Stuff You Should Know - SYSK Live: Back When Ford Pintos Were Flaming Deathtraps

Episode Date: March 1, 2018

For this special live benefit episode recorded in Atlanta, Josh and Chuck go back to the 70s and look at the decidedly ungroovy course of events that led to Ford recalling its Pinto after people started burning up in them. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey everybody, we've already made our big tour announcement for the year, but this is a little different because we have added a show because Denver sold out. So we've added a second show in Denver. Nice, yeah, we're going to be there on Wednesday the 27th.

We added a show the day before. Same place, Gothic Theater, Englewood, Colorado, and you can go to sysklive.com to get info and tickets for that show and all the rest of our shows too, Chuck. That's right, Boston April 4th, DC, April 5th, St. Louis, May 22nd, and Cleveland, Ohio, May 23rd. Come out and see us. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know

from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, actually, I shouldn't say that yet, Chuck, because we're going to start the podcast later. This is like a pre-thing. That's right. A pre-welcome to this episode, a very special episode of Stuff You Should Know. That's right, because, well, it's live.

Right. And not only that, where are we live? We are live in our beloved town of Atlanta. That's right. Hot Atlanta. Well, no, you don't say that. No one calls it that, everybody. But we did this special show at the Buckhead Theater,

sold it out, by the way, and it was a benefit show. Yeah, it was pretty great. We toured this topic in quite a few cities last year. We had a lot of fun, and we decided, actually, it was your idea, give you full credit. Hey, let's make this Atlanta local show a benefit show and give all of the dough to charities of our choice.

So, mine, Chuck, was the National Down Syndrome Society, which is this great organization who advocate for people with Down Syndrome, obviously. But one of the things that the National Down Syndrome Society is dedicated to, especially right now, they have something called Law Syndrome. Check out lawsyndrome.org. And basically, they're trying to get the laws changed

that make people with Down Syndrome choose between pursuing a career and actually being able to support themselves, or not in staying at home and living with their parents, but still getting access to the really great government Medicaid healthcare that they need. So, the NDSS is saying they shouldn't have to choose that.

We should want them to have both of them, so that's their push right now. And you can go to NDSS.org, and they have all sorts of ways for you to donate, and you can do that and feel great about yourself. It's great, and they actually sent people from the society to the show, and we met them, and they were just, they were wonderful,

and what a great place to pick. What a great way to donate your money, people. Yeah, shout out to Colleen and Kayla for coming to the show. Thank you very much. And for my charity, I picked the Lifeline Animal Project right here in Atlanta. They are a sort of local grass rootsy

animal rescue organization. They have a few locations in Atlanta. They're terrific. They have low cost spay and neuter programs. Obviously, you can adopt, you can volunteer. They're really just great, and they do it all, not for fame or glory or money, but because Atlanta has a serious, serious problem

with stray pets, and they're just the nicest people. So it's great that you guys are supporting them, and it's a very worthy cause. They are who Emily and I are charitable with every year on our own anyway, and it was great to efficiently partner with them and be able to combine with our regular donating and write them a big old fat check

thanks to stuff you should know listeners. Yeah, so here's the thing. We donated 100% of our proceeds from that show. We twisted every arm involved. How Stuff Works got t-shirts made up. Legendary super fan and friend, Aaron Cooper, donated his time to design the t-shirts. The people who made the t-shirts donated them for free.

All the proceeds from the t-shirts went to National Down Syndrome Society and Lifeline Animal Rescue. So what we're trying to say now is we're releasing this episode, and we are hoping that you are beloved stuff you should know listeners. Well, take the time to go make a donation yourself in exchange for this free live episode that we're bringing you.

That's right, and if you wanna just donate regular style, you can go to lifelineanimal.org. That would be great, but they made it super easy and set up a text donation campaign. So all you have to do is text Lifeline, whatever amount of money. So text Lifeline, dollar sign five, to 50155, and you have just donated five bucks,

or however much money you wanna donate. It's really, really easy. Right, and you can go to the ndss.org website, and you can donate there, and they make it pretty easy on you. I believe both donations to both organizations are text deductible, so it's got that bonus too. That's right, so one more time for Lifeline.

You can text to the number 50155. Text the words Lifeline, dollar sign, and whatever number you wanna donate. Yep, and then that's ndss.org, and away with the show. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. Jerry's not here.

But we are, with all these beautiful people live at the Buckhead Theater in our own Atlanta GA. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's good. Wow, hey. There they are. Not too shabby, everybody. Yeah!

Yeah! So let's start. Man, I feel great. You feel what? So, I feel great. Since this is a live podcast, and it's actually set a little further back in time, we thought we would all get into the Wayback Machine.

So for those of you who have seen us live before, you know the Wayback Machine is made up. It's not a real thing. But it does take a twinkle in your eye. That's right. And a heart full of magic to get into the Wayback Machine. So I hope all of you have that going on right now. That was my best service, Silverman impression.

It's pretty good. Thanks. So we're all on the Wayback Machine, okay? And we're going back to Detroit, Michigan. Back to, I don't know, like the mid-60s or something like that, we'll say. Yeah, back when people still wanted to go to Detroit. On purpose. Sorry, ma'am.

Yeah, I told you. And we're gonna fly in... That's the sound it makes. And we're very small and invisible, by the way. So we're gonna fly in over the shoulder of an up-and-coming auto executive with a beautiful head of hair named Lee Iacocca. Oh. And Lee, Lee at the time, he was what you might call a young turk,

up-and-coming, like ready to take on the world great guy. And he had a lot of cred around the company that he worked at called Ford Motor Company. That's right, it was pre-Christler. Right. And he had a lot of cred because he had designed the Mustang, right? It was known as Lee's car, even. Yeah, I mean, if you are the guy and the lead of the Ford Mustang project,

then you've kind of bought your ticket in the car industry. Right. One of the great cars. If you make the car that vanilla ice will eventually love, you've done something quite right with your life, right? Did he have a Mustang? Rollin' in my 5.0 with the rag top down? That's a Mustang, buddy.

Is it? Sure. I think it's even in the video. I've never been more ashamed. To not know the lyrics of a song? Yeah, because it's F and vanilla ice. So I don't feel like I should have known it. I just feel like a stooge.

Oh, no, it's fine. No, you've got a wean shirt on, you probably shouldn't know this. But I know that lyric, though. I didn't know 5.0. 5.0. That's my understanding, right, everybody? I thought it was a Volkswagen Beetle. No, no, but that does come up starting now.

