Reckless Homicide

[snooter]

les stroebel is the author..if you ever wanted to know how the plaintiffs tried to extort ford motor and the pinto this book is worth putting in your collection..william neal (fords defense attorney) needs saint hood on his defense..eye opener on how evidence was only brought to attention of the jury due to good old cop detective work by neal...eye opener as well on how badly the plaintiff attoney sucked and neglected to tell the truth...good book i just finished..yes my grammer sucks as well as my spelin...

[jpd80]

Thanks, it's a good read.

 

Words from Lee Iacocca:

LINK

 

"I can't talk about bad cars without a few words on the Ford Pinto. We brought out the Pinto in 1971.

We needed a subcompact, and this was the best one you could buy for under $2000. A lot of people must

have agreed – we sold over four hundred thousand Pintos in the first year alone. This made the car a great

success and put it in the category of the Falcon and the Mustang.

Unhappily, the Pinto was involved in a number of accidents where the car burst into flames after a

rear-end collision. There were lawsuits – hundreds of them. In 1978, in a major trial in Indiana, the Ford

Motor Company was charged with reckless homicide. Ford was acquitted, but the damage to the company

was incalculable.

There were two problems with the Pinto. First, the fuel tank was located behind the axle, so if the car

got hit hard enough from behind, there was the possibility of a fire.

The Pinto was not the only car with this problem. In those days, all small cars had fuel tanks behind

the axle, and all small cars were occasionally involved in fires.

But the Pinto also had a filler neck on the fuel tank that sometimes, in a collision, was ripped out on

impact. When that happened, raw gas spilled out and frequently ignited.

We resisted making any changes, and that hurt us badly. Even Joan Claybrook, the tough director of

the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and a Nader Protégé, said to me one day: "It's a shame

you can't do something about the Pinto. It's really no worse than any other small car. You don't have an

engineering problem as much as you have a legal and public-relations problem."

Whose fault was it? One obvious answer is that it was the fault of Ford's management – including me.

There are plenty of people who would say that the legal and PR pressures involved in such a situation

excuse management's stonewalling in the hope the problem will go away. It seems to me, though, that it is

fair to hold management to a high standard and to insist that they do what duty and common sense require,

no matter what the pressures.

But there's absolutely no truth to the charge that we tried to save a few bucks and knowingly made a

dangerous car. The auto industry has often been arrogant, but it's not that callous. The guys who built the

Pinto had kids in college who were driving that car. Believe me, nobody sits down and thinks: "I'm

deliberately going to make this car unsafe."

In the end, we voluntarily recalled almost a million and a half Pintos. This was in June 1978, the

month before I was fired."

Edited January 16, 2011 by jpd80

[7Mary3]

Iaccoca told it like it was. The Pinto was no more dangerous than any similarly sized RWD subcompact available at that time. When GM went through those lawsuits over the side-saddle fuel tanks on 70's-early 80's pickups, I was amazed how similar the situation was to the Pinto.

[RichardJensen]

there's absolutely no truth to the charge that we tried to save a few bucks and knowingly made a dangerous car.

 

Spun that way, it's the truth.

 

But it is a fact that Ford executives were made aware of a potentially serious defect and opted to pay settlements at law over correcting the defect.

 

The problem with that logic is that it tacitly acknowledges that a reasonable person would conclude that Ford was at fault.

 

That's why I prefer Robert Lacey's account, as told in "Ford, the Men and the Machine"

 

Unlike Iacocca, he discusses the Pinto memo, instead of presenting a culpable player's after the fact spin that's heavy on bluster, heavy on anecdote, and light on externally verifiable facts.

Edited January 16, 2011 by RichardJensen

[Mark B. Morrow]

When I graduated from law school in 1988, one of my first job interviews was with a firm in Florida that did a lot of automoblie products liability defense. I had meetings with several of the partners and we talked about my interest in cars and how I had been working on cars since I was in Jr. High School. The last interview was with the head of the auto group. He asked me what I thought of the Ford Pinto and I told him I learned to drive a stick in one, but that I thought it was shortsighted to build it without the necessary featyres to make it safe (the textbook definition of a defect) and that what ever money it would have taken to fix it would have been less than the costs of litigation and bad publicity. He told me that he had handled several Pinto cases for Ford. I didn't get a second interview or the job.

 

Seven years later I was working for a Plaintiff's firm on auto products cases. We didnt have any Ford cases while I was there from 1993 to 2000. Just GM, Chrysler and several tire/rim explosion cases against Firestone, Kelsey Hayes and Budd.

[7Mary3]

Spun that way, it's the truth.

 

But it is a fact that Ford executives were made aware of a potentially serious defect and opted to pay settlements at law over correcting the defect.

 

The problem with that logic is that it tacitly acknowledges that a reasonable person would conclude that Ford was at fault.

 

That's why I prefer Robert Lacey's account, as told in "Ford, the Men and the Machine"

 

Unlike Iacocca, he discusses the Pinto memo, instead of presenting a culpable player's after the fact spin that's heavy on bluster, heavy on anecdote, and light on externally verifiable facts.

 

Valid point. I am no Iaccoca fan, but he does admit his culpability in the matter, and he acknowledges that management should be held to a higher moral standard. I am sure that Ford was not the only auto manufacturer to ever have to make a decision on cost over safety. Did Ford knowingly make a dangerous car? No. Could Ford have made the Pinto safer? Yes. Would it have been reasonable for Ford to do so? That's the real question. And it becomes a difficult question to answer if the Pinto was 'as safe' as the average contemporary compact car.

