The Ford Pinto

W. Michael Hoffman
Executive Director, Center for Business Ethics, Bentley University

I
On August 10, 1978, a tragic automobile accident occurred on U.S. Highway 33 near Goshen,
Indiana. Sisters Judy and Lynn Ulrich (ages 18 and 16, respectively) and their cousin Donna Ulrich
(age 18) were struck from the rear in their 1973 Ford Pinto by a van. The gas tank of the Pinto
ruptured, the car burst into flames, and the three teenagers were burned to death.

Subsequently an Elkhart County grand jury returned a criminal homicide charge against Ford, the
first ever against an American corporation. During the following twenty-week trial, Judge Harold R.
Staffeldt advised the jury that Ford should be convicted of reckless homicide if it were shown that
the company had engaged in “plain, conscious and unjustifiable disregard of harm that might result
(from its actions) and the disregard involves a substantial deviation from acceptable standards of
conduct.”
The key phrase around which the trial hinged, of course, is “acceptable standards.” Did Ford
knowingly and recklessly choose profit over safety in the design and placement of the Pinto’s gas
tank? Elkhart County prosecutor Michael A. Cosentino and chief Ford attorney James F. Neal
battled dramatically over this issue in a rural Indiana courthouse. Meanwhile, American business
anxiously awaited the verdict which could send warning ripples through boardrooms across the
nation concerning corporate responsibility and product liability.

II
As a background to this trial some discussion of the Pinto controversy is necessary.

In 1977 the magazine Mother Jones broke a story by Mark Dowie, General Manager of Mother
Jones business operations, accusing Ford of knowingly putting on the road an unsafe car – the Pinto
– in which hundreds of people have needlessly suffered burn deaths and even more have been
scarred and disfigured from burns.

In his article “Pinto Madness” Dowie charges that:

• Fighting strong competition fromVolkswagen for the lucrative small-car market, the Ford Motor
Company rushed the Pinto into production in much less than the usual time.
• Ford engineers discovered in preproduction crash tests that rear-end collisions would rupture the
Pinto’s fuel system extremely easily.

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 The Ford Pinto

W. Michael Hoffman
Executive Director, Center for Business Ethics, Bentley University

• Because assembly-line machinery was already tooled when engineers found this defect, top Ford
officials decided to manufacture the car anyway – exploding gas tank and all – even though Ford
owned the patent on a much safer gas tank.
• For more than eight years afterward, Ford successfully lobbied, with extraordinary vigour and
some blatant lies, against a key government safety standard that would have forced the company
to change the Pinto’s fire-prone gas tank.
• By conservative estimates Pinto crashes have caused 500 burn deaths to people who would
not have been seriously injured if the car had not burst into flames. The figure could be as
high as 900.
• Burning Pintos have become such an embarrassment to Ford that its advertising agency,
J.Walter Thompson, dropped a line from the ending of a radio spot that read “Pinto leaves
you with that warm feeling.”
• Ford knows that the Pinto is a firetrap, yet it has paid out millions to settle damage suits out
of court, and it is prepared to spend millions more lobbying against safety standards.With a
half million cars rolling off the assembly lines each year, Pinto is the biggest-selling
subcompact in America, and the company’s operating profit on the car is fantastic. Finally, in
1977, new Pinto models have incorporated a few minor alterations necessary to meet that
federal standard Ford managed to hold off for eight years.
• Why did the company delay so long in making these minimal, inexpensive improvements ?

• Ford waited eight years because its internal “cost-benefit analysis,” which places a dollar value on
human life, said it wasn’t profitable to make the changes sooner.

Several weeks after Dowie’s press conference on the article, which had the support of Ralph Nader
and auto safety expert Byron Bloch, Ford issued a news release attributed to Herbert T. Misch, Vice
President of Environmental and Safety Engineering, countering points made in the Mother Jones
article. Their statistical studies conflict significantly with each other. For example, Dowie states that
more than 3,000 people were burning to death yearly in auto fires; he claims that, according to a
National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) consultant, although Ford makes 24
percent of the cars on American roads, these cars account for 42 percent of the collision-ruptured
fuel tanks.

