You're Wrong About - The Exploding Ford Pinto

Episode Date: April 2, 2020

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 PatreonDonate on PaypalBuy cute merchWhere else to find us: Sarah's other show, Why Are Dads Mike's other show, Maintenance PhaseContinue reading →Support the show

People want to not die, but they also want to play golf, and it's just hard to balance those priorities Welcome to your wrong about where every joke is revealed as a tragedy. Oh That's quite good and on theme. Thank you. I didn't even know you knew about this one I know what I've learned from VH ones. I love the 70s 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, and I'm Michael Hobbs I'm a reporter for the Huffington Post and you can support us at patreon.com

Slash you're wrong about and if things are feeling tight right now, and you're already supporting us there You can unsupport us. Yes, because this is an interesting time Like when you were a kid in the 90s where 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 worldcast is going to be interesting like second of all. No, you don't We're going to talk about another interesting time today because the 1970s yes, and it's beautiful Exploding automobiles. Yes. What do you remember about the exploding Ford Pinto?

I just know that they exploded and this was apparently a topic of great murder. Yes for people I don't know if people found it funny at the time, but I remember it being discussed as a funny thing Oh, yeah, the media I encountered about it in the 2000s. Yes, I think I was introduced to this by a joke too There's a joke in Wayne's world or Wayne's world to huh where a car is following them And they slow down and then the car runs into them like barely a tap Oh, yeah, and then the Pinto explodes. I don't know. It's interesting because problems in an American car manufacturer are such a Source spot for Americans and I think especially during that period and I wonder if yeah Exploding Pinto seemed funny at the time because it was like a gallows humor extreme version of maybe other problems that weren't happening

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 to like we 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 And even with gun deaths were you know not doing great at the serious taking game Yeah, but it's also I mean this was also the largest auto recall ever at the time It was actually like a 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 also been looking forward to this episode because it's kind of a throwback to 2018 YWA when we first started out when we were young and dewy and every episode wasn't about a woman's life being slowly Destroyed I know and 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. Oh, yeah, you love doing that Yes, yeah, I feel like do you remember in the 90s when Gwyneth Paltrow was doing some Probably atrocious grew ball 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 My notes are like only 51 pages long. This is not gonna be like of two hour long episode It's like a little cute myth debunk debunk out of here kind of episode secure little duckling of an episode Yes, so this is you Gwyneth Paltrow taking a break from making authentic oven roasted Vegan pizza. Yes, you just like have your one cigarette of the week and like let loose This is this is gonna be easy and fun and quarantine company. This is what we're going for Yes, we'll get back to the human horror in the next couple weeks. Yeah, don't worry cuz I work on this show. So it's inevitable

So we begin with the context of the auto industry in the late 1960s I mean, I also think 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. Hmm. What one thing that we've discovered on this 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 in their bed and like cyclically again and again. Yeah, it's exactly the same thing with car safety Hmm, so the idea that cars can kill you and the idea that auto crashes are like Controllable by people and their responsibility of large corporations is not a natural idea

There was about four decades there We're basically the car companies successfully argued that they weren't responsible for car crashes Hmm. The thing is we are supposed to keep the car driving like if the hub cap falls off when you're driving That's our problem. But if you crash the car into a tree, that's you so there's no reason for us to have seat belts There's no reason for us to design cars to save you. So it's very mid-century American personal Responsibility like you're on your own now Jack you bought it 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 and when was that? 1965 okay, 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 Can you talk about the kind of post-war to nuclear age view of corporate innovation in America? 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 the 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 Hmm 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 Right that it's not that they make a car and then like they iterate on it every year 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 They're 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 like these dashboards that look cool They're like a they had like a shelf design with like the speedometers like way in it And they're really cool looking but the shelf design ends up Decapitating people when they get in car accidents. Oh, is it like at neck level on the vehicle? Oh 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