 

BTW- I enjoyed reading Lacey's book. I think it clearly shows who the real hero of the Ford Motor Company was, HF II. It sure wasn't grandpa.

[Mark B. Morrow]

According to Douglas Brinkley's Wheels for the World Ford knew in October, 1970 that the Pinto fuel tank was susceptible to the filler pipe pulling out in rear end collisions as low as 20 mph and additional punctures of the tank from the bolts on the differential. The cost savings of delaying a design change to 1976 was estimated at $20 Million. The first jury award in California in 1978 was $128 Million including punitive damages. This was the largest award ever in a products liability case although the amount was lowered by the Judge. A year later Ford was charged with indicted by a Grand Jury in Elkhart, IN with 3 counts of reckless homicide for the deaths of 3 girls who burned to death in a Pinto. Ford was acquitted at trial but the cost of the defense was in the millions and the damage to Ford's reputation was severe.

 

Ultimately, the cost of fixing the Pinto in 1970/71 would have been miniscule compared to the costs of not fixing it.

[RichardJensen]

BTW- I enjoyed reading Lacey's book. I think it clearly shows who the real hero of the Ford Motor Company was, HF II. It sure wasn't grandpa.

What I find interesting is that HF & HFII 'overstayed' their welcome--early successes sowed the seeds of later failures.

 

Bill Ford's trajectory has not exactly matched that of his uncle or great grand father.

[ZanatWork]

What I find interesting is that HF & HFII 'overstayed' their welcome--early successes sowed the seeds of later failures.

 

Bill Ford's trajectory has not exactly matched that of his uncle or great grand father.

 

 

Bill isn't someone that'll revolutionize industry, but I think he gets overlooked in how important it was that he got Nasser out and really pushed hard for quality improvements and more competitive product. Back in 2003, I thought Ford was doomed.

 

I'm glad Bill knew better.

 

The fact that he was willing to bring in Mullaly and be almost forgotten himself in the process shows just how much he's more about FoMoCo than he is about his own "legacy".

[RichardJensen]

Well, HF II didn't really 'revolutionize' the industry either.

[jpd80]

Spun that way, it's the truth.

 

But it is a fact that Ford executives were made aware of a potentially serious defect and opted to pay settlements at law over correcting the defect.

 

The problem with that logic is that it tacitly acknowledges that a reasonable person would conclude that Ford was at fault.

 

That's why I prefer Robert Lacey's account, as told in "Ford, the Men and the Machine"

 

Unlike Iacocca, he discusses the Pinto memo, instead of presenting a culpable player's after the fact spin that's heavy on bluster, heavy on anecdote, and light on externally verifiable facts.

Particularly in the light of the solution being a cheap as chips plastic liner for the tanks.

Iacocc would definitely paint himself and everyone else as blameless but really we're

trying to apply a 1990s-21st century morality to a decision maybe back in the late 1960s.

 

IMO, Iacocca should have realized that 400,000 sales in the first year means customers

like your product, issuing a recall to install plastic liner as a precaution would have had a

mixed response but even as a TSB wouldn't have batted an eyelid.

[RichardJensen]

Lacey's rather in depth consideration of the Pinto's genesis and development does not paint a flattering picture of Lido.... The decision to pay settlements instead of recalling the product was emblematic of the approach that Ford had with the Pinto.

 

And while it's true that Ford's attitude was somewhat in keeping with the times, it's also true that the Pinto was designed under a stifling and arbitrary set of requirements that Lido imposed on it. The subsequent decision to pay inch by inch in a fashion that could be kept off the Pinto program's books fits the way Lido ran Ford.

 

"Czarist Russia" indeed..........

[LincolnV]

And while it's true that Ford's attitude was somewhat in keeping with the times, it's also true that the Pinto was designed under a stifling and arbitrary set of requirements that Lido imposed on it. The subsequent decision to pay inch by inch in a fashion that could be kept off the Pinto program's books fits the way Lido ran Ford.

 

Was the Pinto problem the main reason Henry II fired Iacocca?

[jpd80]

Was the Pinto problem the main reason Henry II fired Iacocca?

 

More like the last straw, RJ will tell you better but Iacocca saw him self as basically unanswerable to anyone

and HF II took a great disliking to Iacocca's ego driven decisions, finally the old man had enough and fired him.

Not surprisingly one month after major recall began on the Pinto........

Edited January 17, 2011 by jpd80

[7Mary3]

Lacey's rather in depth consideration of the Pinto's genesis and development does not paint a flattering picture of Lido.... The decision to pay settlements instead of recalling the product was emblematic of the approach that Ford had with the Pinto.

 

And while it's true that Ford's attitude was somewhat in keeping with the times, it's also true that the Pinto was designed under a stifling and arbitrary set of requirements that Lido imposed on it. The subsequent decision to pay inch by inch in a fashion that could be kept off the Pinto program's books fits the way Lido ran Ford.

 

"Czarist Russia" indeed..........

 

Wasn't Iaccoca pushing for a 2000 lbs. $2000 car or something like that?

[RichardJensen]

Wasn't Iaccoca pushing for a 2000 lbs. $2000 car or something like that?

Yep.

 

Lee was very much in the Lutz mode. Blat out a compelling but arbitrary dictate, and meet all objections with 'you're not trying hard enough.'