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The Ford Pinto

W. Michael Hoffman
Executive Director, Center for Business Ethics, Bentley University

Ford, on the other hand, uses statistics from the Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS)
maintained by the government’s NHTSA to defend itself, claiming that in 1975 there were 848
deaths related to fire-associated passenger-car accidents and only 13 of these involved Pintos; in
1976, Pintos accounted for only 22 out of 943. These statistics imply that Pintos were involved in
only 1.9 percent of such accidents, and Pintos constitute about 1.9 percent of the total registered
passenger cars. Furthermore, fewer than half of those Pintos cited in the FARS study were struck in
the rear. Ford concludes from this and other studies that the Pinto was never an unsafe car and has
not been involved in some 70 burn deaths annually, as Mother Jones claims.

Ford admits that early-model Pintos did not meet rear-impact tests at 20 mph but denies that this
implies that they were unsafe compared with other cars of that type and era. In fact, according to
Ford, some of its tests were conducted with experimental rubber “bladders” to protect the gas tank,
in order to determine how best to have its future cars meet a 20-mph rear-collision standard which
Ford itself set as an internal performance goal. The government at that time had no such standard.
Ford also points out that in every model year the Pinto met or surpassed the government’s own
standards, and it simply is unreasonable and unfair to contend that a car is somehow unsafe if it
does not meet standards proposed for future years or embody the technological improvements that
are introduced in later model years.

Mother Jones, on the other hand, presents a different view of the situation. If Ford was so concerned
about rear-impact safety, why did it delay the federal government’s attempts to impose standards?

Dowie gives the following answer:

The particular regulation involved here was Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard 301. Ford
picked portions of Standard 301 for strong opposition way back in 1968 when the Pinto was still in
the blueprint stage. The intent of 301, and the 300 series that followed it, was to protect drivers and
passengers after a crash occurs. Without question the worst post-crash hazard is fire. So Standard
301 originally proposed that all cars should be able to withstand a fixed barrier impact of 20 mph
(that is, running into a wall at that speed) without losing fuel.

When the standard was proposed, Ford engineers pulled their crash-test results out of their files.The
front ends of most cars were no problem – with minor alterations they could stand the impact

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The Ford Pinto

W. Michael Hoffman
Executive Director, Center for Business Ethics, Bentley University

without losing fuel. “We were already working on the front end,” Ford engineer Dick Kimble
admitted. “We knew we could meet the test on the front end.” But with the Pinto particularly, a 20
mph rear-end standard meant redesigning the entire rear end of the car. With the Pinto scheduled for
production in August of 1970, and with $200 million worth of tools in place, adoption of this
standard would have created a minor financial disaster. So Standard 301 was targeted for delay, and
with some assistance from its industry associates, Ford succeeded beyond its wildest expectations:
the standard was not adopted until the 1977 model year.

Ford’s tactics were successful, according to Dowie, not only due to their extremely clever lobbying,
which became the envy of lobbyists all over Washington, but also because of the pro-industry
stance of NHTSA itself. Furthermore, it is not at all clear that the Pinto was as safe as comparable
cars with regard to the positioning of its gas tank. Unlike the gas tank in the Capri, which rode over
the rear axle, a “saddle-type” fuel tank on which Ford owned the patent, the Pinto tank was placed
just behind the rear bumper.

According to Dowie,

Dr. Leslie Ball, the retired safety chief for the NASA manned space program and a founder of the
International Society of Reliability Engineers, recently made a careful study of the Pinto. “The
release to production of the Pinto was the most reprehensible decision in the history of American
engineering,” he said. Ball can name more than 40 European and Japanese models in the Pinto price
and weight range with safer gas-tank positioning.

Los Angeles auto safety expert Byron Bloch has made an in-depth study of the Pinto fuel system.
“It’s a catastrophic blunder,” he says. “Ford made an extremely irresponsible decision when they
placed such a weak tank in such a ridiculous location in such a soft rear end. It’s almost designed to
blow up – premeditated.”