Because Lee Iacocca was one of the few people in Detroit at the time who realized that the American auto industry's lunch was being eaten in the subcompact market, mainly because no American car company was making subcompacts at the time, right? Yeah, we liked our cars very large at the time. Like land yachts. Yeah. Okay, so Lee said the Germans are eating our lunch

with their little Volkswagen Beetle Hitler's car. Look it up. I had two Volkswagen Beetles. Those were two Hitler's cars. You supported Hitler in a way. My mom is over there, she bought that car. Yeah, I don't know. She's going like this.

And then the Toyota Corolla was also killing people, right? Killing Detroit, I should say. Yeah. And so Lee said we need to get a car to market, but I'm not the president. There's a man who is president. What is his name, Chuck? I can't ever remember, honestly.

Oh, no, I do remember. His name is Bunky Knudsen. If you're the president of a car company and your name is Bunky Knudsen, you got to know you have a target on your back, right? Nobody's going to let that stand for very long, especially not Lee Iacocca. Yeah, the only thing Bunky Knudsen in that year would have been president of is the Super Secret Treehouse Playboy Magazine Club.

Right. Led by Bunky Knudsen. Right. Or the local union of the guys who sell those like monkeys that play the cymbals on the street, you know? The wind-up ones. All right, so regardless of that, Bunky Knudsen was in charge, and Lee Iacocca had his sights set on that job.

And so they settled things in the traditional way in the car industry at the time, which was arm wrestling. People are like, is he serious? So Lee Iacocca had this thing where, and we think this is probably how he rose to power, he could rip the sleeve clean off of his shirt right at the shoulder right before an arm wrestling match, right? It was very intimidating.

And he always kept his arms oiled every morning. He would oil them up and very gingerly put the shirt on over them so the oil wouldn't show through. So it really had like a pronounced effect when he tore his shirt sleeve off and went like that. So when he did this, the Bunky Knudsen, and Bunky saw that oil bicep, he knew his time running Ford Company had grown short. That's right.

Bunky Knudsen knew what time it was. All that was totally made up, you all realize, right? The stun silence threw me off a little bit. This is back to the treehouse for Bunky. So Lee Iacocca found himself in charge of Ford, and he said, we got to get a subcompact going fast, dudes. So here's what we're going to do. We're going to get a project going.

I'm even going to give it a code name, which is really weird and sort of soft mark. It's kind of a Knudsen move. But he named it Project Phoenix. This is very cute and a little ironic once you know what this is about. And he said, I want a car. I want it on the market in what, 24 months? Yeah. And normally it took like 43 months to get a car from concept to production.

Iacocca said, nope, 24. Yeah, 24, so super fast and it can't weigh more than 2,000 pounds and it can't cost the customer more than $2,000. Right. And he totally should have called it Project 2000. So that would have been a super cool name in the early 1970s. Right. And that car would go on to be known as the Ford Pinto.

For those of you who aren't going like, oh, right now. Couple of claps, couple of booze, couple of groans, and a lot of like, what's the big deal? We're going to fill the people in on this, okay? Yeah, so the deal with the Ford Pinto was if you don't know, and you did grow up in the 70s, it had a problem. We don't know a lot about cars, but we know that the Ford Pinto had a problem.

If you would hit the Ford Pinto from the rear going very, very slow, then sometimes it would burst into a fiery ball. And that is not a good thing for a car to do. Especially when you're still in the car. That's right. Has anyone seen the movie Top Secret? Remember that one? Val Kilmer?

There's a scene where Val Kilmer, I think, is on a motorcycle. He's being chased by Germans and he somehow out maneuvers them and they swerve off the road and slam on their brakes and almost come to a complete stop right before hitting a Pinto in the rear. But don't quite make it. It makes that crystal ding sound and then boom! They just blow up into flames, right? And this was in the 80s.

This was like at least 10 years after the Pinto had this reputation. That's not that far from the truth, actually. We found from doing this research. So there's actually a lot of choice quotes that we found. A lot of people love taking pot shots at the Pinto. Some have written some pretty great stuff. You want to take the first one? Yeah, the first one was from Popular Mechanics Magazine

and they said, arguably the most dangerous fuel tank of all time was a rear-mounted vessel installed on the 71 through 76 Ford Pinto. It's possibly the best example of what happens when poor engineering meets corporate negligence. Good quote. I got one. There's this guy named Dr. Leslie Ball.

He was the chief safety officer for NASA's manned space program. So this guy knew safety, right? He said that the release to production of the Pinto was the most reprehensible decision in the history of American engineering. So there's a couple of things I want you guys to know. He dropped his microphone. A couple of things to note in this quote. One, he said was the most reprehensible decision,

not one of the. And he also qualifies it with American engineering, not automotive engineering. He's including like Easy Bake Ovens and other stuff that have killed like millions of people, you know? He's including everything ever built, basically. Yeah. Easy Bake Ovens or death traps too.

So the Pinto, it was kind of an issue for Ford as we're going to see, but there's this one tidbit we ran across that we just love. There was a radio spot for the Pinto in the 70s, and Ford had to get their agency to get rid of it because it had the line, the Pinto leaves you with that warm feeling. For real. This is a fun one of research.

All right. So again, I want to reiterate, we don't know anything about the design of cars. We know how to drive cars, and that's about where it ends. But we do know this. The original design of the Pinto had a gas tank that started six inches from the rear bumper. I know that's not a good idea.

If I was in Detroit, I would have said, well, that's weird. Why would you want to do that? Because accidents happen. No one thought about it. That's made even worse by the fact that a car critic would later call that bumper little more than ornamentation. Like cars supposed to have a bumper,

just put that thing that looks like a bumper on it, basically. There was a later improved version of the bumper on the Pinto that could withstand a five-mile-an-hour impact. That was the improved version. And again, this is all happening six inches away from the gas tank. That's just one side of the fuel tank. There's a whole other side,

and it had its own issues, basically. Yeah, there's something on a car called a differential. That's how mechanics say it. We don't know what that is, but I did some research, and here's what I'm going to call it. It's the magic box that makes the car go vroom. I think it's pretty accurate.

What's so funny is we pride ourselves on chasing down every tidbit of information. When it comes to cars, we're just like, what's out? No idea. Who would want to hear a live podcast about a car? So this magic box on the Ford Pinto had four protruding bolts facing the gas tank. See, you're getting it now.

In court later on, and this would end up in court, you'd see where this is going, lawyers would call them can-openers, and we're just going to call them, for this show, flaming death bolts. I wish we had a sound effect, or like a jingle, like flaming death bolts. And we should totally trademark flaming death bolts.

