Business Academics: Stop Promoting the Pinto Myth
In late 1977 the Ford Pinto became infamous as a result of a controversial Mother Jones magazine article by Mark Dowie titled Pinto Madness. Dowie denounced the 1970s Ford sub-compact as a firebomb vulnerable to fatal explosions caused by rear end collisions. Dowie also claimed that Ford chose economics over human life – but that is an outright lie. Dowie’s so-called facts were debunked 20 years ago by Rutger’s Law Review.
The Pinto Case is cited widely in the academic literature of business management, organisational behaviour, management ethics and related disciplines. My question is why? The facts of the case are well documented in law journals – yet the Pinto myth maintains traction in business schools around the world. One article wrote that if it was untrue then it is the very case that an ethics course would invent. In that light, it is time for the Myth of the Pinto to be pushed aside by the actual facts of the case.
The Ford Pinto Myth as Espoused by Business School Professors
The case of the Ford Pinto, in the early 1970s, is usually put forward to students as a matter of fact. The young Turk Iacocca, rising on the success of the Ford Mustang, pushed for a sub-compact car to cost no more than $2000 and weigh no more than 2000 pounds. The production schedule of the Pinto was only 25 months, whereas industry standard was 43 months. In crashes over 25 miles per hour the fuel tank always ruptured spilling fuel onto the road, the low fuel tank was situated behind the differential and would get rammed into it on collision causing a spark and then ignition. At the same time, a rear end collision would cause the doors to jam shut and the result was a deadly fireball which incinerated its occupants.
The story gets more sinister when it turns out that the Capri’s tank was higher and therefore did not suffer the same problem. The Pinto’s fuel tank problem went unfixed for several reasons: Iacocca wanted the Pinto in showrooms by 1971; Iacocca would not suffer negative reports so nobody told him this flaw had been identified during testing (safety was not a Ford priority); and, a cost-benefit analysis of loss of lives compensation versus the cost of fixing the Ford Pinto’s fuel tank meant it was cheaper for Ford to ignore the problem and pay off the victims.
The cure would have been a simple $11 per vehicle fire prevention device… and an alternative bladder could have achieved the safety requirement for a mere $5.08 per vehicle. At around this time the academic has their student morally enraged.
The story is BULLSHIT and it is time that academics from the business schools stop spreading it around as the truth.
The Pinto Myth Debunked in Rutger’s Law Review, 1991
Enter another professional body who have well and truly debunked this myth a good 20 years ago – Myth of the Ford Pinto Case is from Rutger’s Law Review, 1991 volume 43:1013. You can download the Myth of the Ford Pinto Case from PointofLaw (link on the right side of their page). You can also read Grimshaw v Ford Motor Company (1981) online.
Over a wide range of reading about the Pinto case several things came to light. Lee Iacocca was not the great villain of all time, he went to revive the Chrysler Corporation in the 1980s and became a legendary working man’s hero. There was never any evidence Iacocca knew of anything regarding those fuel tank allegations. The Pinto’s fuel tank was not an unusual configuration for a sub-compact at that time in the US market, it was no safer or more dangerous than other cars of it’s type. Sub-compacts are an inherently more dangerous vehicle than a larger car, it remains a fact of life today. We compromise safety and luxury for economy and convenience. One key reason for the controversial low fuel tank placement was that the Pinto was a hatchback, the fuel tank needed to be lower by necessity (common practice in its market of the early 1970s). At the same time, European cars had the higher tank which caused splashing of fuel onto back seat passengers in accidents – so the espoused cure was another compromise of safety.
Dowie’s facts in the Mother Jones article were blatantly wrong and clearly sensationalised to meet Dowie’s agenda. The offending cost-benefit analysis Dowie mentioned was never undertaken in the context of evaluating the Ford Pinto’s fuel tank in isolation. All Ford product lines were represented in the analysis and the cost of a human life was determined not by Ford but by a relevant government administrative body much earlier. This so-called damning cost-benefit analysis had been created for the insurance body, on request. It was not performed for the assessment of Pinto deaths by fire in rear-end collisions, as espoused by Dowie.
There was never any evidence to support the claim that the Pinto production schedule was 25 or 38 weeks… it may have been grossly mistaken by Dowie.