This is also like this. I think I also learned this on VH1 that in the 70s lawn darts were a popular toy until they were too many Injuries and it's like well whose idea was it to let kids throw darts at each other exactly Yeah, like do you really think that people are just gonna not crash into stuff like ever? Is that your plan? Well, this is what's really interesting So there's old 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 Which is like I this is a classic to me legal argument food group of like yeah 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 Yeah, I think you see that a lot in bad-faith arguments 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 percent 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 all linked 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 a few safety researchers. They were not cognizant of the degree to which crash worthiness could be designed into cars So it's basically just like well if I get in a car crash, I'm gonna die There's nothing like Ford and GM and Chrysler can actually do about it. 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've 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 Yeah at some point and that that's part of its life also that it has pontoons I think that's very important Yeah, so now we get to the design of the Ford pinto. Let me send you a photo of this car hang on 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 All right, you see it. Oh Yeah, it's cute, right. Yeah, I would drive that It is I want to say a hatchback. Yeah, 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 old mobiles and I'm like zipping around between them

Because I'm a I'm on my way to a babysitting emergency or something But I'm like I'm I'm a Charlie's angel pretending to be a babysitter. Like that's the energy of this car Yeah, and so I just sent you another one where it's a pinto in a field with a horse next to it Which is very literal. Yeah, the this is their ad where they're like, no, no, don't think of the bean. Yeah So, I mean 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 Really? So it's like european style. 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 are 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 like they all knew each other They were all in detroit You know one year forward 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 Oh 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 And so in the late 1960s li aya koka 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 two thousand dollars and what's two thousand dollars in today money

That's like eight thousand bucks. Okay, which is actually a good deal for a brand new car. That's a car of the people 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. Wow. They just like Rammed this thing through production. Just get it onto the market get it under this price Yeah, they did that with the delorean too. 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 back seat 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 Oh, yeah, I feel like you see Because I read a lot of like clayboy magazines from the 60s and 70s 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 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 a Engineer saying that the pressure was to get the trunk big enough that it could hold two sets of golf clubs

Wow So this is like they are marketing this car to like the playboy reader Weekend corporate golfer type. 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. That's like their only understanding of humans. Yes, exactly So basically to do this instead of putting the gas tank above the axle 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. Oh, okay. Is it that little like metal tongue? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, no 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 It's like that thing in mission impossible where like a helicopter blade almost slices Tom cruises 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

So the car has this massive vulnerability But nobody like thinks about it right because when you're looking at a car and kicking the tires You're not like where is the fuel tank located? Like you just assume that it's a normal car that is not going to explode on any impact 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 goods we rely on and so Basically as soon as this car hits the market, it's a huge hit at some point in the mid 70s

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 70s We start to get a few whispers of weird accidents So in 1972 a woman named lily gray is driving in a forward pinto with her neighbor a 13 year old boy named richard grimshaw I like how it makes it sound like richard just owns his own home

So let me keep that mental image. So for whatever reason they're driving on the highway the pinto stalls So it just kind of stops working on the highway somebody behind them crashes into them And the car explodes And so lily 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 doors. Oh god. Oh, 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 um 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 them gas station that they forgot that they're 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

And now the gas cap comes attached So that people like me who would do that kind of thing can't do it anymore 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 Is there any kind of public awareness to the tune of hey, these cars explode like more than other cars

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 Wow, 11 of these tests averaging a 31 mile per hour impact speed came before pinto started rolling out of the factories Only three cars passed 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 fire trap But they decided that it was cheaper

To put it on the market let people die and pay out settlements Then to fix it So basically what this document shows is that it costs 11 dollars To put a thicker safer better gas tank onto the car And there's 12.5 million pentos 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 dollars per death per death that gives you 50 million dollars

And fixing this gas tank for 11 bucks each gives you 137 million. Oh my god So it's cheaper to let a bunch of people die Then it is to fix this car. I know we said that we were going to do like escapist counter programming, but 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 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 burn 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 What if they just 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

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 seatbelts as options So a lot of safety options were actually add-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. Yeah. So a lot of people didn't buy these options. My Parents have an old 1992 Honda Civic and the passenger side Side mirror was an option back then so it doesn't have a passenger side side mirror You just use the rear-view mirror. Wow. So like this is not something that we've done away with now Yeah, and just like safety as a premium feature. Yeah. Yeah, and so the article one of Pulitzer

