Mike tells Sarah about a dying industry, a dangerous car and the Pulitzer Prize-winning article that misrepresented them both. Digressions include “Mission Impossible,” “Friday the 13th” and the naming conventions of academic articles. This episode contains a larger-than-usual number of dad jokes and a shocking revelation about Johnny Carson.
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Sarah's other show, Why Are Dads
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Mike tells Sarah about a dying industry, a dangerous car and the Pulitzer Prize-winning article that misrepresented them both. Digressions include “Mission Impossible,” “Friday the 13th” and the naming conventions of academic articles. This episode contains a larger-than-usual number of dad jokes and a shocking revelation about Johnny Carson.
Support us:
Subscribe on Patreon
Donate on Paypal
Buy cute merch
Where else to find us:
Sarah's other show, Why Are Dads
Mike's other show, Maintenance Phase
The Exploding Ford Pinto
Sarah: People want to not die, but they also want to play golf. And it's just hard to balance those priorities.
Hello. Welcome You're Wrong About where every joke is revealed as a tragedy.
Mike: Ooh, that's quite good. And on-theme, I didn't even know you knew about this one.
Sarah: I know what I've learned from VH1s I Love the Seventies. I don't know if you can call that knowledge. I'm Sarah Marshall and I'm working on a book about the satanic panic.
Mike: And I'm Michael Hobbes. I'm a reporter for the Huffington post.
Sarah: And you can support us at patreon.com/yourewrongbout, and if things are feeling tight right now, and you're already supporting us there, you can unsupport us. Because this is an interesting time. Mike, when you were a kid in the nineties, were you ever, like, I wish I could live in an interesting time? And now do you want to go back and talk to that kid and be like, listen, first of all, the Boy Meets World Cast is going to age interestingly. Second of all, no, you don't. And we're going to talk about another interesting time today, which is the 1970s and it's beautiful exploding automobiles.
Mike: Yeah. What do you remember about the exploding Ford Pinto?
Sarah: I just remember that they exploded and that this was apparently a topic of great mirth for people. I don't know if people found it funny at the time, but I remember it being discussed as a funny thing in the media I encountered about it in the 2000s. Yeah.
Mike: Yes. I think I was introduced to this by a joke too. There's a joke in Wayne's World or Wayne's World 2, where a car is following them and they slow down and then the car runs into them, like barely a tap, and then the Pinto explodes.
Sarah: It's a good thing because problems in American car manufacturers are such a sore spot for Americans. And I think, especially during that period, and I wonder if you like exploding Pinto seemed funny at the time, because it was like a gallows humor, extreme version of maybe other problems that were happening.
Mike: And it also, we will get into this more, but it also goes back to the way that we don't really take car accidents seriously, as tragedies too. They like tend to think of them as, it's the fault of the people who are in the accident or something, like we don't think of 40,000 auto accident deaths every year as a public health crisis the way that we do with say gun deaths.
Sarah: And even with gun deaths were, you know, not doing great at the serious taking games.
Mike: Yeah. But it's also, I mean, this was also the largest auto recall ever, at the time. It was actually like one of the biggest news stories of the late 1970s was the way that this car had been designed to be really, really easy to explode. But I've actually been looking forward to this episode because it's kind of a throwback to 2018 YWA when we first started out.
Sarah: When we were young and dewy, and every episode wasn't about a woman's life being slowly destroyed.
Mike: Back when our episodes were like short and they were like simple, this episode also has a debunking and then a debunking of the debunking, which is very throwback for us.
Sarah: Oh yeah. You love doing that.
Mike: Yes. Yeah, I feel like, do you remember in the nineties when Gwyneth Paltrow was doing some, probably atrocious screwball comedy, and they asked her why she was doing this like, lightweight role, and she said, no accents, no corsets, no crying. This is kind of our version of that, that like, I only read one book for this episode. My notes are like only 51 pages long. This is not going to be like a two hour long episode. It's like a little cute myth, debunk, debunk outta here kind of episode.
Sarah: A cute little duckling of an episode. So this is you Gwyneth Paltrow, taking a break from making authentic oven roasted, vegan pizza to just like, have your one cigarette of the week and just let loose.
Mike: And like, this is going to be easy and fun and quarantine company. This is what we're going for. And we'll get back to the human horror in the next couple of weeks.
Sarah: Yeah, don’t worry, because I work on this show, so it's inevitable.
Mike: So we begin with the context of the auto industry in the late 1960s.
Sarah: I love how you're like, this is going to be a fun episode. And then you jump right into like the auto industry, mid-century America, the start of its floom-like decline.
Mike: Well, I mean, I also think we're, we're starting with carnage, but not the kind of carnage that we're used to on this show. I mean, basically the context for the Ford Pinto is that driving was extremely dangerous in the late 1970s. One thing that we've discovered on the show is, you know, we've talked about how society had to discover the concept of child abuse and society had to discover the concept of domestic abuse. Like, hey, these things happen and they’re bad.
Sarah: And like cyclically again and again.
Mike: Yeah. It's exactly the same thing with car safety. So the idea that cars can kill you and the idea that auto crashes are controllable by people and the responsibility of large corporations is not a natural idea. There was about four decades there where basically the car companies successfully argued that they weren't responsible for car crashes. The thing is, we are supposed to keep the car driving. Like if the hubcap falls off, when you're driving, that's our problem. But if you crashed the car into a tree, that's you. So there's no reason for us to have seatbelts. There's no reason for us to design cars to save you.
Sarah: So it's very mid-century American personal responsibility. Like you're on your own now, Jack, you bought it.
Mike: Totally. And so the concept that car crashes should be reduced and can be reduced, was a completely new concept and essentially didn't exist before Ralph Nader wrote Unsafe At Any Speed.
Sarah: And when was that?
Mike: 1965. So just before the Pinto starts getting designed in 1967, we have Silent Spring, and we have Unsafe At Any Speed. Both of which are books that are basically saying like, corporations are bad. And a lot of people don't know that at the time, the idea of sort of environmental risks and structural risks was something that people had to sort of have their hands held and taught very slowly.