I think so too. At least that's a band name, I think we should at least call it out as that. Oh, right? You hear that? Are the flaming death bolts behind us? Right, they came out. We're here on the wrong night. So like I said, there's a lot of good quotes out there,

but probably the best of them, the best, came from this journalist named Mark Dowey, who figures big time into the story. And he probably got across the problem with the Pinto better than anybody. And if I may? Please. Mark Dowey said,

if you ran into a Pinto you were following it over 30 miles an hour, the rear end of the car would buckle like an accordion, right up to the back seat, and the tube leading to the gas tank cap would be ripped away from the tank itself, and gas would immediately begin sloshing onto the road around the car, right? The buckled gas tank would be jammed up

against the differential housing, which contained four sharp protruding bolts likely to gash holes in the tank and spill still more gas. Now all you need is a spark from a cigarette, and this is me interjecting here. This is the 70s, so every single person in every single car was smoking every single second of every moment they were driving. There are four lit cigarettes in every car at all times,

with the windows up. Barring that, you could also get it from the ignition or scraping metal, and both cars would be engulfed in flames. If you gave that pin to a really good whack, say at 40 miles per hour, chances are excellent that it's doors would jam, and you would have to stand by and watch its trap passengers burn to death.

That's not me saying this. You're additional, what do you call that? Pantomiming, acting? It's in the pantomime tradition. That's fantastic. Thank you. Reading rainbow with Josh. Give LeVar Burton a run for his money.

All right, so there was one 30 mile per hour crash test with the pinto that found that all 13 gallons, all 13 gallons spilled out in less than 60 seconds. So we all drive here in Atlanta, and you all pump gas. You know how fast when you're pumping gas, it's coming out, and you're like, oh my God, that's so fast, all the gas is coming out. It's so fast!

You can't pump, take a gas in 60 seconds. So the pinto is spilling gas faster than you can pump gas. Think about that next time you go to the gas station. Thank God I'm not driving an early 1970s pinto. So the weird thing is this, despite the pinto's reputation, whether it's from Top Secret, or you learned about it from your older brother,

who knows where you heard it from. But a lot, most people I would even say, know the pinto is a flaming death trap. It turns out, in retrospect, the pinto was really not much worse than any other car in its class at the time, which is not to say that the pinto wasn't a flaming death trap, but instead all cars were flaming death traps at the time.

The idea of being safe if you got into a crash was totally lost on Detroit at the time. It wasn't a thing. So we wondered, how did the pinto actually get this reputation? And to answer that question, we have to go to the great periodical room in the sky. And we have to go back to the 19th. We all have to die?

No, that's the great part about it. You can go there alive. Usually when you say the great thing in the sky, that means you're totally dead. You're just in the sky. All right, great. We're going to the great periodical in the sky. Right, and we're all living.

It's great. We're going to go back to the 1977 section, and we're going to find the 1977 year for Mother Jones magazine. Has anyone ever heard of Mother Jones magazine? It's still around today. One might characterize it as slightly left of center, maybe. And it was very much the same back in the day. And in this September, October 1977 issue of Mother Jones magazine,

there was an article by Mark Dowie. That's right. It's called Pinto Madness. You can still read this article today. It was one of the main sources we used. It's a great deep dive if you want to read some more stuff about the pinto. But Mark Dowie was the quote you read earlier, and he was a journalist there at the time. And this is one reason you know this is also the 70s.

When they released this article in a print magazine, they had a press conference about it, which is adorable when you think about it, especially through today's lens. So they even traveled. They went to Washington, D.C. from San Francisco, held a big press conference there on Capitol Hill about a magazine article,

and they invited Ralph Nader to attend, which, yeah, you should will. If you don't know who Ralph Nader is, he is a great American. He was a consumer crusader who cared really about one thing in life, and that is making sure that corporations didn't screw you over, and they kept you safe,

and it's not like he got rich doing it. Ralph Nader was a great, great dude. Right. He lived like a hermit to show that he wasn't being influenced by one side or the other. He had like a mattress on the floor of like a studio apartment. I think he had a hot plate that he lived with. Ironically, that's very dangerous. How do they think about it?

It was like probably one of the safer hot plates, but yeah. I bet it was the best hot plate on the market. For sure. He would think so, but he bought it with his own money. He did. So anyway, Ralph Nader was there. They got everyone together, and they had this big press conference in Washington, D.C.,

and Dawey starts to poke around a little bit and do a little more research for this article and say, you know, I need to go to these, I need to go to the DOT, I need to go, what was the other one called? The NHTSA. What does that stand for? The National Highway Transportation Safety Administration.

Correct. It's a mouthful. It's a lot of common words, but when you put them together like that, it's tough. So he went and started doing some investigating, and he found out that Ford had been carrying out, well, they've been carrying out crash tests in secret, and when you're carrying out crash tests in secret,

that's probably not a good thing. Right. It means you didn't get the results you were hoping for. So you suppressed the results, you had all the scientists murdered. Lee Aikoka totally did. He's like, you see that? Sure.

He probably was like, go to sleep forever. But that was just to get the ball rolling. He had goons kill the rest of them. Oh, sure. And then you filed the crash test with the DOT. That was the normal thing. So Dowey's sitting there going through all these file cabinets, and you know there's all these bureaucrats going like,

oh, God, why does he keep saying Eureka? What is he finding now? There's a guy in there with a spy camera. And he figured out very, very quickly that Ford was well aware of the notion that its pentos were flaming death traps, right? And from those 40 crash tests, he found that 11 of them, and this is really important, 11 of those crash tests had been carried out before the pinto,

the first one had ever rolled off of the production line. Right? He found in these crash tests that every single one of those 40 crash tests, if it was a pinto that had not been altered, meaning it was the same one that you would buy at like the dealership, they lost gas at an impact of 20 miles an hour over. Not very good, right? No, not good at all.

So three of these cars passed the test, and all three of them had been tweaked for safety. Like these aren't the ones that you would end up buying. They changed three of them, and they all three passed, yet they still didn't use it. And here are the three things they did. One was a plastic baffle, a little square plastic that costs $1, and it weighed one pound, and it went between the flaming death bolts

and the gas tank. Solve the problem. Pretty sensible. Did not use it. Because remember, 2,000 pounds, 2,000 dollars, which I don't know what that is today. It's 2,000 pounds and $12,000. The pounds didn't change?

No. Okay. Gravity is reading relatively the same. The other thing they did, and this ostensibly was a little heavier, they put a metal plate to reinforce that ornamental bumper. In other words, they gave it a bumper. And that worked.