Oh, great. Who's the who's the author who wrote it? Mark Dowey 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

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 Yeah And also this document wasn't even correct that it estimated there would 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 2 000 deaths and 10 000 injuries

Wow And so this article is one of the most popular in the country. It becomes this massive national story It's actually this is nuts I looked up on you know the n-gram 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 really because everyone's writing about pinto. Yeah, like the term death trap That's basically like what this car is called and then that popularizes the term for other things, right? I didn't really think of it as a literal term. I know me before actually

Yeah, oh the other effect of this that happens almost immediately is that it becomes the butt of Jokes so i'm gonna read you a couple of the jokes that I found oh boy. I bet there's going to be some karnak in here Oh my god. How did you know that? I just knew I just felt it. I felt karnak Much like karnak does I felt karnak in my future. Can you describe for listeners what karnak is what the joke is? Okay So karnak is a character that johnny karson 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 mcman 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 a setup for and then yes the envelope Do you want me to read you some examples? Yes, I would love that more than anything in the world 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? Oh

It takes a second they always take a second I love that. That's so silly, right? But it's because I love that. There's also a good one Maybe you want to guess this one. He holds the envelope up and he says shareholder. Uh-huh. It's a sunny bono. Oh my god. How do you know this? Apparently I think in in johnny karson jokes You could tell from my pronunciation that I meant c-h-e-r I do that one or maybe I'm just thinking it's the 70s like there have to be I'm just like ready for sure Yeah, it was what did sunny bono used to be shareholder. Yes So johnny karson is one of the worst people ever to live on this planet and we need to do an episode on him

Oh, is he tell me he's terrible. I'm not going to ruin it But this is a book club that we need to do very soon. I'm excited So do you want to hear his ford pinto joke? Yes, I do. Okay. It's also I like it because it's also misogynistic Which you would not expect from this, right? I would expect that to fit in somehow though ampiantly So he holds the envelope to the turban 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 I didn't when I first read that I didn't get that the dolly parton thing. He's spelling it p a i r Like name a pear. Yeah, it's not great. So dolly parton is his symbolized by her her breasts She just is she is her breasts. Yes. That's the joke so 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 pentos Which is like, all right. Pretty good. I appreciate any vitriol directed at an unsafe product Another quip. It's not clear who this is attributed to. I saw someone attribute it to oscar wild, which is not correct Right someone referred to the ford pinto as a barbeque 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 That sounds like an urban legend, but i'm also totally willing to believe it's true Exactly, it sounds like an urban legend because that's not that good of a slogan for a car anyway Right, it's and it's also kind of weirdly sexual, but then you look at car ad copy of the time You're like, oh, that's also weirdly sexual and confusing. There were a lot of bad tag lines back then So it's not completely out of the ordinary, right? But so this car basically becomes The laughing stock of the country what what's interesting is the national highway traffic safety administration because they're getting all of these post cards

They open an investigation of the car the day after the article comes out What is their job generally? Like what's their wheelhouse? Oh, 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 I'm 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 underexploited in this country. Totally. It's also wildly popular. I don't know why more people don't do this 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. So it couldn't get her mom to see 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 and then does that Work or does the story have a happy ending? The story sara has a debunking So this is where we get into where the ride gets bumpy. Yes Okay

So what happens is this this narrative is is very well entrenched the only people that start questioning this narrative in the early 1990s A engineer and researcher named gary schwarz writes an article called the myth of the ford pinto That is published in the ruckers law review where i'm sure it's as much of a blockbuster as the original article was Yes, exactly You know people other than you like to turn to law review articles for their salacious reading and then this one drives me nuts Eight years later two researchers named matthew lee and david ermann They re-interview everybody who worked at ford. They re-interview 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 east isle argument called Pinto madness as a flawed landmark narrative on organizational and network analysis Okay, which is like guys you couldn't give it somewhat better name like it's academic titling mike You know that it has to be simple phrase colon complicated boring phrase. That's the law 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 I mean, I for one am intrigued, but I understand that i'm always, you know, not Representative in some ways so the place to start is