Sarah: Can you talk about the kind of post-war to nuclear age view of corporate innovation in America?
Mike: I mean, I think it's, it's so long ago that we can't fathom this now, but there was a time when corporations were seen as essentially benign. I mean, one of the things that's really interesting about Unsafe at any Speed and about this sort of growing realization, that auto safety is a thing is the extent to which, people didn't know that car makers had control over this stuff. Car crashes were seen as these sort of acts of God, personal responsibility, there's nothing anybody can do. But what starts coming out in 1960s is more and more stories of like, wait a minute, these companies are acting really irresponsibly. And they're selling products that are making you more likely to die.
And so the big thing in the auto industry at the time was of course, planned obsolescence. That it's not that they make a car and then like they iterate on it every year. It gets a little bit safer, a little bit safer, a little bit better. They're basically every three years, they're just completely starting over. They're like, let's add fins or like let's add a wooden steering wheel and safety is not playing into this. They're just adding all these weird bells and whistles. And so one thing that the car makers start doing is there's these dashboards that look cool. They have like a shelf design with the speedometer way in it and they're really cool looking, but the shelf design ends up decapitating people when they get in car accidents.
Sarah: Oh no! Oh, is it like at neck level on the vehicle?
Mike: Yeah. Another thing was the steering column used to just like impale people because the car makers were like, well, don't crash into stuff if you don't want a big metal rod through your chest.
Sarah: This is also like, I think, I think I also learned this on VH1 that in the seventies lawn darts were a popular toy until there were too many injuries. And it's like, well, who’s idea was it to like kids throw darts at each other?
Mike: Exactly.
Sarah: Yeah. Like, do you really think that people are just going to not crash into stuff like ever? Is that your plan?
Mike: Well, this is what's really interesting. Because people tried suing the car companies over this, and there's old federal court decisions where the judges basically side with the car companies. So this is a quote from one of the judges in 1966, “The intended purpose of an automobile does not include its participation in collisions with other objects. The defendant also knows that its automobiles may be driven into bodies of water, but it is not suggested that the defendant has a duty to equip them with pontoons.”
Sarah: Which is like, I, this is like a classic to me, legal argument food grouplike, I'm going to compare this quite reasonable request to this other thing that's allegedly a corollary, but really is like ludicrous and exaggerated and any reasonable person would be like, well, of course not. And like that, that sort of false equivalence, it's just, I think you see that a lot in bad faith arguments.
Sarah: And in the court system too, that judges often fall for these things that are very principled. But in reality, cars are not driving into the water a lot, but they are crashing into each other a lot. At the time, 50,000 people a year were dying in car accidents and the population of the US was 30% smaller than it is now. So you were about twice as likely back then to die in a car crash as you are now.
This is a quote from an article that's the history of auto safety that I’ll link to in the show notes, “A culture of low expectations concerning auto safety was cultivated by the industry. Thus, people generally did not expect to survive serious accidents, and except for home safety researchers, they were not cognizant of the degree to which crashworthiness could be designed into cars.” So it was basically just like, well, if I get in a car crash, I'm going to die. There's nothing like Ford and GM and Chrysler can actually do about it.
Sarah: Yeah. It's amazing. Because even now I think of car companies as shirking responsibility at every turn, but there are a certain number of cultural norms that they've had to accept. Like I assume in my, and I have assumed for my whole life as a car driving individual, that the vehicle that I'm getting into and trying to move around a city is going to have been designed based on the assumption that it might crash into something at some point, and that that's part of its life.
Mike: Also that it has pontoons. I think that's very important. So now we get to the design of the Ford Pinto. Let me send you a photo of this car. Oh, hang on.
Sarah: I think Pinto is a daring car name because it does not make me think first of a horse. It makes me think of a bean. We can have a very spirited argument about which decade loves beans more.
Mike: All right. Do you see?
Sarah: Ooh, yeah, it's cute.
Mike: Right?
Sarah: Yeah. I would drive that. It is, I want to say a hatchback.
Mike: Yeah.
Sarah: It's tomato red, like an Italian typewriter. And it looks like you could have a car chase in it. Like it looks like it will be fun to drive. It looks like it handles well, it looks like I'm imagining driving it down a freeway with all these like boxy, like Buicks and Oldsmobiles. And I'm like zipping around between them because I'm on my way to a babysitting emergency or something, but I'm like, I'm a Charlie's Angel pretending to be a babysitter. Like that's the energy of this car.
Mike: Yeah. I just sent you another one where it's a Pinto in a field with a horse next to it, which is very literal.
Sarah: Yeah. This is their ad where they're like, no, no, don't think of the bean.
Mike: The context of this car is that you can't really see this from the photo, but it's very small. It's considered a ‘subcompact ‘.
Sarah: Really? So it feels like a European style.
Mike: Yeah. And so basically what's happening in the auto industry at the time is, before the rise of the Japanese car companies, the American auto industry was basically a three-part monopoly. It had consolidated to the point where there's three companies, according to David Halberstam's The Reckoning, which I highly recommend. They're basically, there was kind of nominally competition between the car companies, but not really, they all knew each other. They were all in Detroit, you know, one year Ford sells more cars, one year GM sells more cars, but like they have these product categories. Everyone sort of has their marketing stuff in place. It's not really a competitive industry and it's only in the late 1960s when Honda and Toyota and Nissan show up with better cars. They're very cheap. They drive well, they're more reliable. And all of a sudden there's real competition and the big three automakers get scared.
Sarah: Because in Japan it's a cultural norm to not let drivers be killed by steering columns all the time. And people are into it for some reason.
Mike: And so late 1960s Lee Iacocca, who's the head of Ford at the time, basically goes to his engineers and says, we need a car that competes with the VW Beetle and the Toyota Corolla and all these little, small cheap cars that all like the hip young kids are driving these days. And so he basically gives them the order that no matter what the car has to be at the most 2000 pounds, it has to be light. And it has to cost less than $2,000.
Sarah: And what's $2,000 in today money?
Mike: That's like 8,000 bucks, which is actually a good deal for a brand new car.
