: magic box that makes the car go room.
Speaker 2: I think it's pretty accurate.
Speaker 4: What's what's so funny is like we pride ourselves on
Speaker 4: chasing down every tidbit of information when it comes to cars,
Speaker 4: We're just like, that's out.
Speaker 2: No idea.
Speaker 3: Who'd want to hear a live podcast about a car? So, uh,
Speaker 3: this magic box on the Ford Pinto had four protruding
Speaker 3: bolts facing the gas tank that uh see you're getting
Speaker 3: it now that uh in court later on, and this
Speaker 3: would end up in court that you see where this
Speaker 3: is going. Lawyers would call them can openers, and we're
Speaker 3: just gonna call them for this show, flaming death bolts.
Speaker 4: I wish we had a sound effect or like a
Speaker 4: jingle like Flaming Death Bolts.
Speaker 3: And we should totally trademark Flaming Death Bolts.
Speaker 4: I think so too, or at least that's a band name.
Speaker 4: I think we should at least call it out as that.
Speaker 5: Oh right, do you hear that?
Speaker 3: Are they're Flaming Death Faults behind us?
Speaker 2: That came out?
Speaker 5: Uh, we're here on the wrong night.
Speaker 4: So, like I said, there there's a lot of good
Speaker 4: quotes out there, but probably the best of them, the
Speaker 4: best came from this journalist named Mark Dowie who figures
Speaker 4: big time into the story and he probably got across
Speaker 4: the problem with the Pinto better than anybody. And if
Speaker 4: I may please okay, Mark Dowie said, if you ran
Speaker 4: into a Pinto you were following it over thirty miles
Speaker 4: an hour, the rear end of the car would buckle
Speaker 4: like an accordion right up to the back seat, and
Speaker 4: the tube bleeding to the gas tank cap would be
Speaker 4: ripped away from the tank itself and gas would immediately
Speaker 4: begin squashing onto the road around the car. Right the
Speaker 4: buckle gas tank would be jammed up against the differential housing,
Speaker 4: which contained four sharp protruding bolts, likely to gash holes
Speaker 4: in the tank and spill still more gas. Now all
Speaker 4: you need is a spark from a cigarette.
Speaker 2: And this is me interjecting here. This is the seventies.
Speaker 4: So every single person in every single car was smoking
Speaker 4: every single second of every moment they were driving.
Speaker 3: There are four lit cigarettes in every car at all
Speaker 3: times with the windows.
Speaker 2: Up barring that.
Speaker 4: You could also get it from the ignition or scraping metal,
Speaker 4: and both cars would be engulfed in flames.
Speaker 2: If you gave that pin to a.
Speaker 4: Really good whack, say it forty miles per hour, chances
Speaker 4: are excellent that its doors would jam and you would
Speaker 4: have to stand by and watch its trapped passengers burn
Speaker 4: to death.
Speaker 3: You're that's not me saying this.
Speaker 5: Your additional what do you call it? Pantomiming acting?
Speaker 2: It's in the pantomime tradition.
Speaker 5: Fantastic, Thank you.
Speaker 3: Reading Rainbow with Josh give LeVar Burton a run for
Speaker 3: his money. All right, So there was one thirty mile
Speaker 3: per hour crash test with a pinto that found that
Speaker 3: all thirteen gallons, all thirteen gallons, spilled out in less
Speaker 3: than sixty seconds. So we all drive here in Atlanta
Speaker 3: and you all pump gas. You know how fast when
Speaker 3: you're pumping gas, it's coming out and you're like, oh
Speaker 3: my god, that's so fast. Hole coming out so fast.
Speaker 3: You can't pump take a gas in sixty seconds. So
Speaker 3: the Pinto is spilling gas faster than you can pump gas.
Speaker 5: Think about that next time you go to the gas station.
Speaker 4: Yeah, thank god, I'm not driving an early nineteen seventies Pinto.
Speaker 4: So the weird thing is this, despite the Pinto's reputation,
Speaker 4: whether it's from top secret, you learned about it from
Speaker 4: your older brother, who knows where you heard it from,
Speaker 4: but a lot most people, I would even say, know
Speaker 4: of the Pinto is a flaming death trap. It turns out,
Speaker 4: in retrospect, the Pinto was really not much worse than
Speaker 4: any other car in its class at the time, which
Speaker 4: is not to say that the Pinto wasn't a flaming
Speaker 4: death trap, but instead all cars were flaming death traps.
Speaker 4: The idea of being safe if you got into a
Speaker 4: crash was totally lost on Detroit at the time.
Speaker 2: It wasn't a thing.
Speaker 4: So we wondered, okay, well, how did the Pinto actually
Speaker 4: get this reputation?
Speaker 2: And to answer that question, we have.
Speaker 4: To go to the Great Periodical Room in the sky
Speaker 4: and we have to go back to the ninth.
Speaker 5: We all have to die.
Speaker 2: No, No, that's the great part about it. You can
Speaker 2: go there alive.
Speaker 5: Oh.
Speaker 3: Usually when you say the great thing in the sky,
Speaker 3: that means you're totally dead.
Speaker 2: Just in the sky.
Speaker 3: Okay, all right, Great, we're going to the Great Periodical
Speaker 3: in the sky.
Speaker 2: Why and we're all living?
Speaker 5: All right, it's great.
Speaker 4: We're gonna go back to the nineteen seventy seventh section
Speaker 4: and we're going to find the nineteen seventy seven year
Speaker 4: for Mother Jones Magazine. Has everyone ever heard of Mother
Speaker 4: Jones Magazines still around today? So on one might characterize
Speaker 4: it as slightly left of center maybe, And it was
Speaker 4: very much the same back in the day.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 4: And in this September October nineteen seventy seven issue of
Speaker 4: Mother Jones Magazine, there was an article by Mark Dowie.
Speaker 3: That's right, it's called Pinto Madness. You can still read
Speaker 3: this article today. It was one of the main sources
Speaker 3: we used. It's a great deep dive if you want
Speaker 3: to read some more stuff about the Pinto But Mark
Speaker 3: Dowie was the quote you read earlier, and he was
Speaker 3: a journalist there at the time.
Speaker 5: And this is this is one reason you know. This
Speaker 5: is also the seventies.
Speaker 3: When they released this article in a print magazine, they
Speaker 3: had a press conference about it, which is adorable when
Speaker 3: you think about it, especially through today's lens. So they
Speaker 3: even traveled. They went to Washington, d C. From San Francisco,
Speaker 3: held a big press conference there on Capitol Hill about
Speaker 3: a magazine article, and they invited Ralph Nader to attend, which, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: if you don't know who Ralph Nader is, he is
Speaker 3: a great American. He was a consumer crusader who cared
Speaker 3: really about one thing in life, and that is making
Speaker 3: sure that corporations didn't screw you over and they kept
Speaker 3: you safe. And it's not like he got rich doing it.
Speaker 3: Ralph Nader was a great, great dude, right.
Speaker 4: He lived like a hermit to show that he wasn't
Speaker 4: being influenced by one side or the other. He had
Speaker 4: like a mattress on the floor of like a studio apartment.
Speaker 2: I think he had a hot plate that he lived with.
Speaker 3: Ironically, it's very dangerous how they think about it.
Speaker 4: It was like probably the safer hot plates, but yeah.
Speaker 5: I bet it was the best hot plate on the market.
Speaker 2: Yeah, for sure, you would think so. But he bought
Speaker 2: it with his own money.