Almost all of the details In the mother jones article are wrong. Oh my god So we're gonna 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. Oh my god 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

When is the car on the market? It's released 1971 71. Yeah, okay So this secret document which has 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. Oh my god 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 is 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 like all ford cars or all cars all cars Okay, so it's 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? 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 up like the li aya koka level people Also never saw it. It's like some weird random Accountants working in ford who are like here's our projections of what's going to happen It wasn't like a blockbuster document or anything

Right 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 Yeah, 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. Wow 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? Is this another parable about fact checking? Absolutely So this is from the gary shorts article where he goes through and sort of reads all of these background documents In some 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 Well, at least it was a document. I mean, they got that right. Yeah 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 what they would basically back up into a wall at 20 miles an hour And so the car then explodes But the Ford engineers are 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

A immovable object going 20 miles an hour backwards very often 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? Yeah, like we kind of expect Corporations to suck in that way and it's 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 Well, I mean also it's it's 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 And presumably the people doing the crash tests 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 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, right?

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 that 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 for 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. Yeah, 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 is like that was the law back then that cars had to withstand a 30 mile per hour impact So they rammed at 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

Of the cars that they were ramming it with so that it would pierce the gas tank So they essentially changed the rules midstream So that they could get the pentos to explode So that they could get forward to do this recall because they're like, oh my god People keep sending us postcards. Yeah, it's too many postcards And nobody at the time wanted to be like, uh, we looked into this and it's fine because it was in the article I did one appeal. It's her 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

And it's just I mean what they've said afterwards is just it was just easier to tell for to recall the car than to like actually It's like fine. Fuck it. Yeah I get it though. I understand that there's this the 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 Yeah, and the final debunking Is remember how the mother jones article said that between 500 and 900 people had been killed by exploding pentos gary schwarz 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 pentos and is that comparable to like say deaths and fires and volks wagons or is it like a little on the high side This is the dark part is that the forward pinto is actually significantly safer Than the vw beetle or the toyota carola or the amc gremlin or chevrolet vega. Oh god. Oh the poor pinto. I know you're wrong about the pinto It was it was unfairly maligned. We really are Yeah, pinto was a good little car and a good little beam

I mean, I think one of the main lessons here And this is what gary schwarz 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 percent 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 traps It's not that people didn't die horribly inside the pentos at times It's just that they died horribly inside of all sorts of other kinds of cars and with as much frequency People were dying in car accidents a lot back then. It's almost like this show has themes. I know So this is how gary schwarz 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 Its overall fatality rate was roughly in the middle of the subcompact 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. Mm-hmm. It's not remarkable within american car manufacturing Like maybe it does suck and so like it is bad in some ways, but not in a unique way 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 drunk space and so that's where they put the gas tank Then how did we get here? Like why was this article written and did this guy did I mean? How so I mean before we get to the debunking of the debunking. I think it's good to like stop here I have literally no idea what's going to happen next. I feel uneasy my like 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

Which is what the show is all about because everything we're talking about is in plain sight. Yeah, 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 Yeah, 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 because everybody already knows it You're not going to get a good headline out of ongoing situation still terrible Yes, and so this mother jones article is based on these secret documents and a whistleblower From inside forth is probably the person who leaked the documents to mark doey Yeah, it's got mark ruffalo movie written all over it. It makes it seem like this is forbidden knowledge

Everyone wants a deep throat. Yeah When nobody wants to just be like car accidents are bad and they're easily preventable 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 like 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 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 It's like why was a government agency doing the thing that we're accusing for it 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 corporations rights to over-regulate them, right? There's this huge fear of over-regulation even before Reagan, right? 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 Okay, so the government the federal government is doing homework to turn into the corporations to be like don't worry This idea we have will not be too costly to you. We promise. Yes, and literally Doing the gross thing That offends us. Yeah, because they're the sally field parent in this mrs. Doubt fire called life. They're the ones who have to Figure out how much a human life is worth in dollars Calculations can be done about rollover accidents. Exactly. And so in 1974 Gerald Ford Issues an executive order that requires all regulatory agencies