Sarah: That's a car of the people.
Mike: Yes. And so basically his marching orders are, you need to get this car to market as fast as possible. So at the time the average car took about 43 months to like design and build and whatever and get everything ready, for the Pinto they did it in 25 months. They just like rammed this thing through production. Just get it onto the market. Get it under this price.
Sarah: Yeah, they did that with the DeLorean, too.
Mike: I mean, those have all been sent back to the 1950s now, so we have no way to find them. And so one of the decisions that they make in this rush to get the car out the door, is most cars at the time had the gas tank above the rear axle. So basically if you're sitting in the backseat of a car, you're essentially sitting over the gas tank, that's where it is in most cars. And the nice thing about that is it's kind of in the center of the car. So if somebody rams into you, if you get into an accident, it's pretty rare that you're going to puncture the gas tank. That any gas is going to leak out, or that there's any chance of a fire happening. But what they do is with the Pinto, it turns out that it's such a small car that putting the gas tank over the axle is going to dig into the trunk space and it's going to make the trunk smaller. And so, because, I guess this was a thing that cars competed on back then, like you needed to have trunk space.
Sarah: Oh, yeah. I feel like you see, because I read a lot of Playboy magazines from the sixties and seventies, I feel like I've seen a lot of ads specifically about, ‘let me tell you what this trunk can fit. It doesn't look like it, but it can.’
Mike: I ride a bike and I use a backpack, so to me, this is complete French, but apparently that was a big deal. There's a quote from an engineer saying that the pressure was to get the trunk big enough that it could hold two sets of golf clubs.
Sarah: Wow. So this is like, they're marketing this car to like the Playboy reader weekend corporate golfer type.
Mike: Yes. Although people have pointed out that it's a little weird to have a low end cheap car that can fit golf clubs in it. Like it's a little weird, but it's also just like what these auto executives like, that's their way of describing the size of something, is how many golf clubs it is, right?
Sarah: That's like their only understanding of humans.
Mike: Yes, exactly. So basically to do this, instead of putting the gas tank above the axel inside the car, they put it behind the axle kind of low to the ground. So if you look at that photo that I sent you, I think you can actually see the gas tank.
Sarah: Oh, okay. Is it that little like metal tongue? Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Oh no.
Mike: So basically what happens with this is that they put the gas tank hanging out behind the car. So you're basically talking about like between five and nine inches from the back of the car, is just the fuel tank hanging there.
Sarah: It's like that thing in mission impossible where like a helicopter blade almost slices Tom Cruise's neck open because they’re in the channel or whatever. Like it's just like that kind of margin of error shouldn't exist in commuting.
Mike: So the car has this massive vulnerability, but nobody thinks about it. Right? Cause when you're looking at a car and kicking the tires, you're not like, where's the fuel tank located? Like you just assume that it's a normal card that is not going to explode on any impact.
Sarah: Yeah, for our own sanity, we tend to assume that the products we are given to use are safe because if we were second guessing everything, we would live in a constant state of paranoia because we don't know the people who conceive of or assemble the kids we rely on.
Mike: And so, basically, as soon as this car hits the market, it's a huge hit. At some point in the mid-seventies, it's the number one selling subcompact in the country. This is also, the car also comes out two years before the oil embargo, when gas prices go through the roof. And so this is another thing that makes it really popular because it gets great gas mileage because it's so light. And so this car is a massive hit. And then in the mid-seventies, we start to get a few whispers of weird accidents. So in 1972, a woman named Lily Gray is driving in a Ford Pinto with her neighbor, a 13 year old boy named Richard Grimshaw.
Sarah: I like how it makes it sound like Richard just owns his own home, just let me keep that mental image.
Mike: So for whatever reason, they're driving on the highway. The Pinto stalls, so just kind of stops working on the highway, somebody behind them crashes into them and the car explodes. And so Lilly is killed, Richard Grimshaw, this 13 year old boy is horribly disfigured. He goes to the hospital. And so one of the terrible things about this is that if the car gets rear ended, sometimes the rest of the car would warp in such a way that you can't open the door.
Sarah: Oh God. Oh no.
Mike: So you get trapped inside and the fuel tank is burning. And so this is something that starts happening. It's awful. There's another one where three teenage girls are driving and they leave the gas tank, like, you know, you, the lid that goes on the gas tank, when you fill it up, you sort of put it on top of the car when you fill up the tank. Apparently, they realized as they were driving with the gas station that they forgot that. They were like, oh, pull over. We have to get it off the top of the car. And there was a guy in a van behind them who was looking, who dropped a cigarette and was looking for a cigarette around his feet. And again, rammed into them, the car exploded, and three of the four people involved in the crash were killed.
Sarah: And now the gas cap comes attached so that people like me who would do that kind of thing, can't do it anymore.
Mike: And so, as there's more of these cases, people start suing Ford over this car and there are some settlements, but these are, you know, they're in state courts, you know, Ford pays out a couple hundred thousand there's a large punitive damage at one point that gets reduced to smaller punitive damages as it always does, but this is something, you know, it's like one in Michigan and then one in Nebraska, like people aren't really collecting these things.
Sarah: And is there any kind of public awareness to the tune of, hey, these cars explode like more than other cars?
Mike: So that finally happens after five years of this car being on the market. Finally in 1977, Mother Jones publishes an article called Pinto Madness that collects all of these stories and collects all of the settlements that have been getting paid out, all of the accidents that are happening. And so what this shows is that engineers at Ford knew during the design of the Pinto that it exploded in crash tests, and they didn't do anything about it. .
So this is a quote from the Mother Jones article, “Internal company documents in our possession show that Ford has crash tested the Pinto at a top secret site more than 40 times, and that every test made it over 25 miles per hour has resulted in a ruptured fuel tank. 11 of these tests averaging a 31 mile per hour impact speed came before Pinto started rolling out of the factories. Only three cars pass the test with unbroken fuel tanks.”