The US government openly asks designers to compromise between economics and safety. After all, the safest car in the world would never be built so trade-offs are essential to achieve product viability and industry competitiveness.
Why Do Business Academics get this so Wrong?
I won’t get into the nuts and bolts of this case beyond asking you, the reader, to pass this information around to every academic you encounter who insists on passing the Pinto Myth along the academic food chain. The practice is sheer laziness with the facts and should be contested wherever the Pinto Myth raises its ugly misinformed head.
My question to academia is why? If Rutger’s Law Review debunked this myth in 1991, why is there a business school obsession with professors quoting the Pinto case as fact in academic literature over multiple disciplines? In each and every case I encountered, a fast backtrack through the referenced articles traced genealogically back to the Dowie article in Mother Jones. Even today, in a Strategic Management lecture, several students passionately raved about the Pinto Case as fact because another MBA professor had used it as a case study.
The Pinto Myth is BULLSHIT and does not belong in serious academic literature. Further, it does not even belong in our living room. Academic articles should never trace back to a popular published magazine article, because the source is generally unsafe… otherwise dig much deeper independently.
Curiously, there is also a complete divergence between management and business literature and the law literature. How can this be so? Business academics need to take this as a call to caution in their research, they must read more widely. The Pinto Case, as espoused, is wrong and easily unfolded. I can see no excuse.
March 13th, 2010 at 9:10 pm
Noted on page 1027 of The Myth of the Pinto in Rutger’s Law Review, Harley Copp, a former Ford executive who had been in charge of Ford’s crash test program, “conceded that… he himself had not actually concluded that the above axle gas tank location was the safer choice until sometime in 1977″. Moreover the placement behind the axle had advantages…
March 13th, 2010 at 9:20 pm
Also relevant, it was argued by a professor that there was no precedent at the time that a corporation could be held responsible for criminal charges in the 1970s… so I put forward this tidbit of US legal history.
If you look in the HeinOnLine legal database through the university library website (or if you can get hold of the journal article privately somewhere) there is a Law Journal called International Legal Practitioner… if you select the 1987 edition scroll in the sidepane until you see the article on page 66 (September 1987) titled Criminal Prosecution of Corporations for Defective Products.
Precedent of a prosecution of a corporation for homicide “the killing of a human being caused by another human being” runs back to United States v Van Schaick (1904)… also in 1909 in New York People v Rochester Railway and Light Company, as well as New York Central Railroad v United States. Again People v Ebasco Services Inc in New York, 1974. On this basis Ford was prosecuted in 1978 for 3 counts of homicide.
This article goes on to state that at the time Ford Motor Company was indicted in Indiana in 1978 for reckless homicide there was “substantial precedent” for holding the corporation liable under the criminal laws.
On page 67 it follows: Of substantial interest is why corporate executives were not prosecuted in the Pinto case. Brent Fisse has stated: “The reason given by the prosecutor (for not indicting executives) being that he simply did not have the resources to chase after any individual offenders” (footnote 27).
Frances Cullen suggests other reasons for only going after the corporation: “Because of the novelty of the case, the power of Ford, and the difficulty of piercing the corporate veil, Cossentino [the prosecutor] did not seriously consider prosecuting individual Ford executives”.
So if anybody tries to tell you different… I guess you now have the information to start fighting back. This research was simply undertaken to enlighten my course lecturer at the time.
March 13th, 2010 at 9:40 pm
Known deaths in the Pinto case were 27, not the thousands as claimed… that’s another thing I forgot to add into the article (read the bottom paragraphs of the page linked to in this comment).
“In retrospect, Schwartz [in The Myth of the Pinto Case] writes, the Pinto’s safety record appears to have been very typical of its time and class.”
March 15th, 2010 at 12:10 am
Thanks for putting this right (or, rather, reminding us of it having been put right) – company bashing is just en vogue and the crrent crisis hasn’t helped. Big corporaions may not be to everyone’s taste but without them people would still be on horseback instead of comfortably warm in a car in winter.
March 17th, 2010 at 6:04 pm
Craig Newmark adds some more detail in his article The Pinto Myth.
And over on car forums there is a long article called The myth of the exploding Pinto, and others… that discusses the way tests were constructed to ensure the outcome was fire.
These are hardly articles that academics could not pursue if they rigorously approached this topic.