Speaker 3: He did so anyother Ralph Nader was there. They got
Speaker 3: everyone together and they had this big press conference in Washington, DC,
Speaker 3: and Dowie starts to poke around a little bit and
Speaker 3: do a little more research for this article and say,
Speaker 3: you know, I need to go to these need to
Speaker 3: go to dot and need to go what was the.
Speaker 4: Other one called NHTSA ones that stand for National Man
Speaker 4: the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration. Correct, it's a mouthful,
Speaker 4: very good, so a lot of common words, but when
Speaker 4: you put him together like that, it's tough.
Speaker 3: So he went and started doing some investigating and he
Speaker 3: found out that Ford had been carrying out well, they've
Speaker 3: been carrying out crash tests in secret. And when you're
Speaker 3: carrying out crash tests in secret, that's probably not a good.
Speaker 2: Thing, right.
Speaker 4: It means that you didn't get the results you were
Speaker 4: hoping for, so you you suppressed the results you had.
Speaker 2: All the scientists murdered.
Speaker 3: Lea totally. Did He's like you see that?
Speaker 2: Sure?
Speaker 4: He probably like was like, go to sleep forever. But
Speaker 4: that was just to get the ball rolling. He had
Speaker 4: goons killed the rest of them. Oh sure, and you
Speaker 4: then you filed the crash test with the dot.
Speaker 2: That was the normal thing.
Speaker 4: So Dowy's sitting there going through all these file cabinets,
Speaker 4: and you know, there's all these bureaucrats going like, oh God,
Speaker 4: why does he keep saying Eureka.
Speaker 5: Here's the guy in there with the spy camera.
Speaker 4: And he figured out very very quickly that Ford was
Speaker 4: well aware of the notion that its Pintos were flaming
Speaker 4: death traps. Right, And from those forty crash tests, he
Speaker 4: found that eleven of them, this is really important, eleven
Speaker 4: of those crash tests had been carried out before the Pinto,
Speaker 4: the first one, had ever rolled off of the production line.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 4: He found in these crash tests that every single one
Speaker 4: of those forty crash tests, if it was a Pinto
Speaker 4: that had not been altered, meaning it was the same
Speaker 4: one that you would buy at like the dealership, they
Speaker 4: lost gas and an impact of twenty miles an hour
Speaker 4: over Not very good, right, No, not.
Speaker 5: Good at all.
Speaker 3: So three of these cars passed the tests, and all
Speaker 3: three of them had been had been tweaked for safety
Speaker 3: like these aren't the ones that you would end up buying.
Speaker 3: They changed three of them and they all three passed.
Speaker 3: Yet they still didn't use it. And here are the
Speaker 3: three things they did. They one was a plastic baffle,
Speaker 3: a little square plastic that costs.
Speaker 5: One dollar and it weighed one pound.
Speaker 3: And it went between the flaming death bolts and the
Speaker 3: gas tank.
Speaker 5: Solved the problem pretty sensible.
Speaker 3: Did not use it because remember two thousand pounds two
Speaker 3: thousand dollars, which I don't know what that is today.
Speaker 2: It's a two pounds and twelve thousand.
Speaker 3: Dollars the pounds and change.
Speaker 2: Okay, gravity is read relatively the same.
Speaker 3: The other thing they did, and this ostensibly was a
Speaker 3: little heavier, They put a metal plate to reinforce that
Speaker 3: ornamental bumper.
Speaker 5: In other words, they gave it a bumper and that worked.
Speaker 3: And then the finally, the final thing they did was
Speaker 3: a I think they lined that was the inside of
Speaker 3: the outside of.
Speaker 2: The gas tank, the inside of the gas tankah.
Speaker 5: The inside of the gas tank with a rubber bladder.
Speaker 5: And that worked.
Speaker 3: But no one likes saying the word bladder head forward.
Speaker 3: Be honest, it's too gross.
Speaker 2: It works, but it's crony, So we're getting rid of
Speaker 2: that one.
Speaker 3: The point is they had three solutions before the Ford
Speaker 3: was being rolled off the line, and they chose to
Speaker 3: ignore all three of them, right.
Speaker 2: Big point here, right.
Speaker 4: And in addition to this two thousand pound, two thousand
Speaker 4: dollars limitation that I Coca imposed, that radically shortened timeline
Speaker 4: also created a climate where really really dangerous engineering decisions
Speaker 4: were being made.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 2: Normally, when you make.
Speaker 4: A car, you sketch it out, somebody makes a model
Speaker 4: of it, some dude like works it in clay. Yeah,
Speaker 4: you run it into like a couple of walls or
Speaker 4: something like that. If you figure out how many like
Speaker 4: light like cigarette lighters are going to go into it,
Speaker 4: there's a lot of thought put into it. And then
Speaker 4: once all this stuff, this pre production stuff is done
Speaker 4: and you know what the car is going to look like,
Speaker 4: then you begin this process called tooling. And tooling is
Speaker 4: where you make the machines that are going to make
Speaker 4: the car that you're manufacturing. Right with the Pinto, they
Speaker 4: didn't do that. They started designing the car and at
Speaker 4: about the same time they started making the machines that
Speaker 4: were going to make that car. Before they even knew
Speaker 4: ultimately what the final design was going to be. So
Speaker 4: by the time they figured out that they had a
Speaker 4: really dangerous fuel tank on their hands, it was too late.
Speaker 4: The tooling was underway, two hundred million dollars worth of
Speaker 4: machines had been made, and Ford.
Speaker 3: Said, yeah, so when they discovered this, we have a
Speaker 3: couple of quotes here from actual engineers that worked there
Speaker 3: at the time, and they said, did anyone go to
Speaker 3: le Ayacoca and say, hey, we have a problem on
Speaker 3: our hands with his gat stank And this one engineer
Speaker 3: from the Mother Jones article said hell no.
Speaker 4: But if it was like nineteen seventy seven, so we
Speaker 4: didn't say it like that, he went like, hell no.
Speaker 3: Right in my mind he went, hell no, hell no.
Speaker 5: Uh, that person would have been fired.
Speaker 3: Safety wasn't a popular subject around Ford in those days,
Speaker 3: and with Lee it was taboo.
Speaker 2: Or taboo, like if you're a normal.
Speaker 3: Person, if you talk normally, tattoo, taboo, tattoo, taboo. All right, deletrious,
Speaker 3: it's that's a deep cut. Yeah, there's about twenty people
Speaker 3: in here that got that one. That's all right, all right,
Speaker 3: So I had a cocata saying around Ford at the time,
Speaker 3: which was safety doesn't sell. And here's another quote from
Speaker 3: another engineer. Safety is in the issue trunk spaces. You
Speaker 3: have no idea how stiff the competition is over trunk space.
Speaker 3: Do you realize that if we put a safer gas
Speaker 3: tank in the Pinto, you can only get one set
Speaker 3: of golf clubs in the trunk.
Speaker 5: And that's a real quote. Yeah, And here's something that
Speaker 5: you can do when you get home.
Speaker 3: You can go and look up Ford Pinto ad and
Speaker 3: search Google images or being images? Is that of thing?
Speaker 2: Yahoo?
Speaker 3: Yeah, you have to be Google. Yeah, go to netscape.
Speaker 4: And or if you're a paranoid type, duck dut gout.
Speaker 5: That even flew over my head.