And then the final thing they did was, I think they lined the inside of the outside of the gas tank. The inside of the gas tank. Yeah, the inside of the gas tank with a rubber bladder. And that worked. But no one liked saying the word bladder. Hit forward, let's be honest. I guess it's too gross.

It works, but it's fruity. So we'll give them rid of that one. The point is they had three solutions before the Ford was being rolled off the line, and they chose to ignore all three of them. Right. Big point here, right? And in addition to this 2,000 pound, $2,000 limitation that ICOCA imposed,

that radically shortened timeline also created a climate where really, really dangerous engineering decisions were being made, right? Normally when you make a car, you sketch it out, somebody makes a model of it, some dude works it in clay. Yeah. You run it into a couple of walls or something like that. Y'all high five. You figure out how many cigarette lighters are going to go into it.

There's a lot of thought put into it. And then once all this stuff, this pre-production stuff, is done and you know what the car is going to look like, then you begin this process called tooling. And tooling is where you make the machines that are going to make the car that you're manufacturing, right? With the Pinto, they didn't do that. They started designing the car and at about the same time,

they started making the machines that were going to make that car before they even knew ultimately what the final design was going to be. So by the time they figured out that they had a really dangerous fuel tank on their hands, it was too late. The tooling was underway. $200 million worth of machines had been made. And Ford said... Yeah. So when they discovered this,

we have a couple of quotes here from actual engineers that worked there at the time. And they said, did anyone go to Lee Iacocca and say, hey, we have a problem on our hands with this gas tank? And this one engineer from the Mother Jones article said, hell no. But it was like 1970s times, so he didn't say it like that. He went like, hell no. Right?

In my mind, he went, hell no. Hell no. That person would have been fired. Safety wasn't a popular subject around Ford in those days. And with Lee, it was taboo. Ford taboo, like if you're a normal person. If you talk normally. Tatoo, taboo.

Tatoo, taboo. All right, deletrious. That's a deep cut. There's about 20 people in here that got that one. That's all right. All right, so Iacocca had a saying around Ford at the time, which was safety doesn't sell. And here's another quote from another engineer.

Safety isn't the issue, trunk space is. You have no idea how stiff the competition is over trunk space. Do you realize that if we put a safer gas tank in the pinto, you can only get one set of golf clubs in the trunk? And that's a real quote. And here's something that you can do when you get home. You can go and look up Ford Pinto ad and search Google images or Bing images, is that a thing?

Sure, Bing, Yahoo. Doesn't have to be Google. You can do a Netscape. Or if you're a paranoid type, duck, duck, go. That would even flew over my head. It's like they don't track or use cookies or anything like that. Oh, yeah. So you're a creep.

I guess, are you stockpile weapons or something? Gotcha. So anyway, you can look up Ford Pinto ads and they're all kinds of great ads from the old days. And there's one where there's this couple that, I guess, is unpacking for like a camping trip from their pinto, but it doesn't look like anywhere you would want to go camping. It's just kind of like a field.

There's like a ditch. Yeah, it's kind of weird looking. And it says this in the text, just flip down the runabouts rear seat. The runabout was one of the pinto models. Open up the big back door, which we call a hatchback these days. And the big back room makes packing easy.

Pack in your golf clubs, those groceries, those big pieces of luggage. Pack it all in. You make it sound really dirty. There's a big room in your little pinto. I'm the sicko because I'm using Duck Duck Co. That's the sexiest ad of the 70s, as read by me. I like old ads in old magazines

because you can smell them after work. You know what I'm saying? Like if you go into Google Images, there's an ad there but not the smell. But you know what an old magazine smells like? It's a great, fantastic smell. You mean like musty? What magazines are you reading?

Just any old magazine I find. Just like an old penthouse. Pick up. Just like... All right. Jerry... Cut this part. Cut that part.

No, I'm not doing my shot yet. Everybody calm down. My niece left to go to bed. Are there any other kids here? All right. You have a very deep voice, young boy. Right here. I'm seven.

Beard me. Screw. So everybody, I think we can all agree this is going pretty well. Thank you. You're not going to like this. That means that we need to put an ad break in here. Calm down.

We'll be right back right after these messages. All right, Chuck. We're over here listening and we're doing great, frankly. This is going really well. Agreed. So before we go to ad break everyone, we just want to say, here's a quick reminder.

Go to ndss.org to donate to the National Down syndrome society. And Chuck, what's the number for lifeline? You can text to the number 50155. Text the word lifeline, dollar sign, and whatever amount you want to give. All right. Now worry from our sponsor. We're going to use hey dude as our jumping off point,

but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips?

Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in

as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to hey dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road.

Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This I promise you. Oh god. Seriously, I swear.

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Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Oh, just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass

on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey, everybody, we're back. Magic committee. That's how it works. Yep, thank you, sir. I am wearing me undies. Oh, you know what?

We should say this. That's a freebie, man. We'll cut this part out, too. But I have to share this. We got, this is a legit tangent. Like, you know, like all of them. Well, they heavily scripted and rehearsed tangents. So you've heard them.

We got an email yesterday. You saw it. I did. Where a woman, this is so weird. A woman wanted to send a new pair of me undies to us for us to autograph so she could frame the underwear for her husband's Christmas gift. Now that is a deep cut.

Sure. That's a true fan. At least she wasn't like, and you wear them first. Yeah. Each of you pass it off to the other one, and then mail them back to me. But both of those are like, oh yeah, send them in. Right.

Totally do that. I sent the email. She would have smelled like an old magazine. You know, right when she got that in the mail. Chuck. I didn't, what, guys, what? Why would you do that? No one else saw that.

We should probably edit this part out too, Jerry. This guy right here. He sent that email to our head of sales though, and he was so delighted. He was like, oh, I can't wait to send this to me undies. You're autographing underwear. They're not going to believe it. That's like David Lee Roth level.

Except we're autographing me undies for a fan. Some dude. It's not David Lee Roth level. All right, everybody, we're back. Good thinking. Sure. I should probably do it again though, because you just said that.

Hey, everybody, we're back. I think I just stepped on you. Stop laughing, everybody. We need to clean. I said stop laughing. Hey, everybody, we're back. Thanks for hanging there. Thank you.

That was a really long ad break. I don't even know where we were now. I got it. I got it. I got creepy right before. I know that. I know. I got you.

Hey, everybody, we're back. Everyone's going to be like, what the hell happened in Atlanta? That's good enough. We're leaving that in. All right. So by now, everybody, you may be saying, Chuck, Josh, WTF.