Although other points could be brought out in the debate between Mother Jones and Ford, perhaps
the most intriguing and controversial is the cost-benefit analysis study that Ford did entitled
“Fatalities Associated with Crash-Induced Fuel Leakage and Fires” released by J. C. Echold,
director of automotive safety for Ford. This study apparently convinced Ford and was intended to
convince the federal government that a technological improvement costing $11 per car which would

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The Ford Pinto

W. Michael Hoffman
Executive Director, Center for Business Ethics, Bentley University

have prevented gas tanks from rupturing so easily was not cost effective for society.The costs and
benefits are broken down in the following way:

And where did Ford come up with the $200,000 figure as the cost per death? This came from a
NHTSA study which broke down the estimated social costs of a death as follows:

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The Ford Pinto

W. Michael Hoffman
Executive Director, Center for Business Ethics, Bentley University

(Although this analysis was on all Ford vehicles, a breakout of just the Pinto could be done.)
Mother Jones reports it could not find anybody who could explain how the $10,000 figure for “pain
and suffering” had been arrived at.
Although Ford does not mention this point in its news release defence, one might have replied that
it was the federal government, not Ford, that set the figure for a burn death. Ford simply carried out
a cost-benefit analysis based on that figure.
Mother Jones, however, in addition to insinuating that there was industry-agency (NHTSA)
collusion, argues that the $200,000 figure was arrived at under intense pressure from the auto
industry to use cost-benefit analysis in determining regulations. Mother Jones also questions Ford’s
estimate of burn injuries: “All independent experts estimate that for each person who dies by an
auto fire, many more are left with charred hands, faces and limbs.” Referring to the Northern
California Burn Center, which estimates the ratio of burn injuries to deaths at ten to one instead of
one to one, Dowie states that “the true ratio obviously throws the company’s calculations way off.”

Finally, Mother Jones claims to have obtained “confidential” Ford documents which Ford did not
send to Washington, showing that crash fires could largely be prevented by installing a rubber
bladder inside the gas tank for only $5.08 per car, considerably less than the $11 per car Ford
originally claimed was required to improve crashworthiness.

Instead of making the $11 improvement, installing the $5.08 bladder, or even giving the consumer
the right to choose the additional cost for added safety, Ford continued, according to Mother Jones,
to delay the federal government for eight years in establishing mandatory rear-impact standards.
In the meantime, Dowie argues, thousands of people were burning to death and tens of thousands
more were being badly burned and disfigured for life, while many of these tragedies could have
been prevented for only a slight cost per vehicle. Furthermore, the delay also meant that millions of
new unsafe vehicles went on the road, “vehicles that will be crashing, leaking fuel and incinerating
people well into the 1980s.”

In concluding his article Dowie broadens his attack beyond just Ford and the Pinto.
Unfortunately, the Pinto is not an isolated case of corporate malpractice in the auto industry. Neither
is Ford a lone sinner. There probably isn’t a car on the road without a safety hazard known to its
manufacturer. . . .

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 The Ford Pinto

W. Michael Hoffman
Executive Director, Center for Business Ethics, Bentley University

Furthermore, cost-valuing human life is not used by Ford alone. Ford was just the only company
careless enough to let such an embarrassing calculation slip into public records.The process of
willfully trading lives for profits is built into corporate capitalism. Commodore Vanderbilt publicly
scorned George Westinghouse and his “foolish” air brakes while people died by the hundreds in
accidents onVanderbilt’s railroads.

Ford has paid millions of dollars in Pinto jury trials and out-of-court settlements, especially the
latter. Mother Jones quotes Al Slechter in Ford’s Washington office as saying: “We’ll never go to a
jury again. Not in a fire case. Juries are just too sentimental. They see those charred remains and
forget the evidence. No sir, we’ll settle.”

But apparently Ford thought such settlements would be less costly than the safety improvements.
Dowie wonders if Ford would continue to make the same decisions “were Henry Ford II and Lee
Iacocca serving twenty-year terms in Leavenworth for consumer homicide.”