Speaker 4: Uh, it's like they don't like track or use cookies
Speaker 4: or anything like that.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, so you're creep.
Speaker 4: I guess. I guess are you stockpile weapons or something?
Speaker 5: Gotcha?
Speaker 3: So anyway, you can look up four Pinto ads and
Speaker 3: there are all kinds of great ads from the old days.
Speaker 3: And there's one where there's where there's this couple that
Speaker 3: I guess is unpacking for like a camping trip from
Speaker 3: their Pinto. But it doesn't look like anywhere you would
Speaker 3: want to go camping. It's just kind of like a field.
Speaker 2: There's like a ditch.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's kind of weird looking. And it says this
Speaker 3: in the text. Just slip down the Runabout's rear seat.
Speaker 3: The Runabout was one of the Pinto models. Open up
Speaker 3: the big back door, which we call a hatchback these days,
Speaker 3: and the big back room makes packing easy. Pack in
Speaker 3: your golf clubs, those groceries and those big pieces of luggage,
Speaker 3: pack it all in.
Speaker 2: You make it sound really.
Speaker 3: Dirty, there's a big room in your little Pinto.
Speaker 2: I'm the sicko because I'm using Duck Duck.
Speaker 3: It's a sexiest out of the seventies as read by me.
Speaker 4: I like old ads in old magazines because like you
Speaker 4: can smell them after work, you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 4: Like if you go into Google images, the ads there,
Speaker 4: but not the smell. But you know what an old
Speaker 4: magazine smells like. But it's a great fantastic smell.
Speaker 3: You mean, like musty, what magazines are you reading?
Speaker 2: Just any old magazine? Pick up? Just like.
Speaker 3: All right, Jerry cut that part.
Speaker 5: Now, I'm not doing my shot yet.
Speaker 2: And everybody calmed down. My niece left to go to bed.
Speaker 3: So oh, okay, are there any other kids here?
Speaker 5: All right?
Speaker 3: You have a very deep voice, young boy right here.
Speaker 5: I'm seven, bear me screw.
Speaker 4: So everybody, I think we can all agree this is
Speaker 4: going pretty well.
Speaker 2: You're not gonna like this. That means that we need.
Speaker 3: To put an ad break in here.
Speaker 2: Calm down, We'll be right back right after these messages.
Speaker 2: Stuff we Josh shop.
Speaker 6: Soft your shore.
Speaker 3: Hey, everybody, we're back.
Speaker 2: Magic about words.
Speaker 3: Yeah, thank you, sir. I am wearing me Undies. Oh
Speaker 3: you know what we should say this?
Speaker 2: That's a freebie man.
Speaker 3: Well this part out too, but uh, I have to
Speaker 3: share this we got.
Speaker 5: This is a legit tangent like you know, like all
Speaker 5: of them.
Speaker 4: The heavily scripted and reversed tangents that you've heard him.
Speaker 5: We got an email yesterday. You saw it. I did
Speaker 5: where a woman?
Speaker 3: This is so weird. A woman wanted to send a
Speaker 3: new pair of me Undies to us for us to
Speaker 3: autograph so she could frame underwear for her husband's Christmas gifts.
Speaker 5: Now that is a deep cut.
Speaker 4: Sure, that's a true fan. At least she wasn't like
Speaker 4: and you wear them first? Yeah, each of you passed
Speaker 4: it off to the other one and then mail them
Speaker 4: back to me.
Speaker 5: Those are like, oh yeah, send him in right, totally
Speaker 5: do that I.
Speaker 2: Sent you will smell them like an old magazine, you know.
Speaker 2: Right when she got that in the mail.
Speaker 6: Oh chuck, uh said, I didn't what guys, what why
Speaker 6: would you do that?
Speaker 2: No one else saw that. We should probably edit this
Speaker 2: part out.
Speaker 5: To Jared, this guy right here.
Speaker 3: So I send that email to our head of sales though,
Speaker 3: and he was just so delighted. He was like, oh,
Speaker 3: I can't wait to send this to me Undies. They're
Speaker 3: you're autographing underwear. They're not gonna believe it.
Speaker 4: That's that's like David Lee Wroth level, except we're autographing
Speaker 4: me undies for a fan some dude.
Speaker 5: It's not David right.
Speaker 3: All right, everybody, we're back, kind of thinking, sure you
Speaker 3: may do it again though, because you just said that, right, Okay,
Speaker 3: Hey everybody, we're back.
Speaker 4: I think I just stepped on you again. And stop laughing, everybody.
Speaker 4: We need to clean I said, stop laughing.
Speaker 5: Hey, everybody, we're back. Thanks for hanging there.
Speaker 2: Thank you. That was a really long app We know
Speaker 2: where we were now. I got it.
Speaker 3: I got it you right, I got creepy right before
Speaker 3: I know that, I know, all right, I got you. Hey, everybody,
Speaker 3: we're back. Everyone's gonna be like, what the hell happened
Speaker 3: in Atlanta?
Speaker 4: That's good enough. We're leaving that dinn right. So by now,
Speaker 4: everybody you may be saying, Chuck, Josh, WTF, how how
Speaker 4: could this possibly be going on?
Speaker 2: How could Ford be doing.
Speaker 4: This kind of stuff. We're gonna tell you WTF. It
Speaker 4: turns out that back in the sixties, the American auto
Speaker 4: industry was like the last great unregulated industry the entire country.
Speaker 4: And the reason why was because most Americans considered the
Speaker 4: auto industry the backbone of the American economy. Right, so
Speaker 4: everyone said, we should probably just let the auto industry
Speaker 4: decide what's best for it and us it's consumers, because
Speaker 4: we don't want to mess with them.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and big corporations love to look out for everyday Americans,
Speaker 3: all right.
Speaker 4: But at the time, there was a fatality rate aka
Speaker 4: death rate on the America's highways reaching fifty thousand people
Speaker 4: a year.
Speaker 2: We did the math. That's a lot.
Speaker 5: That is a lot.
Speaker 3: Ralph Nader had a book called Unsafe at Any Speed
Speaker 3: that was a big hit.
Speaker 5: He also had one called hot.
Speaker 3: Plates Unsafe at any temperature, So does cell quite as well.
Speaker 4: Has anyone actually read Unsafe at Any Speed? Don't feel bad,
Speaker 4: We haven't either, Okay, good. So he released his book
Speaker 4: in nineteen sixty five, and it was basically like a
Speaker 4: chapter by chapter, really wonky detailed description of how your
Speaker 4: car was ready and willing to murder you, right, not
Speaker 4: kill you, murder you intentional.
Speaker 2: They were like chapters.
Speaker 4: On like the steering column it's going to impale you,
Speaker 4: or that dashboard it ain't padded, and your head's going
Speaker 4: to open up like a ripe candle op when it
Speaker 4: comes in contact with it.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 5: It was amazing chapter I think that.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: And the reason that this would happen for both instances
Speaker 4: is because there's no such thing as seat belts, right,
Speaker 4: So he goes to the truck.
Speaker 5: There were seat belts. It was your mom doing that, right, And.
Speaker 4: That's how you knew, like a really dedicated mom in
Speaker 4: the in the sixties, because she was missing an arm, right,
Speaker 4: that's right, like her kid was all messed up at
Speaker 4: a den on his head or whatever because it didn't
Speaker 4: quite work because her arm came clean off when they
Speaker 4: both went forward. But he was still alive. She didn't
Speaker 4: have an arm. It was a badge of honor back then.