How could this possibly be going on? How could Ford be doing this kind of stuff? We're going to tell you WTF. It turns out that back in the 60s, the American auto industry was like the last great unregulated industry in the entire country. And the reason why was because most Americans considered the auto industry the backbone

of the American economy, right? So everyone said, we should probably just let the auto industry decide what's best for it and us, its consumers, because we don't want to mess with them. Yeah, I think corporations love to look out for everyday Americans. All right. But at the time, there was a fatality rate,

aka a death rate, on the America's highways reaching 50,000 people a year. We did the math. That's a lot. That is a lot. Ralph Nader had a book called Unsafe at Any Speed. It was a big hit. He also had one called Hot Plates, Unsafe at Any Temperature.

Right. So it did sell quite as well. Has anyone actually read Unsafe at Any Speed? Don't feel bad. We haven't either. OK, good. So he released his book in 1965. And it was basically like a chapter by chapter,

really wonky, detailed description of how your car was ready and willing to murder you, right? Not kill you, murder you. Intentional. There were chapters on the steering column. It's going to impale you. Or that dashboard, it ain't padded and your head's going to open up like a ripe cantaloupe when it comes

in contact with it, right? That was the name of the chapter, I think. And the reason that this would happen for both instances is because there's no such thing as seatbelts, right? So he goes to the trouble. No, there were seatbelts. It was your mom doing that. Right.

That's how you knew a really dedicated mom in the 60s because she was missing an arm. That's right. Like her kid was all messed up. I had a dent on his head or whatever because it didn't quite work because her arm came clean off when they both went forward. But he was still alive.

She didn't have an arm. It was a badge of honor back then. So Ralph Nader writes this book and it gets released. And it becomes like a best seller almost immediately. And it has so much of an impact that the next year, Congress passed the Highway Safety Act of 1966. Yeah. And this is another way you knew it was a day from way back

in the day. The House and the Senate passed it unanimously. They all got together and said, well, this is what's good for the American people. So this is our job to do this. And they went, yeah. Pretty sweet. Pretty sweet time.

Pretty sweet. So they passed this thing. And the upshot of it was that now the auto industry would be regulated. It was just the way it was going to be. And the auto industry said, OK, OK, fine, fine. But what about this? Why don't we agree to use something called a cost benefit

analysis to decide if we actually undertake any regulations you propose? Deal? And the DOT and NHTSA was like, well, I don't know. And the auto industry went like that. And the DOT was like, all right, fine, fine. We don't want to arm wrestle over this one. Fine. Cost benefit analysis for everybody.

Yeah. So if you don't know what a cost benefit analysis is, we call it the crew list of all analyses because it's basically just a math problem. You plug in numbers and you say, I plug in this. I plug in this. Is it worth it to do this? Right.

It's great in a lot of circumstances if you're talking about, I don't know, like what's a good example. Or if you're trying to figure out whether to go with Tire Distributor A or Tire Distributor B, kind of easy, right? Exactly. But if you're talking about replacing a fuel tank because it's killing people, it gets a little sticky because one of the inputs on those math problems has to be the value

of a human life. There's no getting around it. No way around it, right? So the NHTSA said, well, I guess we should go ahead and figure out how to quantify a human life. They all went home and, like, kissed their children. And they came back to work. And what they came up with, they actually did it.

There was a 1972 document that said everybody, this is the value of a human life. We figured it out. $200,725. And what they did was they figured it out. Woo! Yeah. Really?

I thought mine was half that. So what they did was they figured out the average life span, or the average age, I guess, of a person who dies in a car wreck and then subtracted it from the average life span of the Americans at the time in the Iraq, such as. And they came up with 37 years. Most people who die in a car wreck would have lived 37 more years.

And then they said, well, how much would those people make in that time? And they said, well, $200,725. The problem with this is that really what they calculated was the cost to society and lost productivity. If it's just wages, right? They didn't take into account some very important stuff like the value that the individual places on his or her own life,

or whether their family wants them to come home after a car wreck, stuff like that. But they came up with this dollar amount and they said, there, there, we'll get better at it over time. But here's what it is. And it's a primitive step. Exactly. Again, the cruelest of all analyses.

So Mark Dowie is sorting through all the file cabinets at the DOT and the. The National Highway Transportation Safety Administration. It's no faster to say it abbreviated. I know. I would just mess it up though. So he's sorting through all the stuff. He's going through file cabinets.

Everyone's worried. And he comes across a document, a memo called fatalities associated with crash-induced fuel leakage and fires. And over the years, people come to think like, this is the smoking gun. This is Pinto. It was about Pinto fires from getting hit in the rear. And that's what it is.

It really wasn't that. What it was, it was about all cars in the United States and whether they caught on fire when they rolled over. However, the one damning thing in this memo was that Ford used that number, well, almost that number, to quantify the value of a human life. But Ford rounded down. They rounded down the value of a human life.

Just, you know, to make the math easier. Yeah, they made it 200 grand. They cut off the $725. Just made it a straight up 200k. Right. So they estimated like 180 fatalities and 180 injuries in car fires, post-collision car fires, every year in the U.S. And they said, well, that would cost society $49 million

in lost productivity. But if you want us to do this $11 per car safety improvement that would save those lives and those injuries, well, it costs us, the auto industry, $113 million. So don't have to do it, right? Great. See it, racquetball Ted. That was kind of, do you guys see Fight Club?

Remember Edward Norton's job? That was kind of what he did, right? A little bit. Yeah. He had to kind of calculate whether or not it was worth taking a recall. Exactly. And Ford, thanks to Dowey, had just been caught red handed

with one of these, submitted in the public record. All right. So part of the Motor Vehicle Safety Act was something, and all these bills, this gets a little wonky, but bear with me, they're all broken down into subcategories. And one of them was called Vehicle Safety Standard 301. And 301 was basically our government getting together and saying, you know what?

We feel like you should be able to get hit from the rear at like 20 miles an hour and not explode into a fiery ball. We've talked about it. We know what you're going to say, Detroit, but we've talked about it. We feel very strongly about this. We feel that's reasonable. Democrats push for 30, Republicans push for 10.

They met in the middle at 20. There are people from Cobb County here, I'm sure. They are not happy with you right now, Chuck. That's all right. They are going to let us know via email after this show. I'm so angry at the way you feel about life. So they settled on 20 miles an hour, and that was Safety Standard 301.

But here's the rub for Ford and the Pinto is they had a problem on their hands. They knew they couldn't withstand 20 miles an hour. They could barely withstand five. So this would have meant a complete redesign on the Pinto. So they came up with a plan, basically, to, shall we say, delay the process. Yeah.