III
On March 13, 1980, the Elkhart County jury found Ford not guilty of criminal homicide in the
Ulrich case. Ford attorney Neal summarised several points in his closing argument before the jury.
• Ford could have stayed out of the small-car market, which would have been the “easiest way,”
since Ford would have made more profit by sticking to bigger cars.
• Instead, Ford built the Pinto “to take on the imports, to save jobs for Americans and to make a
profit for its stock- holders.”
• The Pinto met every fuel-system standard of any federal, state, or local government, and was
comparable to other 1973 sub-compacts. The engineers who designed the car thought it was a
good, safe car and bought it for themselves and their families.
• Ford did everything possible to recall the Pinto quickly after NHTSA ordered it to do so.
• Finally, and more specifically to the case at hand, Highway 33 was a badly designed highway, and
the girls were fully stopped when a 4,000-pound van rammed into the rear of their Pinto going at
least 50 miles an hour. Given the same circumstances, Neal stated, any car would have suffered
the same consequences as the Ulrich’s Pinto.

As reported in the New York Times and Time, the verdict brought a “loud cheer” from Ford’s board
of directors and undoubtedly at least a sigh of relief from other corporations around the nation.

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The Ford Pinto

W. Michael Hoffman
Executive Director, Center for Business Ethics, Bentley University

Many thought this case was that of a David against a Goliath because of the small amount of money
and volunteer legal help Prosecutor Cosentino had in contrast to the huge resources Ford poured
into the trial. In addition, it should be pointed out that Cosentino’s case suffered from a ruling by
Judge Staffeldt that Ford’s own test results on pre-1973 Pintos were inadmissible. These documents
confirmed that Ford knew as early as 1971 that the gas tank of the Pinto ruptured at impacts of 20
mph and that the company was aware, because of tests with the Capri, that the over-the-axle
position of the gas tank was much safer than mounting it behind the axle. Ford decided to mount it
behind the axle in the Pinto to provide more trunk space and to save money. The restrictions of
Cosentino’s evidence to testimony relating specifically to the 1973 Pinto severely undercut the
strength of the prosecutor’s case.

Whether this evidence would have changed the minds of the jury will never be known. Some,
however, such as business ethicist Richard De George, feel that this evidence shows grounds for
charges of recklessness against Ford. Although it is true that there were no federal safety standards
in 1973 to which Ford legally had to conform and although Neal seems to have proved that all
subcompacts were unsafe when hit at 50 mph by a 4,000-pound van, the fact that the NHTSA
ordered a recall of the Pinto and not other subcompacts is, according to De George, “prima facie
evidence that Ford’s Pinto gas tank mounting was substandard.”

De George argues that these grounds for recklessness are made even stronger by the fact that Ford
did not give the consumer a choice to make the Pinto gas tank safer by installing a rubber bladder
for a rather modest fee. Giving the consumer such a choice, of course, would have made the Pinto
gas tank problem known and therefore probably would have been bad for sales.

Richard A. Epstein, professor of law at the University of Chicago Law School, questions whether
Ford should have been brought up on criminal charges of reckless homicide at all. He also points
out an interesting historical fact. Before 1966 an injured party in Indiana could not even bring civil
charges against an automobile manufacturer solely because of the alleged “uncrashworthiness” of a
car; one would have to seek legal relief from the other party involved in tire accident, not from the
manufacturer. But after Larson v. General Motors Corp. in 1968, a new era of crashworthiness suits
against automobile manufacturers began. “Reasonable” precautions must now be taken by
manufacturers to minimise personal harm in crashes.

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 The Ford Pinto

W. Michael Hoffman
Executive Director, Center for Business Ethics, Bentley University

How to apply criteria of reasonableness in such cases marks the whole nebulous ethical and legal
arena of product liability.
If such a civil suit had been brought against Ford, Epstein believes, the corporation might have
argued, as it did to a large extent in the criminal suit, that the Pinto conformed to all current
applicable safety standards and with common industry practice. (Epstein cites that well over 90
percent of United States standard production cars had their gas tanks in the same position as the
Pinto.) But in a civil trial the adequacy of industry standards are ultimately up to the jury, and had
civil charges been brought against Ford in this case the plaintiffs might have had a better chance of
winning.