Speaker 4: So Ralph Nader makes this makes writes this book, and
Speaker 4: it gets released and it becomes like a best seller
Speaker 4: almost immediately, and it has so much of an impact
Speaker 4: that the next year Congress passed the Highway Safety Act
Speaker 4: of nineteen sixty six.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and this is another way you knew it was
Speaker 3: a day from way back in the day. The House
Speaker 3: and the Senate passed it unanimously.
Speaker 2: This is so quaint.
Speaker 3: They all got together and said, well, this is what's
Speaker 3: good for the American people.
Speaker 5: So this is our job to do this.
Speaker 3: And they went yeah, yeah, pretty sweet, pretty sweet time.
Speaker 4: Pretty sweet. So they passed this thing. And the upshot
Speaker 4: of it was that now the auto industry would be regulated.
Speaker 4: It was just the way it was going to be. Okay,
Speaker 4: And the auto industry said, okay, okay, fine, fine, but
Speaker 4: what about this. Why don't we agree to use something
Speaker 4: called a cost benefit analysis to decide if we a
Speaker 4: actually undertake any regulations you propose? Deal and the DOT
Speaker 4: and NHTSA was like, well oh no. In the auto
Speaker 4: industry went like that, and the DOTWO is like, all right, fine, fine,
Speaker 4: we don't want to arm wrestle over this one. Fine
Speaker 4: cost benefit analysis for everybody.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So if you don't know what a cost benefit
Speaker 3: analysis is, we call it the cruelest of all analyzes
Speaker 3: because it's basically just a math problem. You plug in
Speaker 3: numbers and you say, I plug in this, I plug
Speaker 3: in this.
Speaker 5: Is it worth it to do this?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 5: Which works great in.
Speaker 3: A lot of circumstances if you're talking about I don't know,
Speaker 3: like a like what's a good example.
Speaker 4: Or like if you're trying to figure out whether to
Speaker 4: go with tire distributor A or tire distributor, be kind
Speaker 4: of easy.
Speaker 5: Right exactly.
Speaker 3: But if you're talking about replacing a fuel tank because
Speaker 3: it's killing people, it gets a little sticky. Because one
Speaker 3: of the inputs on those math problems has to be
Speaker 3: the value of a human life.
Speaker 5: There's no getting around it, no way around it.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 4: So the NHTSA say said, well, I guess we should
Speaker 4: go ahead and figure out how to quantify a human life.
Speaker 4: They all went home and like kissed their children. Then
Speaker 4: they came back to work, and what they came up
Speaker 4: with they actually did it. There was a nineteen seventy
Speaker 4: two document that said, everybody, this is the value of
Speaker 4: a human life. We figured it out two hundred thousand,
Speaker 4: seven hundred and twenty five dollars. And what they did
Speaker 4: was it was just like, who, yeah, really, I.
Speaker 2: Thought mine was half that. So what they did was
Speaker 2: they figured out.
Speaker 4: The average life span or the average age I guess,
Speaker 4: of a person who dies in a car wreck, and
Speaker 4: then subtracted it from the average lifespan of the Americans
Speaker 4: at the at the time in the Iraq such as
Speaker 4: and they came up with They came up with thirty
Speaker 4: seven years. Those people who die in a car wreck
Speaker 4: would have lived thirty seven more years. And then they said, well,
Speaker 4: how much would those people make in that time? And
Speaker 4: they said, well, two hundred thousand, seven and twenty five dollars.
Speaker 4: The problem with this is is that really what they
Speaker 4: calculated was the cost to society and lost productivity if
Speaker 4: it's just wages, right, They didn't take into account some
Speaker 4: very important stuff like the value that the individual places
Speaker 4: on his or her own life, or whether their family
Speaker 4: wants them to come home after a car wreck, stuff
Speaker 4: like that. But they came up with this dollar amount
Speaker 4: and they said they're there. We'll get better at it
Speaker 4: over time. But here's what it is, and it's a primitive.
Speaker 3: Stab exactly again, the cruelest of all analyses. So Mark
Speaker 3: Dowie is sorting through all the file cabinets of the
Speaker 3: DOT and the.
Speaker 4: The National Highway Transportation Safety Administration. It's no faster to
Speaker 4: say it abbreviated.
Speaker 3: I know, I would just mess it up though. So
Speaker 3: he's sorting through all this stuff, he's going through file cabinets.
Speaker 3: Everyone's worried, and he comes across to document a memo
Speaker 3: called Fatalities associated with the Crash induced fuel Leakage and Fires.
Speaker 3: And over the years people come to think like, this
Speaker 3: is the smoking gun.
Speaker 5: This was pinto.
Speaker 3: It was about pinto fires from getting hit in the rear,
Speaker 3: and that's what it is. It really wasn't that. What
Speaker 3: it was was it was about all cars in the
Speaker 3: United States.
Speaker 5: And whether they caught on fire when they rolled over.
Speaker 3: However, the one damning thing in this memo was that
Speaker 3: Ford used that number, well almost that number to quantify
Speaker 3: the value of a human life. But Ford rounded down.
Speaker 4: They rounded down the value of a human life, just
Speaker 4: you know, to make the math easier.
Speaker 5: Yeah, they made it two hundred grand.
Speaker 3: They cut off the seven hundred and twenty five dollars,
Speaker 3: just made it a straight up two hundred.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 4: So they estimated like one hundred and eighty fatalities and
Speaker 4: one hundred and eighty injuries in car fires post collision
Speaker 4: car fires every year in the US. And they said, well,
Speaker 4: that would cost society forty nine million dollars in lost productivity.
Speaker 4: But if you want us to do this eleven dollars
Speaker 4: per car safety improvement that would save those lives and
Speaker 4: those injuries, well it cost us the auto industry one
Speaker 4: hundred and thirteen million dollars, So don't have to do
Speaker 4: it right, great, see it Racquetball's head.
Speaker 3: That was kind of a do you guys see fight club?
Speaker 3: Remember Edward Norton's job. That was kind of what he
Speaker 3: did right a little bit.
Speaker 4: Yeah, he had to kind of calculate whether or not
Speaker 4: it was worth taking a recall exactly. And Ford, thanks
Speaker 4: to Dowie, had just been caught red handed with one
Speaker 4: of these submitted in the public record.
Speaker 3: All right, so part of the Motor Vehicle Safety Act
Speaker 3: was something and all these bills this gets a little wonky,
Speaker 3: but bear with me. They're all broken down into subcategories,
Speaker 3: and one of them was called Vehicle Safety Standard three
Speaker 3: oh one and three yoho one was basically our government
Speaker 3: getting together and saying, you know what, we feel like
Speaker 3: you should be able to get hit from the rear
Speaker 3: at like twenty miles an hour and not explode it
Speaker 3: into a fiery ball.
Speaker 4: We've talked about it. We know what you're going to say, Detroit,
Speaker 4: what we've talked about. We feel very strongly about this.
Speaker 5: We feel that's reasonable.
Speaker 3: Democrats push for thirty, Republicans pushed for ten. They met
Speaker 3: in the middle at twenty.
Speaker 2: There are people from copp County here on sure. They
Speaker 2: are not happy with you right now, so that's right.
Speaker 2: They are going to let us know via email after
Speaker 2: this show.
Speaker 3: I'm so angry that the way you feel about life.