I had Coke and went, kill it. Kill that thing. Kill that Standard 301. I hate it. And they were happy because they didn't have to kill a human. Right. For once.

So what Klausen is. Oh, yeah. I didn't even mean to say that, but it works pretty well. So here's what they did. They got attorneys on the case and they said, here's what you'll do. You're going to file these arguments. On the last day that you can file an argument and you're

going to get all this data together and you're going to shove it in their face and say, here's an argument. DOT. DOT. And now you've got to look through all this stuff and you have to satisfy that argument. So they may not have even cared if the argument held up or not.

The point was they just wanted to delay things so they could keep selling the very dangerous Pinto. So they did this and they didn't file them concurrently all at once, which is sort of what you usually do in law and court. They would file one. They would go look through them all and say, this holds water.

It doesn't. They go great. They wait until the next deadline and file another one. And all of a sudden they have delayed this process for nine years. Nine years. They started arguing against it in 1968 and Standard 301 went into effect in 1977.

Right? Yeah. Boo. Boo. So there's kind of like a silver lining to this whole thing. And that Ford's objections actually forced the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration to study the problem of car fires, to answer Ford's objections and say,

no, actually you're wrong. They're kind of a problem. Yeah. They were giving them reams of data and then they went, oh, we just gave them reams of data. Right. But the NHTSA also had to like contract with people to study this stuff.

And what they were finding was that car fires in America were way, way more of a problem than even Ford, I think, realized at the time. They turned up some stats. Like 400,000 cars were burning up on the American highway every year, burning more than 3,000 people of death. Is that high? 400,000 cars.

Yeah. Maybe it's a little high. I don't know. But this is what they turned up. That sounds high. Here's one. 40% of all calls to all fire departments in the United States in the 1960s were cars on fire.

Isn't that nuts? This is the last time you guys saw a car on fire. This would be like you would see one and a couple of miles later, there's another one. Well, yeah. And this was people didn't have cell phones. So you would have to see a car on fire, have a dime in your pocket, be near enough to a pay phone to report it.

Right. And that was 40%. And have made the judgment that there was a chance that the person was going to make it in the time that you went to the pay phone. Right. You know? There's a lot of factors here.

40% seems high. Like if you had a Christmas parade in your town, there was a pretty good chance a couple of those cars were just going to catch fire in the middle of the parade. This is insane. This is what the NHTSA was finding from studying this problem. There's a University of Miami study.

They found that rear end impact fires were quote, a clear and present hazard to all Pinto owners. That was the cane saying that. All right. So wait, wait, wait, we got to take another ad break. Okay. Everybody will be right back. Don't get up.

We'll be right back right after these messages. All right. Chuck, last ad break, it's going pretty well. It's a hot crowd. You got that straight, buddy. Before we go to ad break, we just wanted to remind you again. Go to ndss.org to donate to the National Down syndrome Society.

Chuck. That's right. Or you can text to the number 50155. Text lifeline, dollar sign, and the amount you want to give. It's that easy. Yeah. It doesn't need to be an or proposition. It could be an and proposition.

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step by step. Oh, not another one. Uh-huh. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Oh, just stop now. If so, tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen, so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey everybody, we're back. It's a lot better live, huh? They get it now. So the original draft of the Motor Vehicle Safety Act had a part that provided, it was very controversial, it provided for criminal sanctions, criminal sanctions against executives of auto companies.

And these, well, let's be honest, these white dudes that were executives of these auto companies said, well, I think, I don't think you really mean that, right? That means we could go to prison, you go understand. I like, I think we should, we have some lobbyists on the case. They put the lobbyists on the case, and they did get that lobbied out of the Safety Act, unfortunately. Yeah. I say unfortunately, that's me talking.

Sure. Well, you're speaking for both of us, buddy. Would they end up with, like, five or ten thousand dollars? Yeah, in 1977 money, which today translates to, like, forty grand. So if you were an auto executive who knowingly put a dangerous car out on the American market, you could face a fine of forty thousand dollars. And from what we understand, that's, like, once, one time fine. Yeah.

That was it. So it would be up to the media and the courts to force Ford to do something about its pinto. And boy, did they ever. The drumbeat started, isn't that right? It started with Dowey, right? Like Mark Dowey gets this, gets a lot of credit for the pinto article. And definitely, he definitely had a big impact. But he gets some undue credit for getting Standard 301 to come into effect.

Because it came into effect pretty shortly after the pinto madness article came out. It turns out, later research turned up, that the NHTSA had said, Ford, we're so sick of you arguing about Standard 301. How long will it take for you guys to get your cars up to Standard 301 level? Which, again, is a twenty mile an hour rear impact that doesn't lead to fuel loss. And Ford was like, I don't know. Seems like a big job, right? Four years?

And the NHTSA was like, you know, it took you two years to design the car from scratch, right? They're like, yeah, this is huge, massive improvements to make it safe. So four years. So the NHTSA said, fine, fine. In 1977, it'll come into effect. So it was just coincidence. But Dowey's article did have a big impact in the way of shaping public opinion. Yeah, for sure.

So what happens is there start to be some lawsuits. People that are getting burned alive in pinto's and other cars say, well, maybe we could sue somebody. And is that a duck lacking? Is there a duck in the house? Well, okay, let's get back on track. Let's get back on track. Works, doesn't it? You're all charmed.

Thank you for taking that one for us, Chuck. Jerry, cut that part. All right, so that's delicious. It's good, yeah. Bullet? Bullet bram bourbon. It's called buzz marketing, everyone. They don't even pay us for that.

Yet. So they're these people that have this job where they recreate accidents for, sometimes it's for court, for attorneys, for the state, sometimes it's for insurance companies. But they recreate these accidents to kind of show what went down. And some of them started to say, and again, it was a radical notion, started to say, wait a minute, I think that if you get in a car wreck, you maybe should be able to live through it. It's a radical idea, but like maybe they should make cars safer?

Yeah. They go back to San Diego hippie. Well, the notion from America, everyone sort of agreed to this thing where like, you get in a car wreck and die, like you got in the car wreck, it's your fault. It was a driver's fault. Yeah, it's a driver's fault. You can't make cars safer in the case of an accident. It seems weird now because it's all we think about as auto safety, but it was just not

on the radar. Leigh Aikoka was not the only one. But that was thanks to Detroit, like saying, it's your fault, you're a dummy. But everyone agreed to it. Well, yes, in Detroit's defense, at the time, everybody was drunk while they were driving. Way more than today. So they kind of had a point, but still, they could still make the cars safer and should have even more back then.

