Ford Pinto. The fireball of death, or is it? #blogpost

I have seen many making jokes about Ford Pinto. And yes I can agree that Ford made mistakes with it. How ever, I cannot say that it would deserve it’s reputation. In fact I would like to claim that it was a lot better car than it’s reputation gives for it.

I’m not trying to claim that it was perfect as it was, cause it wasn’t
I’m not trying to claim that ford didn’t knew about the problem, as it did.
But I’m still claiming that it was just as safe on average, as the cars it competed with. or maybe only marginally worse.

Note that we are talking about car from 70’s, For modern cars cathing a fire in an accident is quite rare, and usually requires impact so hard that the occupants of the car die anyway. but for 70’s car catching a fire in an accident, while it wasn’t too common it did happen a lot more often than with modern cars.

For your convenience here is few links

Now granted, Pinto did have a nasty habbit of catching fire after getting rear ended. but it wasnt a case of combusting every time.
The impala rearending the pinto in these videos, a video that has become almost a meme nowdays. Well I have read from somewhere but I couldnt find it again, that it was 4th impala, 4th pinto, 4th attempt to to cause a fire, and a tiny incidiary bomb making sure that it would burn.
Yes it could be proven that pintos were prone to catch fire, but getting it on film was a lot more harder than just crashing something in to a pinto.