Speaker 3: So they settle in twenty miles an hour and that
Speaker 3: was Safety Standard three oh one. But here's the rub
Speaker 3: for Ford and the Pinto is they had a problem
Speaker 3: on their hands. They could with stand twenty miles an hour,
Speaker 3: they could barely withstand five, so this would have meant
Speaker 3: a complete redesign on the Pinto.
Speaker 5: So they came up with a.
Speaker 3: Plan basically to shall we say delay the process.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I Coca went kill it, killed that thing, killed
Speaker 4: that standard three oh one, I hate it.
Speaker 5: And they were happy because they didn't have to kill
Speaker 5: a human.
Speaker 2: Right for once.
Speaker 4: So what Clowson is, Oh, yeah, I didn't even mean
Speaker 4: to say that, but.
Speaker 2: Getting dark pretty well.
Speaker 5: So here's what they did.
Speaker 3: They got attorneys on the case and they said, here's
Speaker 3: what you'll do. You're gonna you're gonna file these arguments
Speaker 3: on the last day that you can file an argument,
Speaker 3: and you're gonna get all this data together and you're
Speaker 3: gonna shove it in their face and say here's an argument,
Speaker 3: dot dot U, and now you got to look through
Speaker 3: all this stuff and you have to satisfy that argument.
Speaker 3: So they may not have even cared if the argument
Speaker 3: held up or not. The point was they just wanted
Speaker 3: to delay things so they could keep selling the very
Speaker 3: dangerous pinto So they did this, and they didn't They
Speaker 3: didn't file them concurrently, all at once, which is sort
Speaker 3: of what you usually do in the law in court.
Speaker 3: They would file one, they would go look through them
Speaker 3: all and say, yeah, this holds water. It doesn't They
Speaker 3: go great, They'd wait till the next deadline and file
Speaker 3: another one, and all of a sudden, they have delayed
Speaker 3: this process for nine years.
Speaker 2: Nine years.
Speaker 4: They started arguing against it in nineteen sixty eight, and
Speaker 4: standard three oh one went into effect in nineteen seventy seven.
Speaker 2: Right, yeah, boo. So there's kind of like.
Speaker 4: A silver lining to this whole thing, and that Ford's
Speaker 4: objections actually forced the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration to
Speaker 4: study the problem of car fires, to answer Ford's objections
Speaker 4: and say, no, actually, you're wrong, they're kind of a problem.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 3: They were giving them reams of data and then they went, oh,
Speaker 3: we just gave them.
Speaker 4: Right, But the NHTSA also had to like contract with
Speaker 4: people to study this stuff. And what they were finding
Speaker 4: was that car fires in America were way, way more
Speaker 4: of a problem than even Ford I think realized at
Speaker 4: the time. They turned up some stats like four hundred
Speaker 4: thousand cars were burning up on the American Highway every year,
Speaker 4: burning more than three thousand.
Speaker 2: People of death. Is that high?
Speaker 5: Four hundred thousand cars.
Speaker 2: Yeah, maybe it's a little high. I don't know, but
Speaker 2: this is what they turned up.
Speaker 3: It sounds high. Here's a here's one forty percent of
Speaker 3: all calls to all fire departments in the United States
Speaker 3: and the nineteen sixties were cars on fire.
Speaker 2: Isn't that nuts?
Speaker 4: Just the last time you guys trust a car on fire.
Speaker 4: This would be like an like you would see one
Speaker 4: and a couple of miles later, there's another one.
Speaker 3: Well yeah, And this was people didn't have cell phones,
Speaker 3: so you would have to see a car on fire,
Speaker 3: have a dime in your pocket, be near enough to
Speaker 3: a payphone.
Speaker 5: To report it, right, And that was forty percent, and
Speaker 5: have made.
Speaker 4: The judgment that there was a chance that the person
Speaker 4: was going to make it in the time that you
Speaker 4: went to the payphone. You know, there's a lot of
Speaker 4: factors here. Forty percent seems high. Like if you had
Speaker 4: a Christmas parade in your town, there was a pretty
Speaker 4: good chance a couple of those cars were just going
Speaker 4: to catch fire in the middle of the parade. This
Speaker 4: is insane. And this is what the NHTSA was finding
Speaker 4: from studying this problem. There's a University of Miami study.
Speaker 4: They found that rear end impact fires were quote a
Speaker 4: clear and present hazard to all Pinto owners.
Speaker 2: That was the cane saying that.
Speaker 3: All right, so.
Speaker 4: Wait, wait, wait, we got to take another Mbrank Okay, everybody.
Speaker 2: We'll be right back.
Speaker 4: Don't get up, We'll be right back right after these messages.
Speaker 7: Softly soft, Hey, everybody, we're back.
Speaker 2: It's a lot better live. Huh.
Speaker 5: They get it now.
Speaker 3: So, the original draft of the Motor Vehicle Safety Act
Speaker 3: had had a part that provided it was very controversial.
Speaker 5: It provided for criminal.
Speaker 3: Sanctions, criminal sanctions against executives of auto companies, and these well,
Speaker 3: let's be honest, these white dudes that were executives of
Speaker 3: these auto companies said, well, I think I don't think
Speaker 3: you really mean that right.
Speaker 2: That means we could go to prison, you understand.
Speaker 3: I like, I think we should. Uh, we have some
Speaker 3: lobbyists on the case. And so they put the lobbyists
Speaker 3: on the case, and they did get that lobbied out
Speaker 3: of the Safety Act. Unfortunately, Yeah, I say, unfortunately, that's
Speaker 3: me talking.
Speaker 2: Sure, Well, you're speaking for both of us, buddy, And.
Speaker 3: They end up with like five or ten thousand dollars.
Speaker 4: Yeah, in nineteen seventy seven, money which today translates to
Speaker 4: like forty grand. So if you were an auto executive
Speaker 4: who knowingly put a dangerous car out on the American market,
Speaker 4: you could face a fine of forty thousand dollars and
Speaker 4: from what we understand, that's like once one time.
Speaker 2: Fine, Yeah, that was it.
Speaker 4: So it would be up to the media and the
Speaker 4: courts to force Forward to do something about its Pinto
Speaker 4: And boy.
Speaker 3: Did they ever the drumbeat started, isn't that right?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 4: It started with Dowie, right, Like, Mark Dowie gets this
Speaker 4: gets a lot of credit for the Pinto article, and
Speaker 4: definitely he definitely had a big impact, but he gets
Speaker 4: some undue credit for getting Standard three to ZHO one
Speaker 4: to come into effect because it came into effect pretty
Speaker 4: shortly after the Pinto madness article came out. It turns
Speaker 4: out later research turned.
Speaker 2: Up that the NHTSA had.
Speaker 4: Said, Ford, we're so sick of you arguing against standard
Speaker 4: three oh one. How long will it take for you
Speaker 4: guys to get your cars up to standard three TOZHO
Speaker 4: one level, which again is a twenty mile an hour
Speaker 4: rear impact that doesn't lead to fuel loss.
Speaker 2: And four it was like, I don't know, seems like a.
Speaker 4: Big job, right, four years And the NHTSA was like,
Speaker 4: you know, it took you two years to design the
Speaker 4: car from scratch, right, They're like like, yeah, this is huge,
Speaker 4: massive improvements to make it safe. So four years so
Speaker 4: the NHTSA said, fine, fine, in nineteen seventy seven, it'll
Speaker 4: come into effect. So it was just coincidence, but Dowy's
Speaker 4: article did have a big impact in the way of
Speaker 4: like shaping public opinion.