Yeah, for sure. So these, I don't know, we call them accident re-creationists. Reconstructionists. Reconstructionists. Re-creationists are the Civil War dudes. Does anyone here do that? Any Civil War re-enactors here? There's three who are just sitting there like this right now.

All right, quick sidebar. Emily and I went hiking. You guys ever go to Sweetwater State Park? See, local show. Emily, you remember this? We went hiking in Sweetwater and there were some Civil War re-enactors. But it wasn't like, what I know about Civil War re-enactors is they throw a big battle party or whatever it's called and they act like it's a big war and they go, bang, you

die or don't die, bang, bang, and then that's sort of what happens. Do they do that? I have no idea what they do. But it's a big show on a field. I went to one when I was a kid. I remember that. But these dudes were just hanging out in the woods at Sweetwater State Park. They had a fire going and it was like three or four people.

There was a couple of dudes and a couple of ladies in their outfits and they were cooking, I guess, like a squirrel on a spit. That's Huckabee style. It was no organized thing. I was just hiking by. It was like a year ago. I was like, well, that's weird. Did you guys just back slowly into the woods?

Don't make eye contact. I guess I approved because it wasn't war. So that's kind of cool. Well, no, they were prepping for war. They were gathering their strength from squirrels apparently. Muskets. Very strange. Don't go to Sweetwaters, by the way.

Don't go there. Not after that. I didn't know if there was something else. There was a lot of abandoned tires in the ravine or something. So where are we? Jerry, cut that whole story. I don't know. I think it was a good story.

I think we should keep it, Jerry. Is she dead? Is she in the great periodical room of the sky? All right, so these recreationists, that's where I was, are saying maybe you should sue the car company, because cars should be safer. And people went, oh, well, that's not a bad idea. Yeah, because it's a very revolutionary idea.

These guys were saying, with the Pinto in particular, I'm starting to notice a lot of charred bodies that are otherwise in perfect shape look great, aside from the charred part, right? They don't have any contusions. They don't have any broken bones. So these accents are happening at really low speed. Maybe it's actually a design flaw with Ford.

And so the lawyers were like, that sounds great. And they started circling the courthouses, like the flying monkeys in the Wizard of Oz, and dropping lawsuits down on a Ford's head. And at first, Ford was like, bring it. We're Ford. Juris are made up of like, upstanding registered voters, right? We're going to be just fine.

And Ford won a couple at first, and then they started losing them. And Ford was still kind of like, we're still taking the jury trial on. But the whole thing turned on this one trial in 1977 in Orange County, California. And Ford lost big time, actually, in a Pinto case. They lost, and this was in 1977,

they lost $125 million in damages to a boy named, he's 13 years old, Richard Grimshaw was very sad. He's burned very badly, and the driver of the car died. And 125 million bucks, I mean, it's a lot of money now. But back then, it's a ton of money. And it's what they call, you've heard of like a symbolic award where they'll just hit a company with a ton of money, and it later gets reduced.

What they really care about is that the media knows that they got hit with this ton of money. That was sort of the case here. It got reduced to what, three and a half million bucks. It's still pretty significant. Still a lot of money back then, of course. But that initial figure really made a point and sent shock waves through the auto industry.

And so Ford changed its tactics. They were like, okay, well, maybe we'll start settling. And we got another quote, and Chuck reads it way better than me. So if you don't mind. Yeah, this was an attorney for Ford. And I'll read it in the voice of Lionel Hutz of The Simpsons. The great Phil Hartman. Here we go.

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 will settle. Thanks for that. That is a... He wasn't overheard saying that. A TV reporter stuck a microphone in his face,

and he said that. That was his quote that he gave. Amazon Alexa didn't overhear him saying that to his wife at home later. Exactly. So Ford was like, okay, kill that guy, that lawyer. We're going to start settling. And so they did start settling.

There's some benefits to settling. Well, there's some drawbacks too. One is that it tells the entire world that you know your case is terrible. But it says, well, there's going to be lower payouts to the lawyers, and there's going to be lower payouts to the defendants. And it also cuts down on discovery. So discovery, if you go to a jury, the plaintiff, the person filing the case, has legal access to any and all documents

that you have that prove their case against you, right? So with all these jury trials, there was this steady trickle, or flow even, of... Yeah, it wasn't even a trickle. It was a flow of damning evidence coming out of Ford, going into the hands of lawyers who were happily turning it around and handing it to the media, who were reporting on this stuff, which was getting the public just good and pissed,

and that drumbeat that Chuck was talking about started to really pick up. And people were really looking at Ford in this weird, unsettling, non-blinky way, you know? Everyone took their shirts off, and they put war paint on, and Ford was starting to get a little nervous. They were like, like us? And America said, you. That got a little weird. Yeah, thank you for clapping for that.

Thank you, buddy. You get a T-shirt. That bordered on performance art. Did it? I think so. Had I taken my shirt off, it would have been perfect. Oh, my God. Do it. No. You're out of your mind?

You guys can cheer until blood comes out of your mouths, and I still wouldn't take my shirt off. There is nothing you can do to make me take my shirt off. Actually, I would probably be more able to take my shirt off, which would be... That does feel good, though. Now we've reached David Lee Roth level. I wish I had another shot. Oh, my God.

That's shy. That's just having common values. Not taking your shirt off in public when people tell you to. That's normal stuff, man. You did good is what I'm saying. Thank you. Jerry, cut out the last one. Serious. Shame on all of you. Hometown show.

Finally, in 1977, Safety 301 came into effect. What we talked about was you should be able to hit a car from 20 miles an hour, not be a flaming death ball. In 1977, New Pinto debuted with a very brand-new safety feature, that $1, one-pound piece of plastic in between the flaming death bolts and the gas tank. That they've known since 1968 would save lives. Boo. Thank you.

Lee Iacocca by this time and Ford in general were scared to death of the PR crisis that had been growing and growing. The whole thing, again, was started by Dowey's article. Not only did he get the Mother of Jones readership involved, he really kind of awakened the mainstream media to the thing. Everybody was reporting on this. People were suing Ford. It was a huge big problem. Lee Iacocca told everybody, clam up.

That's actually a direct quote from his book, his 1988 book. I used to think in a happier time that it was called Straight Talk, but that's a Dolly Parton movie. It's called Talking Straight. I got to say, you sent me this initial, Josh wrote this show, and he sent it and he said Straight Talk, and I was like, did Dolly Parton play Lee Iacocca? It still sends it.