So Mother Jones gets a leak of these internal documents at Ford, and these are some of the most paradigm setting documents ever gathered by a journalist, where basically it shows that Ford knew that this car was going to be a firetrap. But they decided that it was cheaper to put it on the market, let people die and pay out settlements than to fix it. So basically what this document shows is that it costs $11 to put a thicker, safer, better gas tank onto the car. And there's 12.5 million pintos. And the average out of court settlement for one of these wrongful death suits is $200,000. And so they do projections that if this car goes onto the market, there's probably going to be 180 deaths. And if you do the math 180 deaths at $200,000-
Sarah: Per death.
Mike: Per death, that gives you $50 million and fixing this gas tank for 11 bucks each gives you 137 million. So it's cheaper to let a bunch of people die than it is to fix this car.
Sarah: I know we said that we were going to do escapist counter-programming, actually, this is an episode about how in the interest of capitalism it is cheaper and therefore preferable for a group of people to just die.
Mike: This is a quote from the article, “Ford's cost benefit table is buried in a seven page company memorandum entitled ‘fatalities associated with crash induced, fuel leakage, and fires.’ The memo argues that there is no financial benefit in complying with proposed safety standards that would admittedly result in fewer auto fires, fewer burned deaths and fewer burn injuries.” This is actually the beginning of the country starting to trust corporations less. I mean, I think this was really shocking when it came out that companies are literally balancing lives against safety and just like, not even lives lives, just like, what will it cost us to kill people?
Sarah: What if they sold it as like a premium model and they're like, hey, we can have the version that kills you or the version that doesn't kill you, but you have to pay like $50 bucks.
Mike: Well, one thing that's actually really interesting about this is, subcompact cars had much worse safety standards than larger cars. And they often sold things like seat belts as options. So a lot of safety options were actually ad-ons and were actually something you had to pay for. And the fact is, everyone thinks they're not going to get into a car accident. So a lot of people didn't buy these options. My parents have an old 1992 Honda Civic and the passenger side mirror was an option back then. So it doesn't have a passenger side ‘side’ mirror, you just use the rear view mirror. So like, this is not something that we've done away with now.
Sarah: Yeah. And just like safety as a premium feature. Yeah.
Mike: Yeah. And so the article won a Pulitzer.
Sarah: Oh, great. Who's the, who's the author who wrote it?
Mike: Mark Dowie, and the article came with a coupon that people could send to the national highway traffic safety administration, basically saying, what the hell are you doing? How did you let a car like this get onto the road and stay on the road for this long? And so immediately after the article comes out, people start sending it. It's like a postcard, people start sending it in.
Sarah: And I'm sure a lot of the people writing in have driven or been passengers in a Pinto at some time in their lives if it's this popular of a model or have been on the road with them. I mean, everyone, I feel like that's how you create change is if you can get a significant number of people feeling personally invested.
Mike: Yeah. And also this document wasn't even correct that it estimated there'd be 180 deaths. And according to the Mother Jones article, there's been somewhere between 500 and 900 deaths due to this. And then after the article comes out, there's a 60 Minutes episode that says up to 2000 deaths and 10,000 injuries. And so this article is one that was popular in the country. It becomes this massive national story. It's actually, this is nuts, I looked up on, you know, at the engram thing on Google, where you can look at like the use of a word over time. If you look up the word ‘death trap’, the word ‘death trap’ explodes after 1977.
Sarah: Really? Because everyone's writing about Pintos?
Mike: Basically. The term death trap, that's basically like what this car is called and then that popularizes the term for other things
Sarah: Right. I didn't really think of it as a literal term ever before actually yeah.
Mike: The other effect of this that happens almost immediately is that it becomes the butt of jokes. So I'm going to read you the jokes that I found.
Sarah: I bet there's going to be some Karnak in here.
Mike: Oh my God. How did you know that?
Sarah: I just knew, I just felt it. I felt Karnak much like Karnak does. I felt Karnak in my future.
Mike: Can you describe for listeners what Karnak is? What the joke is?
Sarah: Okay. So Karnak is a character that Johnny Carson did on the Tonight Show where he would in a way that is problematic in ways that I am too ignorant to even fully parse but can certainly see. He would put on a turban and he's a fortune teller character. And then Ed McMahon gives him an envelope and he holds it up to his turban and he will say the punchline that he's sensing that the contents of the envelope are as set up for, and then he reads the envelope.
Mike: Do you want me to read you some examples?
Sarah: Yes. I would love that more than anything in the world.
Mike: So the examples I found this morning were, so he holds the envelope up to his head and he says Gatorade, and then he opens the envelope and the little card inside says, ‘what does an alligator get on welfare?’
Mike: It takes a second. They always take a second.
Sarah: I love that. That's so silly. Right. But it's just, I love that.
Mike: There’s also one, maybe you want to guess this one, he holds the envelope up and he says ‘shareholder’.
Sarah: Is it Sonny Bono?
Mike: Oh my God. How do you know this?
Sarah: Apparently, I think Johnny Carson jokes.
Mike: You could tell from my pronunciation that it’s C H E R.
Sarah: Or maybe I'm just thinking it's the seventies. Like there have to be, I'm just like ready for Cher jokes.
Mike: Yeah. What did Sonny Bono used to be? Shareholder? Yes. So Johnny Carson is one of the worst people ever to live on this planet and we need to do an episode on him.
Sarah: Oh, is he? Tell me.
Mike: He is terrible. I'm not going to ruin it, but this is a book club that we need to do very soon.
Sarah: I'm excited.
Mike: So do you want to hear his Ford Pinto joke?
Sarah: Yes, I do.
Mike: Okay. It's also, I like it because it's also misogynistic, which you would not expect from this.
Sarah: I would expect that to fit in somehow, though. Ambiently.
Mike: So he holds the envelope to the turbine. He says ‘Macintosh, Dolly Parton, and the Ford Pinto.’ And then he opens the envelope, and it says name an apple, a pear, and a lemon. It’s not his best. I didn't, when I first read them, I didn’t get that the Dolly Parton thing, he’s spelling it PAIR, like name a pear. Yeah, it's not great.
Sarah: So Dolly Parton is just symbolized by her breasts. She is her breasts. That's the joke.