Speaker 5: Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 3: So what happens is there's starting to be some lawsuits.
Speaker 3: People that are getting burned alive in pintos and other
Speaker 3: cars say well, maybe maybe we could sue somebody, and
Speaker 3: that is that a duck.
Speaker 4: Class a duck in the house. Well, okay, let's get
Speaker 4: back on tracks. Get back on track.
Speaker 2: Works, doesn't it. You're all charmed? Thank you for taking
Speaker 2: that one for us, Chuck.
Speaker 3: Jerry cut that part all right, so by that's delicious,
Speaker 3: it's good.
Speaker 2: Yeah, bullet bullet, bran bourbon.
Speaker 3: It's called buzz marketing everyone. They don't even pay us
Speaker 3: for that yet. So they're these people that have this
Speaker 3: job where they recreate accidents for sometimes it's for court,
Speaker 3: for attorneys for the state. Sometimes it's for insurance companies.
Speaker 3: But they recreate these accidents to kind of show what
Speaker 3: went down. And some of them started to say, and
Speaker 3: again it was a rat started to say, wait a minute,
Speaker 3: I think that if you get in a car wreck,
Speaker 3: you maybe should be able to live through it. It's
Speaker 3: a radical idea, but like maybe they should make cars safer.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they go back to San Diego hippie.
Speaker 5: Well the notion from from America.
Speaker 3: Everyone sort of agreed to the thing where like you
Speaker 3: get in a car wreck and die, like you got
Speaker 3: in the car wreck, it's your fault.
Speaker 2: It was a driver's fault.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's a driver's fault. You can't make cars safer
Speaker 3: in the case of an accident. It seems weird now
Speaker 3: because it's all we think about is auto safety, but
Speaker 3: it was just not on the radar. LEI Coca was
Speaker 3: not the only one, but that.
Speaker 4: Was thanks to Detroit, like saying, it's your fault, you're
Speaker 4: a dummy.
Speaker 5: But everyone agreed to it. Everyone was.
Speaker 4: Yeah, in in Detroit's defense, at the time, everybody was
Speaker 4: drunk while they were driving, way more than today, so
Speaker 4: they kind of had a point. But still they could
Speaker 4: still make the cars safe and should have even even
Speaker 4: more back then.
Speaker 5: Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 3: So these I don't know, we call them accident recreationists.
Speaker 4: Reconstruction reconstructionists, recreationists, or the Civil War dudes.
Speaker 3: Does anyone here do that?
Speaker 5: Any Civil War reenactors?
Speaker 2: There's three who are just sitting there like right.
Speaker 3: Now, all right, quick sidebar Emily and I went hiking
Speaker 3: at you guys ever go to Sweetwater.
Speaker 5: State Park.
Speaker 2: See local show.
Speaker 5: Emily remember this.
Speaker 3: We went hiking in Sweetwater and there were some Civil
Speaker 3: War reenactors, but it wasn't like what I know about
Speaker 3: Civil War reenactors is that they throw a big battle
Speaker 3: party or whatever it's called, and they act like it's
Speaker 3: a big war and they go bang you die or
Speaker 3: don't die and bang bang, and then that's sort of
Speaker 3: what happens.
Speaker 5: I have no idea what they do, but.
Speaker 3: It's a big show, like on a field like I
Speaker 3: went to one when I was a kid.
Speaker 5: I remember that.
Speaker 3: But these dudes were just hanging out in the woods
Speaker 3: at sweet Quater State Park. They were like they had
Speaker 3: a fire going and it was it was like three
Speaker 3: or four people. It was a couple of dudes and
Speaker 3: a couple of ladies and in their outfits and they
Speaker 3: were cooking like I guess, like a squirrel on a spit.
Speaker 2: That's Huckeby style.
Speaker 3: It was no organized thing, and I was just hiking by.
Speaker 3: It was like a year ago. I was like, well,
Speaker 3: that's weird.
Speaker 4: Did you guys just like back slowly into the ward,
Speaker 4: don't make eye contacted me.
Speaker 3: I guess I approved because it wasn't war, so that's
Speaker 3: kind of cool.
Speaker 2: It was you know, they were prepping for war.
Speaker 4: So oh okay, they were gathering their strength from squirrels,
Speaker 4: plowing their muskets to go faint.
Speaker 5: Very strange.
Speaker 3: Don't go to Sweet Waters, by the way, don't go there.
Speaker 2: No, not after that, Okay.
Speaker 4: I didn't know if there's something out like there's a
Speaker 4: lot of abandoned tires in the ravine or something.
Speaker 3: All right, so where are you Jared cut that whole story.
Speaker 2: I don't know. I think it was a good story.
Speaker 2: I think we should keep it.
Speaker 3: Jerry, is she dead?
Speaker 2: Skyticle? Remember the sky?
Speaker 5: All right?
Speaker 3: So these recreationists that's where I was, are saying, uh,
Speaker 3: maybe you should sue the car company, like because cars
Speaker 3: should be safer, And people went, oh, well that's not
Speaker 3: a bad idea. Yeah, because every revolutionary idea.
Speaker 4: These guys were saying. With the Pinto in particular, I'm
Speaker 4: starting to notice a lot of charred bodies that are
Speaker 4: otherwise in perfect shape, look great aside from the charred part, right,
Speaker 4: Like they don't have any contusions, they don't have any
Speaker 4: broken bones. So like these accents are happening and really
Speaker 4: low speed. Maybe it's actually a design flaw with Ford.
Speaker 4: And so the lawyers were like, that sounds great, and
Speaker 4: they started circling the.
Speaker 2: Courthouses like the flying Monkeys and.
Speaker 4: The Wizard of Oz and dropping lawsuits down on the
Speaker 4: Ford's head. And at first it was like, bring it,
Speaker 4: We're Ford. You know, juries are made up of like
Speaker 4: upstanding registered voters, right, We're going to be just fine.
Speaker 4: And Ford won a couple at first, and then they
Speaker 4: started losing them and Ford was still kind of like,
Speaker 4: we're still we're still taking the jury trial on. But
Speaker 4: the whole thing turned on this one trial in nineteen
Speaker 4: seventy seven in Orange County, California, and Ford lost big time.
Speaker 4: Actually in a Pinto case.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they lost, and this was in seventy seven. They
Speaker 3: lost one hundred and twenty five million dollars and damages
Speaker 3: to a boy named He's thirteen years old, Richard Grimshaw
Speaker 3: was very sad. He's burned very badly, and the driver
Speaker 3: of the car died and one hundred and twenty five
Speaker 3: million bucks back I mean, it's a lot of money now,
Speaker 3: but back then it's a ton of money. And it's
Speaker 3: what they call, you've heard of like a symbolic award,
Speaker 3: where they'll just hit a company with a ton of
Speaker 3: ton of money and it later gets reduced. But all
Speaker 3: they can about is that the media knows that they
Speaker 3: got hit with this ton of money. That was sort
Speaker 3: of the case here. It got reduced to what three
Speaker 3: and a half million bucks.
Speaker 2: It's still pretty It seems a lot.
Speaker 3: Of money back then, of course, but that initial figure
Speaker 3: like really made a point and sent shockwaves through the auto.
Speaker 4: Industry, and so Ford changed its tactics. They're like, okay,
Speaker 4: well maybe we'll start settling.
Speaker 2: And we got another quote and.
