Check Out This 1977 Televised Debate Over The Ford Pinto With Milton Friedman And A Very Young Michael Moore
Yes, that is Michael Moore. On further review, that is not Michael Moore. The author of this video at Youtube was mistaken, but it's still a very interesting clip. The Ford Pinto controversy all began when Mother Jones published this article: Pinto Madness.
Fixing the Pinto would have added $13 to the price of an $1830 car. Ford chose to not to spend the $13, and hundreds of people died as a result.
I remember my only ride in a Pinto. It was a brand new 1974 version, sharp - white with orange stripes. Dr. Jerry Ruff, a local pediatrician with four sons, who threw the greatest birthday parties ever seen in Bloomington, Indiana in the 1970s or any time since, had won it in a local raffle. The parties weren't birthday parties really, they were one-day Olympics consisting of 10 events involving at least 20 kids of various ages, complete with an awards ceremony and prizes at the end of hours and hours of competition.
Anyway, so Dr. Ruff, a wiry talkative dude about 5'8'' 140 lbs, who won two Little 500 bicycle championships while an undergrad at Indiana University, who later ran the Boston Marathon in 1977 with his 11-year-old son Joe also completing the race. The pediatrician Dr. Ruff, who never slept it seemed to me, who told crazed parents who called him at home at 3 am worried about their feverish child: 'Your kid is fine. His internal organs won't begin to cook until his temperature hits at least 105. Call me if that happens. Goodnight.'
This same Dr. Ruff who required his 4 boys to earn daily TV time by doing a set amount of pull-ups, push-ups and sit-ups, all supervised and recorded by his equally spry wife Nancy. Sports were free TV, no push-ups were required to watch. But god forbid, if you wanted to see 30 minutes of Sanford & Son, Mr. Eddie's Father or Good Times at the Ruff house, then Joe was going to have to do 25 reps of something, and so were you.
So Jerry wins this sweet Ford Pinto somehow. He probably rigged the raffle. Next day Joe calls and says 'come take a ride, we're all going to drive around town while my dad goes to car dealerships and tries to sell it.' I was 8 and this was therefore a damn good plan. I hopped on my bike and covered the mile to the Ruff house in 2 minutes. We all piled in the Pinto. Jerry, driving. Mike in the passenger seat and Andy, Ted, Joe and I squeezed into the ridiculously tiny back seat.
We didn't have an accident. We didn't die. Dr. Ruff found a dealer to buy it. And Ford Pintos were pretty damn cool in my eyes.
Yet, we would have burned like toast. And all so Ford could save $13 bucks per car.
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Pinto Madness
For seven years the Ford Motor Company sold cars in which it knew hundreds of people would needlessly burn to death.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/1977/09/pinto-madness
Aug 22, 2012 at 1:41 AM
Reader Comments (5)
Car designers face cost driven choices and tradeoffs all the time. Lots of good things get left off because of (seemingly) affordable cost. I am reminded of the recent Ford Mustang re-design where they retained the solid rear axle because moving to a common-on-any-late-20th-century vehicle independent rear suspension would have added about $400 to the manufacturing cost and probably $1000 to the sticker price. Plus a component of the muscle car aficionado demographic probably wants the solid axle to do rubber laying burnouts.
Add a few of these choices and a $25K car becomes a $40K car. So it was not really about the $13.
What is truly despicable is when Ford had a few hundred thousand of these cars on the road and internally debated the much higher cost of a a recall to fix it and figured that keeping quiet, letting people die and paying out some insurance claims to the survivors of the minority who successfully sued them was cheaper. (my half-assed recollection of the events)
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Good catch. It fooled a lot of people, including me.
http://www.google.com/search?q=milton+friedman+michael+moore&sugexp=chrome,mod=16&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
Learning is a good process. Here the effectiveness of learning is clearly mention. It is also useful in automobile sector. By learning Ford discover a new model. The improvement also takes place every year. At the time of driving a car always care about safety. Use such type of car which is safety.