Mike: So though, these were the tenor of the jokes. There's also, this is a much better joke, because this is during the Iran hostage crisis. There's a political cartoon where it's an American fighter plane flying over Iran and two Iranians are looking at the plane and one of them says, oh my God, I hope they're not dropping bombs on us. And the other one says it's worse. It's Ford Pintos, which is like, all right, pretty good.
Sarah: I appreciate any vitriol directed at an unsafe product.
Mike: Another quip, it's not clear who this is attributed to. I saw someone attributed to Oscar Wilde, which is not correct. Someone referred to the Ford Pinto as a barbecue that seats four. It's pretty good. And then there's also a story apocryphal, I'm pretty sure that the advertising agency for Ford had to recall and destroy all these magazine ads because they described the Ford Pinto as ‘the Pinto leaves you with that warm feeling.’
Sarah: That sounds like an urban legend, but I'm also totally willing to believe it's true.
Mike: Exactly. It sounds like an urban legend because that's not that good of a slogan for a car anyway.
Sarah: Right, right. And it's also kind of weirdly sexual, but then you look at car ad copy of the time and you're like, oh, that's also weirdly sexual and confusing.
Mike: There were also a lot of bad taglines back then, so it's not completely out of the ordinary. But so this car basically becomes the laughingstock of the country. What's interesting is the national highway traffic safety administration, because they're getting all of these postcards, they opened an investigation of the car the day after the article comes out.
Sarah: What is their job generally like? What's their wheelhouse?
Mike: This is, I mean, they're the federal agency that makes sure that things are safe on the roads. Like they have road design standards. They check out cars that are exploding and tell them not to explode. They investigate cases where people say, you know, my car blew up on me and it shouldn't like, this is the agency that like, should be doing this stuff. There's also a huge number of lawsuits that come out after the article. There's a prosecutor in Indiana that actually tries to charge Ford with criminal homicide.
Sarah: I am always very excited when I hear about any attempt to prosecute companies or corporations on some kind of homicide charge. Like I think that's a very exciting frontier that we, in my opinion, have underexposed in this country.
Mike: Totally. It's also wildly popular. I don't know why more people don't do this.
Sarah: Yeah. I know prosecutors should get their numbers up by going off to corporations. Everyone would love them. They could be like, I'm like Mark Ruffalo in that movie Sarah couldn't get her mom to see.
Mike: And so about six months after the Mother Jones article comes out, the traffic safety administration finishes its investigation and says, yes, the gas tank is faulty. This should not have been on the market. And basically before they get the chance, Ford does a voluntary recall of every single Ford Pinto from 1971 to 1976 and says, anyone who owns one, you can take it into a mechanic shop and they'll update the car with, there's like a plastic shield that they put on.
Sarah: And then does that work? Does this story have a happy ending?
Mike: The story, Sarah, has a debunking. So this is where we get into-
Sarah: This is where the ride gets bumpy.
Mike: Yes. Okay. So what happens is this narrative is very well entrenched. The only people that start questioning the narrative, in the early 1990s, an engineer and researcher named Gary Schwartz writes an article called The Myth of the Ford Pinto that is published in the Rutgers Law Review.
Sarah: I'm sure it's as much of a blockbuster as the original article was. You know, people other than you like to turn to law, review articles for their salacious reading.
Mike: And then, this one drives me nuts. Eight years later, two researchers named Matthew Lee and David Urman, they reinterview everybody who worked at Ford. They reinterview people who worked at the traffic safety administration. They basically go back and do all of the Mother Jones work again, and they publish another sort of “You're Wrong About-y argument called, ‘Pinto Madness as a Flawed Landmark Narrative, an Organizational and Network Analysis’. Which is like, guys, you couldn't give it a somewhat better name?
Sarah: It's academic titling, Mike. We know that it has to be simple phrase, colon, complicated, boring phrase. That’s the law.
Mike It's like it's among the best academic articles I've ever read. And it's like, you can't get anybody to read stuff like this, ‘a flawed landmark narrative’? Guys.
Sarah: I mean, I, for one I'm intrigued, but I understand that I'm, you know, not representative in some ways.
Mike: So the place to start is, almost all of the details in the Mother Jones article are wrong.
Sarah: Oh my God.
Mike: So we're going to start with the secret document. The secret document from Ford, basically balancing costs versus human lives. The Ford Pinto was designed in 1967. This secret document was not written until 1973. So this cost versus human lives could not have informed the design of the Ford Pinto because it didn't come out until six years after they made the decision of where to put the gas tank.
Sarah: When is the car on the market?
Mike: It's released in 1971.
Sarah: 71.
Mike: Yeah. Okay. So yeah, this secret document, which was written six years after the Pinto is designed, does not mention the Ford Pinto. It is not about the Ford Pinto, and it is not about rear end accidents.
Sarah: Oh my God.
Mike: The actual document was a document that Ford was asked to prepare by the traffic safety administration about rollover accidents for the entire auto industry. So this is something that the government does all the time. Like we're thinking of passing a law about pesticides, and then they go to the pesticide manufacturers and they're like, how much is this going to cost you? How much do you think this is going to affect your profits? Blah, blah, blah.
And so these documents are always secret, simply because they don't want their competitors to read them. So it's like, Ford does this analysis, but like, they don't want Chevrolet to read it because like they there's numbers in there that they don't want to get out. So that's the reason why it's secret. It's not secret because it's like an internal Ford document. And so this actual analysis is every car on the market.
Sarah: Like all Ford cars or all cars?
Mike: All cars. Basically, the national highway traffic safety administration at the time is thinking of passing a new law about rollover standards, like, should there be a roll bar in the car? Should there be stronger aluminum or whatever it is. And so basically as a part of this process, the safety administration has to ask Ford, like, what do you think this is going to do to the car market? If we do this, like how much is this going to affect people? And so there's no evidence that anyone within Ford, outside of this very small department that does this, ever saw the document. So the engineers never saw it.