I never corrected it. I never saw the movie. That would be great. You never saw Straight Talk? Oh, no. I'm so shamed. Is that going to be your movie crush pick? Oh, maybe. That's buzz marketing. Now I have to do it.

No, no, no. So, yeah, it was called Talking Straight in the end. I think Straight Talk might have been the working title. But then he says, we were so afraid of this PR crisis bankrupting forward, if you could imagine that. They just said, no one talk. Don't talk to anybody. Just clam up.

And they thought that if somebody said something the wrong way and there was a scary turn of phrase or something like that that was just taken the wrong way, it would be seen as an admission of guilt. The problem was, to the public, the fact that they weren't talking was seen as an admission of guilt more than anything. Yeah, it was a big deal.

60 Minutes was literally knocking at the door. Morley Safer was at Ford knocking at the door. And he said, I'm Morley Safer. And if you're not intimidated now, I got Ed Bradley with me. We've sent two of our best dudes. So you should be pretty worried. And Ford was crouched down under their window like, are they still out there? He said, it's so funny.

I used to love 60 Minutes. But when I was like 13, it's such a weird show to watch as a kid. It's sophisticated. Yeah, it was not sophisticated. Apparently you were? Yeah, it was not. I don't know what, I like the little. Then after that, you just like, all right, I'll turn the channel.

And also, now that I think about it, I think it came on after either like the wonderful world of Disney or. That was great. Or Wow Kingdom or something. Anyway, I don't know what that is, sir. That was like full house was on there. That was like the 90s. You're way off.

Yeah, I'm so old. Do you see this beard? So much gray. Like the Davey Crockett story hour. Was that one? Let's make that one. Well, I'm not that old. Okay.

Night writer. That was a good, I had a good theme song. This is devolved into like, shout out your favorite old thing. We're almost done, everybody. Calm down. All right. We're hitting the end. In June, they started their own recall proceedings and 60 minutes was on the door.

They're knocking. They're knocking. And Ford says, you know what? We're going to undertake a voluntary recall. If anyone believe that they'll make us look so good of 1.4. And I don't know if we mentioned the Pinto was a big, big seller. Like despite all this, it was a super, super popular car. The best selling subcompact of the 70s.

It very much was. It's Winona Ryder's car in Stranger Things 2. Oh, yeah? Haven't seen it. I don't know. Was it her car in Stranger Things 1? I don't remember. But they feature the Pinto in Stranger Things 2.

Night writer. Spoiler. Thanks a lot. Now I know what car she drives. All right. So they undertake a 1.4 million car recall on just the Pinto alone but also another car they had, right? The Mercury Bobcat.

Right. Which is it's like more luxurious but equally deadly twin. And we're not quite sure like what made it so luxurious. No idea. Maybe it had like an onboard like blow dryer brush to like feather your hair with while you were going home. Well, you sit in the back seat and they just have the thing from the hair place that just lowers over your hair.

That is the pinnacle of luxury that we can think of for the 1970s. God bless the 70s. All right. The bad news is though, and this is very sad to stop laughing, between the time Ford decided to undergo that recall in June and the time it told consumers like internally they said, all right, June, we'll do this. September, we announced it to the public. In those few months, there was a very, very sad crash rear end.

You need another shot. No. A rear end impact where some young women died and there was a prosecutor in Indiana named Michael Constantino that said, you know what? I've had it. I've done. I know the deal. I'm going to bring these dudes on trial for murder, murder, like he filed criminal homicide

charges against the executives at Ford for that crash. Yeah. Very big deal. Yeah. So, and it wasn't just like a flash in the pan like this trial actually, or these charges went to trial. It was over like three years. And over the three years, everybody was reporting on Ford executives on trial for murder every

day. The charges got dismissed, but the public criminalizing of Ford's executives were, it was huge. Like it was a bad PR crisis before that it couldn't get worse than that. Your executives on trial for murder. Right. Yeah, for sure. So despite all this, despite the fact that the Pinto was a flaming death trap to a certain

extent, when you look at the numbers today and when you look at the real statistics, it was not much worse and sometimes better than other cars on the market at the time that would kill you from fire. Like the Vega or the Gremlin, they would kill you. Right. So we tried to figure out, and actually it turns out there was this 1993 article in Harvard Law Review where this guy said, I've done math, I've actually figured it out. And here's the number I came up with.

It was 27, 27 people, is probably the number of people who died in low speed rear collision impact fires in Pinto. And that's over like 10 years. Yeah. Yeah. Like millions of cars, 27. It's not that bad actually, right? It was way less than I think Mother Jones said like 500 to 900.

And this is so Mother Jones. They said that was a conservative estimate that we just made up. And then I think 60 minutes, Chuck's beloved 60 minutes said like thousands of people had died in Pinto's. No one knew, so they were just making up numbers. But this 1993 article said no, it was probably 27 actually. Exactly. So in the end, we look back and the Pinto was, even though it could have been a flaming

death trap, what it really was was a very bad victim of PR. Yeah. You know? The problem was is that the way you could die in a Pinto was just too bad to be allowed to continue, right? The idea that like if you've gotten a rear end collision and the passenger compartment filled up with gas, that's bad enough. But the idea that it could happen at such a low speed that you would still be conscious

when you caught fire and burned to death, the American public said, no, that can't happen. It doesn't matter. And so thanks to Dowey's article and 60 minutes eventually, the Pinto was basically laid to waste as far as the American public was concerned and still has a bad reputation today. That's right. In the end, the Pinto took the rear impact. But not in the good way. Not in the good way.

In every kind of bad, you know? That's true. I never thought about that. So in the end, Mr. Lee Ayakoka would go on to write his legend with the Chrysler Corporation by bringing them back from kind of the brink of bankruptcy into huge success in the 90s and the 80s. And he was named, I think, by Portfolio Magazine as the 18th greatest CEO of all time, just ahead of Oprah.

He just bulls*****s team Oprah up here, wrote a couple of books, wrote that biography that Josh talked about that Dolly Parton did not star in, and another called, where have all the leaders gone? And Mr. Ayakoka is still alive today, the ripe old age of 92 in Bell Air neighborhood of Los Angeles, California. Where there is nary a Pinto to be found. That's right. And that is the story of the Ford Pinto.

Well, that went pretty well, Chuck. Yeah. If you want to get in touch with us for any reason, you can tweet to us at SYSK Podcast. I'm at JoshClarke and I also have a website called RUseriesClarke.com. Chuck's on Facebook at Charles W. Chuck Bryant or at Stuff You Should Know. You can email us and Jerry to StuffPodcast at HowStuffWorks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web, StuffYouShouldKnow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuffWorks.com.

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