Speaker 4: Chuck reads it way better than me, so if you
Speaker 4: don't mind, Yeah, this.
Speaker 3: Was an attorney for Ford, and I'll read it in
Speaker 3: the voice of Lionel Hunts of the Simpsons, the great
Speaker 3: Phil Hartman. Uh, here we go. We'll never go to
Speaker 3: a jury again, not in a fire case. Jury is
Speaker 3: a just too sentimental. They see those charred remains and
Speaker 3: forget the evidence. No, sir, we'll settle thanks for that.
Speaker 3: That is a he wasn't overheard saying that a TV
Speaker 3: reporter stuck a microphone in his face and he said that.
Speaker 4: Right, that was his quote that he gave, Like Amazon
Speaker 4: Alexa didn't overhear him saying that to his wife at
Speaker 4: home later, right exactly.
Speaker 2: So Ford was like, Okay, kill that guy, that lawyer.
Speaker 5: Yeah, we're going.
Speaker 4: To start settling. And so they did start settling. There's
Speaker 4: some benefits to settling. Well, there's some drawbacks too. One
Speaker 4: is that it tells the entire world that you know,
Speaker 4: your case is terrible, but it says, well, there's going
Speaker 4: to be lower payouts to the lawyers, and there's going
Speaker 4: to be lower payouts.
Speaker 2: To the defendants.
Speaker 4: And it also cuts down on discovery. So discovery, if
Speaker 4: you go to jury, the plaintiff, the person filing the case,
Speaker 4: has legal access to any and all documents that you
Speaker 4: have that prove their case against you.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 4: So with all these jury there was this steady trickle
Speaker 4: or flow even of Yeah, it wasn't even a trickle.
Speaker 4: It was a flow of damning evidence coming out of
Speaker 4: Ford going into the hands of lawyers who were happily
Speaker 4: turning it around and handing it to the media who
Speaker 4: were reporting on this stuff, which was getting the public
Speaker 4: just good and picked and that drum beat that Chuck
Speaker 4: was talking about started to really pick up, and like
Speaker 4: people were really looking at Ford like in this weird,
Speaker 4: like unsettling, non blinky way.
Speaker 5: You know.
Speaker 2: Everyone took their shirts off and they put like.
Speaker 4: War paint on, and just FOURB was starting to get
Speaker 4: a little nervous. They were like, like US America said, you.
Speaker 5: So that got a little weird. Yeah, thank you for clapping,
Speaker 5: Thank you, buddy.
Speaker 3: You get a T shirt that bordered on performance art,
Speaker 3: did it?
Speaker 5: I think so?
Speaker 2: Had I taken my shirt off, it would have been.
Speaker 5: For oh my god, do it.
Speaker 4: No, you're out of your mind, you guys until blood comes.
Speaker 2: Out of your mouths.
Speaker 4: And I still wouldn't take my shirt off. There's nothing
Speaker 4: you can do to make me take my shirt.
Speaker 3: Actually, I would probably be my shirt off, which would
Speaker 3: be uh.
Speaker 4: That does feel good, though. Now we've reached David Lee
Speaker 4: Roth level.
Speaker 5: I wish I had another shot.
Speaker 3: Oh my god, all right.
Speaker 2: That's so shy. That's just having common values. Not taking
Speaker 2: your shirt off in public when people tell you to.
Speaker 4: That's normal stuff. Man, you did good is what I'm saying.
Speaker 4: You Jerry cut out the last series.
Speaker 2: Shame on all of you.
Speaker 5: I'metown show, all right.
Speaker 3: So finally, in nineteen seventy seven, safety three oh one
Speaker 3: came into effect. What we talked about, would you should
Speaker 3: be able to hit a car from twenty miles an
Speaker 3: hour not be a flaming death ball? And the nineteen
Speaker 3: seventy seven new Pento debuted with a very brand new
Speaker 3: safety feature that one dollar one pound piece of plastic
Speaker 3: in between the flaming death bolts and the gas dagg.
Speaker 4: That they've known since nineteen sixty eight would save lives.
Speaker 5: Boom, thank you.
Speaker 4: So Leiah Coca by this time and Ford in general,
Speaker 4: were scared to death of the PR crisis that had
Speaker 4: been growing and growing. And the whole thing again was
Speaker 4: started by Dowie's article. Not only did he get the
Speaker 4: Mother Jones readership involved, he really kind of awakened the
Speaker 4: mainstream media to the thing. So everybody was reporting on this,
Speaker 4: people were suing for it.
Speaker 2: It was a huge, big.
Speaker 4: Problem, and I had Coca told everybody clam up. That's
Speaker 4: actually a direct quote from his book, his nineteen eighty
Speaker 4: eight book. I used to think in a happier time.
Speaker 4: That was called straight Talk. That's a Dolly Parton movie.
Speaker 4: It's called talking Straight job.
Speaker 3: I gotta say you sent me this initial Josh said
Speaker 3: this wrote this show, and he sent it and he
Speaker 3: said straight talk, And I was like, did Dolly Parton
Speaker 3: play lee?
Speaker 2: Still it still says I never corrected it.
Speaker 3: I never saw the movie. That would be great.
Speaker 2: You never saw straight talk?
Speaker 5: Oh no, that's so ashamed. Is that gonna be your movie?
Speaker 5: Crush pick?
Speaker 2: Oh maybe that's buzz marketing. Now I have to do it.
Speaker 3: No, no, no, no, So yeah, it was called talking
Speaker 3: Straight In the end, I think straight talk might have
Speaker 3: been the working title.
Speaker 4: Okay, but in it he says, like we were so
Speaker 4: afraid of this PR crisis bankrupting forward. If you could
Speaker 4: imagine that that they just said, no one talked, don't
Speaker 4: talk to anybody, just clam up. And they thought that
Speaker 4: if somebody said something the wrong way and like there
Speaker 4: was a scary turn of phrase or something like that
Speaker 4: that was just taking the wrong way, it would be
Speaker 4: seen as an admission of guilt. The problem was to
Speaker 4: the public that the fact that they weren't talking was seen.
Speaker 2: As an admission of guilt. More than anything.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it was a big deal.
Speaker 3: Like sixty Minutes was literally knocking at the door, like
Speaker 3: morally safer?
Speaker 5: Was it? Ford knocking at the door?
Speaker 3: And he said, I'm morally safer And if you're not intimidated, now,
Speaker 3: I got Ed Bradley with me. We've sent two of
Speaker 3: our best dudes, so you should be pretty worried.
Speaker 4: And Ford was crouched down under their window, like are
Speaker 4: they still out there?
Speaker 5: It's just so funny. Is I used to love sixty Minutes?
Speaker 2: Sure?
Speaker 3: You know when I was like thirteen. It's so such
Speaker 3: a weird show to watch as a kid.
Speaker 2: It's sophisticated.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that was not so investigated, apparently you were. Yeah,
Speaker 5: I was not. I don't know what.
Speaker 4: I like the little right, and then after that you're
Speaker 4: just like all right, I'll turn the channel.
Speaker 3: Well, and you know, and also now I think about
Speaker 3: I think it came on after either like the Wonderful
Speaker 3: Warble of Disney.
Speaker 5: Or that was great or Wow Kingdom or something. Anyway,
Speaker 5: I don't know what that is, sir.
Speaker 2: That was like Full House was on there, that was
Speaker 2: like the nineties.
Speaker 5: You're way off, but yeah, I'm so old.
Speaker 2: Do you see this?