The higher ups, like the Lee Iacocca level, people, also never saw it. It's like some weird random accountants working in Ford who were like, here's our projections of what's going to happen. It wasn't like a blockbuster document or anything. And the $200,000 figure, like ‘a life is worth’ $200,000, that was not the cost of settlement. That was the traffic safety's suggestion for how much to value human life. So that was not Ford being gross, that was the traffic safety administration saying, this is the number we're going to give you. This is like lifetime earnings of people, like the average American at the time earned that much over the course of their life. So you need to use this math and then we'll make a decision based on this.
Sarah: Wow.
Mike: So they're asking Ford, hey, do you guys mind making this calculation and then maybe we'll decide it's worth it and maybe we'll decide it's not, but like we just kind of want to know what is the cost of this regulation going to be?
Sarah: Is this another parable about fact checking?
Mike: Absolutely. So this is from the Gary Schwartz article where he goes through and sort of reads all of these background documents. In sum, the secret document wasn't secret, wasn't given any importance within the company, and didn't materially affect the decision to design the Pinto.
Sarah: Well at least it was a document. I mean, they got that right.
Mike: And so, the other sort of big myth of the Mother Jones article was this idea that the engineers had done all this crash testing of the Pinto and it blew up every time and they kind of knew that it was dangerous and then they got overruled. And this is from the extremely boringly titled article where they went back, and they interviewed all of the engineers. It's actually true that the Pinto failed a lot of its crash tests and did actually explode in a lot of the crash tests, but the issue was, all of this crash testing was happening 10 years before the Mother Jones article comes out, right? The Mother Jones article comes out in 1977.
In 1967 when they're doing all of this testing, crash testing was a baby infant field. No one knew how to test cars. And so one of the standards that they had to use, because the traffic safety administration asked them, was the way that they tested cars, like the rear end durability of cars, was they would basically back up into a wall at 20 miles an hour. And so the car then explodes, but the Ford engineers, they're developing a methodology for crash testing at the same time they're designing the car. So they're basically saying like, look, this doesn't happen in real life. Nobody backs up at 20 miles an hour. And if you hit a wall, the wall kind of caves in, so you're not going to ram into an immovable object going 20 miles an hour backwards, very often.
Sarah: So they're like the tests we've designed are inadequate to give us any real information. So let's assume it's safe, which is bad, but it's not, it's interesting. It's not like headline bad, right? It's like, we kind of expect corporations to suck in that way. And it's almost like the Pinto, this like alleged internal memo where they're like, we know we're going to kill people and we don't care, is like more villainous and also preferable to them just being bad at their jobs.
Mike: Well, I mean, also it's sort of understandable in that the testing field is so new at that point, you can very much say this car keeps blowing up when we do crash tests, something's wrong with the crash tests.
Sarah: Presumably, the people doing the crash test don't have the kind of power where they can be like, why don't we test this in ways that are more reasonable to how it's going to be driving?
Mike: And these researchers also find that there were trade-offs to having the gas tank above the rear axle. So a lot of engineers at the time were actually really uncomfortable with the idea of the gas tank being right under the passengers. Because if you get into a bad enough accident and the fuel tank leaks, and it catches on fire, it's like underneath the passengers. And so there was a debate at the time of what are we trading off by having it so close to the passengers, like people could really get hurt. So it wasn't obvious that this move of the gas tank to the back was going to kill people. It was just like, we think this is actually going to be safer and we think that the crash tests just aren't picking up the way the car crashes actually work.
And so this is from the organizational researchers, “In some, the design stage was not characterized by an engineering consensus that the Pinto was unsafe. The value of crash tests was unclear. A safe placement of the gas tank was not identified, and the safety value of potential design changes was subject to disagreement.” So there was never any evidence that they were being callous and kind of like let's release this car, even though it's dangerous. Like, they really were doing their best and looking at, you know, very limited information that they had. And then of course, if this is all bullshit, why did the traffic safety administration decide that it was a dangerous gas tank and order Ford to do this recall?
What we find out later is that the traffic safety administration basically only decided that Ford had fucked up because they were getting all of these postcards. There's all this public pressure on them. They did the investigation. They rammed the Pinto in the rear at 30 miles an hour, which was like, that was the law back then, that cars had to withstand a 30 mile per hour impact. So they rammed it a bunch of times at 30 miles an hour and it never caught fire. And so they started ramming it at 35 miles an hour and they created a special car to ram it, they weighted down the hood, the car that they were running it with so that it would Pierce the gas tank. So they essentially change the rules midstream so that they could get the Pintos to explode so that they could get Ford to do this recall.
Sarah: Because they're like, oh my God, people keep sending us postcards, too many postcards.
Mike: And nobody at the time wanted to be like, oh, we looked into this and it's fine. Because it was in the article, and it won a Pulitzer.
Sarah: It just shows that public momentum is the only way to get anything done. And also that the thing that you achieve will not necessarily be made valid by the fact that it has public momentum behind it.
Mike: And it's just, I mean, what they've said afterwards is just, it was just easier to tell Ford to recall the car.
Sarah: They’re just like, fine, fuck it. Yeah. I got it though. I understand that there's this, the consumer is upset, and it just shows what kind of power that we have as a collective. And it's a shame that we don't use it toward more accurate ends.
Mike: Yeah. Yeah. And the final debunking is, remember how the Mother Jones article said that between 500 and 900 people had been killed by exploding Pintos, Gary Schwartz, this researcher, goes back through all of the state and national data on fatalities and car accidents. He finds that between 1971 and 1976 of the entire life of the car, he only found 27 deaths from fires in Pintos.
Sarah: And is that comparable to like say deaths in fires in Volkswagens, or is it like a little on the high side?
Mike: The dark part is that the Ford Pinto is actually significantly safer than the VW beetle or the Toyota Corolla or the AMC Gremlin or Chevrolet Vega.
Sarah: Oh, the poor Pinto. Oh, no.
Mike: You’re wrong about the Pinto. It was unfairly maligned.
Sarah: We really are. The pinto was a good little car and a good little bean.
