Over the years there have been countless failures in different industries that have been a turning point for brands. Without going any further, recently Samsung, the technology giant based in South Korea for 78 years, has signed one of the great failures with the ; or Takata, whose airbags have become a kind of pandemic that has affected multiple manufacturers, claiming 14 lives and more than 100 injuries.
The great setbacks in the automobile industry are very varied, but without a doubt, one of the most notorious cases is what happened to the North American giant Ford with its Pinto model. A car that hit the market in 1971 to revive the oval firm in a context in which Japanese brands (especially Toyota with the birth of the Corolla) or other Europeans such as Volkswagen were gaining a large market share in the car segment. the compact ones.
And it is true that Ford achieved it, because it made the Pinto a bestseller, reaching 400,000 units sold – figures typical of iconic models such as the Mustang or the Falcon – in its first year of marketing, although they achieved it by paying a very high price: appraising life of your customers.
Lee Iacocca, CEO of Ford at the time, decided that the best way to counteract the rise of his rivals was to build a car with a very low weight (it should not exceed 2,000 pounds, about 907 kg), that cost no more than 2,000 dollars and whose production was carried out in 25 months, when at that time the manufacturing period was estimated at about 43 months.
The result was a car that came out of production with two serious serial defects: on the one hand, the tank, located on the rear axle – a common practice in those years by most car manufacturers – made the cars explode very easily since the fuel tank broke when the car suffered a small impact from behind since its weak structures did not prevent the differential screws from ending up getting stuck in the tank when moving. Thus, the fuel ended up spilling and causing a large fire when the slightest spark jumped after the impact; on the other hand, a rear-end collision at about 40 km/h left the vehicle accordion-like and locked the doors. A combination that made the Ford Pinto a terrible death trap.
But the most serious thing is not the defect with which it went on the market, but Ford’s passivity. And it is that an investigation carried out by in 1977 uncovered that they were aware of the danger that their vehicle posed, but stopping production and changing the architecture represented a great cost for the firm, so it was decided to go ahead with the launch. In fact, Ford conducted more than 40 secret tests with the Ford Pinto and all of them ended with a cracked fuel tank after impacting at 40 km/h.
An imprudence that is further aggravated considering that the manufacturer found several remedies to put an end to this defect, which came to claim around 500 deaths during the eight years it was on sale. However, none of them were implemented. The reason why is related solely to economic issues since the cheapest solution was a kind of hard plastic container made by Goodyear that was placed inside the gas tank, so that when it hits it does not crack and spill gasoline. The price of the fix was set at five dollars per car, but Ford had a choice and chose the cheapest and least ethical: not to repair and yes to compensate for each death.
And it is that the signature of the oval battled and pressured the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) of the United States for years to ensure that, despite the repercussions that the Ford Pinto was causing, only the cost-benefit balance of the company and its hypothetical consequences, and it was decided to assess each death at $200,000. In this way, by multiplying the estimated 180 deaths per year aboard a Ford Pinto by the 200,000 dollars with which each of them had to be compensated, it was cheaper than investing five dollars in each of the more than ten million units sold.
Finally, after several years of investigation by the authorities, Ford was forced to face 117 lawsuits as a result of the Pinto incidents and the Department of Transportation forced Ford to initiate the largest recall in its history, of 1.5 million units. A controversial example that has gone down in history to the point of being illustrated in movies like Top Secret.
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