Epstein feels that a criminal suit, on the other hand, had no chance from the very outset, because the
prosecutor would have had to establish criminal intent on the part of Ford. To use an analogy, if a
hunter shoots at a deer and wounds an unseen person, he may be held civilly responsible but not
criminally responsible because he did not intend to harm. And even though it may be more difficult
to determine the mental state of a corporation (or its principal agents), it seems clear to Epstein that
the facts of this case do not prove any such criminal intent even though Ford may have known that
some burn deaths and injuries could have been avoided by a different placement of its Pinto gas
tank and that Ford consciously decided not to spend more money to save lives.
Everyone recognises that there are trade-offs between safety and costs. Ford could have built a
“tank” instead of a Pinto, thereby considerably reducing risks, but it would have been relatively
unaffordable for most and probably unattractive to all potential consumers.

To have established Ford’s reckless homicide it would have been necessary to establish the same of
Ford’s agents, since a corporation can only act through its agents. Undoubtedly, continues Epstein,
the reason why the prosecutor did not try to subject Ford’s officers and engineers to fines and
imprisonment for their design choices is “the good faith character of their judgment, which was
necessarily decisive in Ford’s behalf as well.”

For example, Harold C. MacDonald, Ford’s chief engineer on the Pinto, testified that he felt it was
important to keep the gas tank as far from the passenger compartment as possible, as it was in the
Pinto. And other Ford engineers testified that they used the car for their own families. This is
relevant information in a criminal case which must be concerned about the intent of the agents.

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 The Ford Pinto

W. Michael Hoffman
Executive Director, Center for Business Ethics, Bentley University

Furthermore, even if civil charges had been made in this case, it seems unfair and irrelevant to
Epstein to accuse Ford of trading cost for safety. Ford’s use of cost-benefit formulas, which must
assign monetary values to human life and suffering, is precisely what the law demands in assessing
civil liability suits. The court may disagree with the decision, but to blame industry for using such a
method would violate the very rules of civil liability. Federal automobile officials (NHTSA) had to
make the same calculations in order to discharge their statutory duties. In allowing the Pinto design,
are not they too (and in turn their employer, the United States) just as guilty as Ford’s agents?

IV
The case of the Ford Pinto raises many questions of ethical importance. Some people conclude that
Ford was definitely wrong in designing and marketing the Pinto.The specific accident involving the
Ulrich girls, because of the circumstances, was simply not the right one to have attacked Ford on.

Other people believe that Ford was neither criminally nor civilly guilty of anything and acted
completely responsibly in producing the Pinto. Many others, I suspect, find the case morally
perplexing, too complex to make sweeping claims of guilt or innocence.

Was Ford irresponsible in rushing the production of the Pinto?

Even though Ford violated no federal safety standards or laws, should it have made the Pinto safer
in terms of rear-end collisions, especially regarding the placement of the gas tank?
Should Ford have used cost-benefit analysis to make decisions relating to safety, specifically
placing dollar values on human life and suffering?
Knowing that the Pinto’s gas tank could have been made safer by installing a protective bladder for
a relatively small cost per consumer, perhaps Ford should have made that option available to the
public.
If Ford did use heavy lobbying efforts to delay and/or influence federal safety standards, was this
ethically proper for a corporation to do?

One might ask, if Ford was guilty, whether the engineers, the managers, or both are to blame. If
Ford had been found guilty of criminal homicide, was the proposed penalty stiff enough ($10,000
maximum fine for each of the three counts equals $30,000 maximum), or should agents of the
corporations such as MacDonald, Iacocca, and Henry Ford II be fined and possibly jailed?

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The Ford Pinto

W. Michael Hoffman
Executive Director, Center for Business Ethics, Bentley University

A number of questions concerning safety standards are also relevant to the ethical issues at stake in
the Ford trial. Is it just to blame a corporation for not abiding by “acceptable standards” when such
standards are not yet determined by society?
Should corporations like Ford play a role in setting such standards?
Should individual juries be determining such standards state by state, incident by incident?
If Ford should be setting safety standards. how does it decide how safe to make its product and still
make it affordable and desirable to the public without using cost-benefit analysis?
For that matter, how does anyone decide? Perhaps it is putting Ford, or any corporation, in a
catch-22 position to ask it both to set safety standards and to make a competitive profit for its
stockholders.

Regardless of how we answer these and other questions it is clear that the Pinto case raises
fundamental issues concerning the responsibilities of corporations, how corporations should
structure themselves in order to make ethical decisions, and how industry, government, and society
in general ought to interrelate to form a framework within which such decisions can properly be
made in the future.

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