Mike: I mean, I think one of the main lessons here, and this is what Gary Schwartz points out, is that only a tiny, tiny, tiny percent of car crashes are rear impact. And only a tiny percent of those are actually fires. So the fact is, people who die in fires after car accidents only represent 0.6% of people who die in car accidents total. Most people don't die in fires. Most people die in like normal car accidents, like side impact, car accidents, front impact car accidents. Putting all of our effort into preventing this one type totally ignores the fact that like all of the cars back then were death traps, like PW Beetles were death threats.
Sarah: It's not that people didn't die horribly inside the Pintos at times, it's just that they died horribly inside of all sorts of other kinds of cars.
Mike: And with as much frequency people were dying in car accidents a lot back then.
Sarah: It's almost like this show has themes.
Mike: So this is how Gary Schwartz concludes his article from 1991, “From what I've been able to learn, as for safety, the Pinto was a car that was neither admirable nor despicable. It's overall fatality rate was roughly in the middle of the sub-compact range. Its record was better than the subcompact average with respect to fatalities with fire, yet for the quite small category of fatalities with rear end fire, its design features apparently gave it a worse than average record.” So it's like on this one thing it's not great, but in general, when you look at the 99% of accidents that aren't rear end fires, it's fine.
Sarah: It's not remarkable within American car manufacturing. Like maybe it does suck in stuff, like it is bad in some ways, but not in a unique way.
Mike: Yeah. And also, I mean, these institutional researchers also looked into this, and they point out that a bunch of other subcompact cars also had the gas tanks behind the rear axle. Like even this design thing was not like a Pinto jam, it was like small cars want trunk space and so that's where they put the gas tank.
Sarah: So how did we get here? Like why was this article written and did this guy- how?
Mike: I mean, so before we get to the debunking of the debunking, I think it's good to stop here.
Sarah: I have literally no idea what's going to happen next. I feel uneasy.
Mike: My lesson with this journalism, because I think this really is a story of bad journalism and hasty journalism, my takeaway from this is the way that we prioritize secret things over well-known things.
Sarah: Which is what this show is about because everything we're talking about is in plain sight. It's not a scoop. It's just like things that are already known are interesting because we can know something without paying sufficient attention to it.
Mike: And also things like car crashes, are just like, hey, lots of people are dying in car crashes and that's bad. It's pretty boring cause everybody already knows it.
Sarah: You’re not going to get a good headline out of ‘ongoing situation, still terrible.’
Mike: Yes. And so this Mother Jones article is based on these secret documents and a whistleblower from inside Ford that is probably the person who leaked the documents to Mark Doughy.
Sarah: Yeah. It's got Mark Ruffalo movie written all over it.
Mike: It makes it seem like this is forbidden knowledge.
Sarah: Everyone wants a deep throat.
Mike: When nobody wants to just be like, car accidents are bad, and they're easily prevented.
Sarah: Yeah. A lot of bad journalism generally comes from a writer trying, in good faith or at least partial good faith, to draw attention to an issue that they sincerely believe needs attention and that generally does. And then having to find a story that is spectacular enough to hook the public. And maybe it's so spectacular that you just don't want to question the plausibility of it because if you did, then maybe you wouldn't be able to write that story and then you couldn't get people to pay attention to this thing.
Mike: Yeah. Well, to me, I mean, this leads into the debunking of the debunking, which is basically all about why was the traffic safety administration asking for this analysis in the first place? Like why was a government agency doing the thing that we're accusing Ford of? Right, right. They're literally balancing lives versus costs. And then what you find is that what's happening in the 1970s is there's this huge push to rationalize government regulation. So there's all of these court decisions coming down saying that it's an infringement on corporation’s rights to overregulate them, right? There's this huge fear of over-regulation even before Reagan.
This is an excerpt of all these court rulings. “A 1968 court ruling forced the traffic safety administration to evaluate and respond to every industry objection before issuing a standard. A 1972 decision required that safety standards be practicable and provide an objective safety benefit. Similarly, in the executive branch in the early 1970s, the traffic safety administration was told to justify the cost effectiveness of its standards because critics of all stripes worried that over-regulation was strangling the American economy.”
Sarah: Okay. So the government, the federal government, is doing homework to turn to the corporations to be like, don't worry, this idea we have will not be too costly to you, we promise.
Mike: And literally doing the gross thing that offends us.
Sarah:Yeah. Cause they're the Sally Field parent in this Mrs. Doubtfire call of life. They're the ones who have to figure out how much a human life is worth in dollars so the calculations can be done about rollover accidents.
Mike; Exactly. So in 1974, Gerald Ford issues an executive order that requires all regulatory agencies to provide numerical estimates of the cost and benefits associated with any rules being propagated.
Sarah: Oh, so it's a tale of two Fords.
Mike: I mean, to me, I think this is an important story to tell for a podcast that is like a, it was capitalism all along, podcast. I have no interest in like defending Ford. I don't give a shit. Like if people, if people want to say that Ford is awful and amoral and balances lives against its own legal costs, I don't care.
Sarah: Yeah. It's like, yeah, of course they do. It’s just, maybe not to a spectacular extent.
Mike: Yeah. I think it's really important that one of the mistakes that we made, and I think this is a really foundational mistake with this story and other stories involving big corporations, is that we blamed Ford. It's very easy to turn this into a bad apple story of like, look how gross Ford is.
Sarah: Isn't it fascinating that Pinto becomes such a known phenomenon and there are Pinto jokes into the nineties and it's almost like we know that if we keep saying Pinto, we'll be like, yeah, Pinto, Pinto is the unsafe car, Pintos. And it's like, well, they're kind of all unsafe. Once again, it's like, we're focusing on the Pinto to avoid a whole system that facilitates unsafe vehicles.
Mike: And also, I mean, the author of this history of auto safety mentioned there's lots of design decisions that car makers have made that have resulted in way more than 27 deaths.
Sarah: Like that steering column, probably. Like I'm sure there's various very heavy duty steering columns that have killed more than 27 people in a particular model of a car.
Mike: Yeah. But because we don't have secret documents, because we don't have this great smoking gun thing, and we've kind of heard this story enough now that it doesn't shock us anymore.