To provide numerical estimates of the costs and benefits associated with any rules being propagated Oh, so it's a tale of two fords. And so, 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 I have no interest in like defending ford I don't give a shit like if people if people want to say that like ford is awful and amoral and balances lives Against its own legal costs. Like I don't care. Yeah, it's like, yeah, of course. They do just maybe not to a spectacular extent 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 we blamed ford

It's very easy to turn this into a bad apple story of like look how gross ford is Isn't it fascinating that pinto becomes Such a known phenomenon and there are pinto jokes into the 90s And it's almost like we know that if we keep saying pinto, we'll be like, yeah pinto pinto is the unsafe car pentos And it's like, well, they're kind of all unsafe. Yeah. Once again, it's like we're focusing on the pinto to avoid a whole system that facilitates unsafe vehicles. Yeah. And also, I mean the the author of this history of auto safety

mentions there's lots of design decisions that car makers have made that have resulted in way more than 27 deaths 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 car 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. It's like friday the 13th three We're like, yeah, yeah jason kill the teens exactly like it's difficult to write about things that don't have this unexpected counterintuitive aspect

Isn't it terrible that our ability to be interested in our own safety is dependent on there being twists? Yeah I mean this is this to me is like the foundational error of this is that Calling it a story of corporate malfeasance. It's not wrong Right, 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. It's like this virus is infecting people. 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 Why have we created this moist area? Yeah, and then periodically we're like, oh my god. There's mildew here. I can't Yeah, 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 government's 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 descriptions of the pinto case Probably implies an inflated level of rationality to what is better understood as institutionally embedded

Unreflective action. This is the same guys that gave their paper a terrible title. What they mean is I really I was just thinking Oh, that's really good institutionally embedded unreflective action unreflective action that may see I am a refugee from academia. So I'm like, yeah, it's great 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 like a bunch of people are gonna 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 these smoking gun memos We're not gonna find them What we're gonna 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 the story to not like 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 right Yes, 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 at all

Fits. Yeah, so that's it. That's our story. Well, wait. I want to know about this colonelist. What's his deal? Oh, we never found out nobody knows it's kind of frustrating actually that nobody has gone back and done a like How did this happen thing not yet? Because usually I wanted like some sort of kitty genivy style like who had lunch with who to get this Yeah, what I think it actually is I have no evidence for this. Okay. This is your nancy grace moment 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. Yeah, I don't want to like paint all whistleblowers with a bad brush But oftentimes right, but they're humans, you know, they're not all ink. They're not all mark ruffalo types Yes, it's not a mark ruffalo movie tragically And so 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 miss and there might be some truth to that it might be a mixture Yeah, and again, I like I don't want to defend ford like Like seven times. I just want to be really careful. Are you imagining there's going to be this blockbuster this week? people are going to cancel you for being a fan of ford Well, I'm a like this is a very like believe people when they come forward about stuff podcast

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 no, it doesn't mean we should instinctively disbelieve whistleblowers It doesn't mean we should verify. 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 I don't know the fact that if he had a more general story

Like four doesn't care about safety in general or like federal safety regulations are beholden to the auto industry That's a perfectly great story, but I kind of it just doesn't have the punch of like they knew So yeah, so uh, that's our uh, that's our extremely brief episode for today I think it's like an extremely normal sized podcast episode. That's true It's like where this restaurant that over time has become known for making huge Impossible to eat burgers. Yeah, we're like, here's a normal burger. You want to do yourself on have fun Don't be too disappointed. I think this is a nice change. This was fun. Yeah, we're doing uh, we're doing a little brief throwback episode These are good. Yeah to our salad days two years ago. Yeah

So, uh, yeah, don't believe anything you read in the newspaper and um always defend ford against any attack That's what people are taking away from us 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 Yes, and so just like watch an episode of the nanny and take some notes and then have a fun researchy day Yes, I'm imagining you with an envelope held up to your head right now Oh