Speaker 5: Beard?
Speaker 4: So much gray, like the Davy Crockett story Hour was
Speaker 4: that one?
Speaker 2: Let just make that up.
Speaker 5: Well, I'm not that old night writer.
Speaker 2: That was a good I had a good theme song.
Speaker 3: This has devolved into like shout out your favorite old thing.
Speaker 2: We're almost done. Everybody call that.
Speaker 5: All right, we're hit in the end.
Speaker 3: So uh. Nineteen seventy eight, In June, they started their
Speaker 3: own recall proceedings. In sixty minutes, was on the on
Speaker 3: the door, they're knocking, they're knocking, and Ford says, you
Speaker 3: know what, We're gonna undertake a voluntary recall if anyone
Speaker 3: believe that the will make us look so good of
Speaker 3: one point four and I don't know if we mentioned
Speaker 3: the Pinto was a big, big seller, Like, despite all this,
Speaker 3: it was a super super popular car.
Speaker 4: It was like the best selling subcompact of the seventies.
Speaker 5: It very much was.
Speaker 3: It was It's Winona Ryder's car and Stranger Things Too.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, I haven't seen it. I don't know.
Speaker 5: Was it her car and Stranger Things one?
Speaker 3: I don't remember, but they feature the Pinto and Stranger
Speaker 3: Things too.
Speaker 2: Night Rider.
Speaker 3: Spoiler thanks a lot, right now, I know what car
Speaker 3: she drives, all right? So they undertake a one point
Speaker 3: four million car recall on just the Pinto alone, but
Speaker 3: also another car they had, right.
Speaker 4: The Mercury Bobcat right, which was its like more luxurious
Speaker 4: but equally deadly twin. And we're not quite sure like
Speaker 4: what made it so luxurious?
Speaker 5: No idea.
Speaker 4: Maybe it had like an onboard like blow dryer brush
Speaker 4: to like to feather your hair with while you were
Speaker 4: going home.
Speaker 3: What were you sit in the back seat and they
Speaker 3: just have the thing from the hairplace that just right
Speaker 3: lowers over your head.
Speaker 4: That is the pinnacle of luxury that we can think
Speaker 4: of for the nineteen seventies.
Speaker 5: God bless the seventies.
Speaker 2: All right.
Speaker 5: The bad news is, though, and this.
Speaker 3: Is very sad to stop laughing, between the time four
Speaker 3: decided to undergo that recall in June and the time
Speaker 3: it told consumers, like internally they said, all right, June,
Speaker 3: we'll do this September we announced it to the public.
Speaker 3: In those few months, that was a very very sad crash.
Speaker 5: Rear rear end.
Speaker 3: You need another shot, no, a re random impact where
Speaker 3: where some young women died. And there was a prosecutor
Speaker 3: in Indiana named Michael Constantino that said you know what,
Speaker 3: I've had it, I've done.
Speaker 5: I know the deal.
Speaker 3: I'm going to bring these dudes on trial for murder.
Speaker 4: Murder, like he filed criminal homicide charges against the executives
Speaker 4: at Ford for that crash.
Speaker 5: Yeah, very big deal.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: So, and it wasn't just like a flash in the
Speaker 4: pan like this trial actually or these charges went to trial.
Speaker 2: It was over like three years.
Speaker 4: And over the three years, everybody was reporting on Ford
Speaker 4: executives on trial for murder every day, and the charges
Speaker 4: got dismissed, but the public criminalizing of Ford's executives were
Speaker 4: it was huge. Like it was a bad PR crisis
Speaker 4: before that. It couldn't get worse than that, your executives
Speaker 4: on trial for murder, right.
Speaker 5: Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 3: So despite all this, despite the fact that the Pinto
Speaker 3: was a flaming death trap to a certain extent, when
Speaker 3: you look at the numbers today and when you look
Speaker 3: at the real statistics, it was not much worse and
Speaker 3: sometimes better than other cars on the market at the
Speaker 3: time that would kill you from.
Speaker 4: Fire, like the Vega or the Grimlin. They would kill you, right,
Speaker 4: So we tried to figure out and actually it turns
Speaker 4: out there was this nineteen ninety three article in Harvard
Speaker 4: Law Review where this guy said, I've done the math.
Speaker 4: I've actually figured it out, and here's the number I
Speaker 4: came up with.
Speaker 2: It was twenty seven.
Speaker 4: Twenty seven people is probably the number of people who
Speaker 4: died in low speed rear collision impact fires in pintos.
Speaker 5: And it's over like ten years, like millions of cars.
Speaker 2: Twenty seven. It's not that bad, actually.
Speaker 4: Right, it was way less than I I think Mother
Speaker 4: Jones said like five hundred to nine hundred. Yeah, and
Speaker 4: this is so mother Jones. They said that was a
Speaker 4: conservative estimate that we just made up. And then I
Speaker 4: think sixty minutes Chuck's beloved sixty Minutes said like thousands
Speaker 4: of people had died in Pinto's, no one knew, so.
Speaker 2: They were just making up numbers.
Speaker 4: But this nineteen ninety three article said, no, it was
Speaker 4: probably twenty seven actually exactly.
Speaker 3: So in the end we look back and the Pinto was,
Speaker 3: even though it could have been a flaming death trap,
Speaker 3: what it really was was a very bad victim of
Speaker 3: pr Yeah, you know, yep.
Speaker 4: So, like the problem was was that the way you
Speaker 4: could die in a Pinto was just too bad to
Speaker 4: be allowed to continue, right, the idea that, like if
Speaker 4: you got in a rear in collision and the passenger
Speaker 4: compartment filled up with gas.
Speaker 3: That's bad enough.
Speaker 4: But the idea that it could happen at such a
Speaker 4: low speed that you would still be conscious when you
Speaker 4: caught fire and burned a death. The American public said, Nope,
Speaker 4: that can't happen. It doesn't matter. And so thanks to
Speaker 4: Dowie's article and sixty minutes, eventually, for sure, the Pinto
Speaker 4: was basically laid to waste as far as the American
Speaker 4: public was concerned, and still has a bad reputation today.
Speaker 5: That's right.
Speaker 3: In the end, the Pinto took career impact, but not
Speaker 3: in the good.
Speaker 4: Way, not in the good way, in every kind of bad.
Speaker 5: You know, that's true. I never thought about that.
Speaker 3: So in the end, mister Lee Ayacoca would go on
Speaker 3: to write his legend with the Chrysler Corporation by bringing
Speaker 3: them back from kind of the brink of bankruptcy into
Speaker 3: huge success.
Speaker 5: In the nineties.
Speaker 3: In the eighties, and he was named I think by
Speaker 3: Portfolio magazine as the eighteenth greatest CEO of all time,
Speaker 3: just ahead of Oprah, which is.
Speaker 5: Both team Oprah. Up Here.
Speaker 3: Wrote A couple of books wrote that biography that Josh
Speaker 3: talked about, that Dolly Parton did not star in, and
Speaker 3: another called Where Have all the Leader's Gone? And mister
Speaker 3: Iacocca is still live today, the ripe old age of
Speaker 3: ninety two in bel Air neighborhood of Los Angeles, California.
Speaker 2: Where there is nary a Pinto to be found.
Speaker 5: That's right, and that is the story of the Ford Pinto.
Speaker 3: Yeah, thanks, yeah, good luck. Stuff you should Know is
Speaker 3: a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my heart Radio,
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