Sarah: It's like Friday the 13th 3. We're like, yeah. Yeah. Jason killed the teens.
Mike: Exactly. Like it's difficult to write about things that don't have this unexpected counter-intuitive aspect.
Sarah: Isn't it terrible that our ability to be interested in our own safety is dependent on there being twists?
Mike: I mean this to me is like the foundational error of this, is that calling it a story of corporate malfeasance, it's not wrong, but it's just, it's bigger than that and worse than that. Like whenever I hear people talking about greedy corporations, I don't disagree, but I'm also like, well, every corporation is greedy. Like that's what the word corporation means. Right?
Sarah: It's like this virus is infecting people.
Mike: Yeah. The way that you fix these things isn't by making Ford less greedy, it's by completely changing the way that we conceive of corporations and the kinds of standards we're setting for ourselves. Like why are we allowing the corporations to have this much power over the way that they are regulated?
Sarah: Why have we created this moist area? And then periodically we're like, oh my God, there's mildew here. I can't believe that.
Mike: And so this is how this organizational analysis ends. “The taken for granted nature of much sensible bloodshed, for example, 40,000 annual traffic fatalities, combined with the propensity of governments, media, and others to blame individual people or organizations for outcomes, can cause us to ignore social problems that flow from the interconnectedness of organizations. Despite our argument that a consciously cynical decision did not produce an unsafe fuel tank, our description of the Pinto case probably implies an inflated level of rationality to what is better understood as institutionally embedded unreflective action.” These are the same guys that gave their paper a terrible title. What they mean is I-
Sarah: I was just thinking, oh, that's really good. ‘Institutionally embedded’.
Mike: ‘Unreflective action.’
Sarah: Unreflective action. That may see, I'm a refugee from academia so I'm like, yeah that’s great.
Mike: Yeah, I mean, the way that they conceive of this is that like, we're always looking for a decision. Like someone made the decision that a bunch of people are going to die so that I don't have to spend more money. But the fact is when you look through an organization and the history of cases like the Ford Pinto, no one makes a decision. There is no decision. We can't apply a kind of moral standard to the logic of organizations. And whenever we're looking for decisions and we're looking for the smoking gun memos, we're not going to find them. What we're going to find is just really bad outcomes that come from everybody acting on the incentives that we've created for them. And so it's much more important when we debunk this story to not defend Ford or whatever, I don't care, but it's to like, it's all rotten. The entire sector is as rotten as we thought Ford was.
Sarah: Right. Yeah. So it's like we're in the trash compactor in Star Wars and Ford is that snake guy. It's like, oh, hey a snake. I mean, I'm not surprised to see the snake here, it all fits.
Mike: Yeah. So that's it. That's our story.
Sarah: Well, wait, I want to know about this journalist. What's his deal?
Mike: Oh, we never found out.
Sarah Nobody knows?
Mike: It’s kind of frustrating, actually, that nobody has gone back and done a, like, how did this happen, thing?
Sarah: Not yet.
Mike: Cause it usually, I wanted like some sort of Kitty Genovese style, like who had lunch with who to get this. What I think it actually is, I have no evidence for this.
Sarah: Okay, this is your Nancy Grace moment.
Mike: Yes. Is that he got duped by his whistleblower, that we have an idea of whistleblowers as these like crusading do gooders within organizations that are acting out of good motives. Most whistleblowers are like disgruntled employees and people who have like an axe to grind. I mean, kind of like Deep Throat, right? We found out that he was mad that he didn't get a promotion. And then in retaliation, he told the journalists about Watergate. I don't want to paint all whistleblowers with a bad brush, but oftentimes.
Sarah: Right. But they're humans, you know, they're not all, they're not all Mark Ruffalo types. This is not a Mark Ruffalo movie, tragically.
Mike: I think what probably happened was that he got an exaggerated version of this account by a whistleblower who had been fired. It sounds like he was fired for sort of not showing up to work and being kind of incompetent. But he has cast that as, I was attacked for my whistleblower-ness. And there might be some truth to that. It might be a mixture. And again, I like, I don't want to defend Ford.
Sarah: You’ve said that like seven times.
Mike: I just want to be really careful.
Sarah: Are you imagining there's going to be this blockbuster this week, people are going to cancel you for being a fan of Ford?
Mike: Well, I'm like, this is a very like, believe people when they come forward about stuff, podcasts. So I think it's very important to take people seriously when they report on corporate malfeasance. It's very important to listen to people and have a reflexive trust of them. But I also think that we can't base our narratives on one account, and it doesn't mean we should instinctively disbelieve whistleblowers. It does mean we should verify.
Sarah: I think what you're saying is that this whistleblower did have information worth sharing with the public, but maybe not the kind of information that could be assembled into a blockbuster Pulitzer Prize winning article, which unfortunately that's what most news of corporate malfeasance is like.
Mike: And also the fact that if he had a more general story, like Ford doesn't care about safety in general.
Sarah: Or like, federal safety regulations are beholden to the auto industry. That's a perfectly great story, but I can have, it doesn't have the punch of like, they knew!
Mike: So yeah, that's our extremely brief episode.
Sarah: I think it's like an extremely normal sized podcast episode.
Mike; That's true.
Sarah: It's like, we're this restaurant that over time has become known for making huge, impossible to eat burgers, and now we're like, here's a normal burger you won’t hurt yourself on, have fun. Don't be too disappointed. I think this is a nice change. This was fun.
Mike: Yeah, we're doing a little brief throwback episode. These are good.
Sarah: Yeah. To our salad days. Two years ago.
Mike: Yeah. So yeah, don't believe anything you read in the newspaper and always defend Ford against any attack. I think that's what people do.
Sarah: I’m uncomfortable with that, I would say that, just assume that if there's a passing reference to anything, any cultural artifact on a sitcom ever, assume that the backstory is really interesting and weird. And so I just like, watch an episode of The Nanny and take some notes and then have a fun research-y day.
Mike: Yes. I'm imagining you with an envelope held up to your head right now.
Sarah: I can do that next time.