The Ford Pinto: A Brief History of Ford's $2,000 Gamble

The Ford Pinto is one of the best-known cars in America for one thing, and that thing is mostly wrong, or at least badly told. The real story is stranger. It includes a sales smash, a van-cosplay wagon, a famous memo that wasn't about the Pinto and a flying car. Let's do the funny parts first. The serious parts get treated seriously.

Lee's car: 2,000 and 2,000

Ford wanted a small car to fight imports like the VW Beetle and Toyota Corolla. Ford president Lee Iacocca set a brief that fit on a napkin: a 1971 model that weighed under 2,000 lb and cost under $2,000. Inside Ford, the project became known as "Lee's car."

The Pinto went from conception to delivery in 25 months, against an industry average of 43, the shortest production planning schedule in auto history at the time. It went on sale on September 11, 1970, with the tagline The Little Carefree Car, named after a spotted horse. It borrowed its powertrain from the European Escort.

Rushed? Yes. In late October 1970, less than two months after launch, 26,000 Pintos were recalled to fix an accelerator that could stick. In March 1971, Ford recalled all 220,000 Pintos built before March 19 over fuel vapors in the air filter that could be ignited by a backfire. The Little Carefree Car was keeping somebody busy.

Then everyone bought one

The Pinto sold more than 100,000 by January 1971 and 352,402 in its first model year. In 1974 Ford built 544,209, its best year. By the end of production in July 1980, there were 3,150,943, more than its domestic rivals, the Chevrolet Vega and the AMC Gremlin, combined. The Gremlin, by the way, beat it to market by six months, and the Vega arrived the day before the Pinto. The 1970s subcompact war was a knife fight in a phone booth.

The wagon, and the wagon that wanted to be a van

The Pinto station wagon arrived on February 24, 1972. Then Ford had its most 1970s idea: the Pinto Cruising Wagon. It was a sedan-delivery version styled to look like a small custom van, with round "bubble" porthole windows in the side panels and optional vinyl graphics. It's a subcompact wearing a shag-carpet costume, and we love it unconditionally.

The Mercury Bobcat: Pinto, but fancier

Lincoln-Mercury dealers got a twin, the Mercury Bobcat. It started in Canada for 1974 and came to the US for 1975 as the Runabout hatchback and Villager wagon, with an egg-crate grille and chrome headlight bezels. For 1976, the Pinto got that grille and those bezels too, so the "upscale" Bobcat's look was handed down to its cheaper sibling. Mercury built 224,026 Bobcats from 1975 to 1980.

The serious part: the fuel tank

Here the jokes stop. The Pinto's fuel-system design, with the tank between the rear axle and the rear bumper (standard practice for US subcompacts then), could be damaged in moderate-speed rear-end crashes, causing fuel leaks and fires. People were killed and badly burned. That's why the rest of this section is written straight.

Some context: federal rear-impact fuel-system standards were still being written while the Pinto was developed. In August 1970, the month the Pinto went into production, NHTSA proposed a stricter 20 mph fixed-barrier standard. Ford chose to meet a 20 mph moving-barrier standard for all its cars by 1973.

The "Pinto memo" wasn't about the Pinto

The most famous document in this story is often misdescribed. In 1973, Ford's Environmental and Safety Engineering division wrote a cost–benefit analysis called Fatalities Associated with Crash Induced Fuel Leakage and Fires. It's now known as the Grush/Saunby Report, or the "Pinto memo." It was submitted to NHTSA to support Ford's objection to a proposed stronger fuel-system standard. It dealt mainly with fires in rollovers, for all cars sold in the US by all manufacturers, not Pinto rear-end crashes specifically. The values it put on deaths and burn injuries came from figures NHTSA itself had calculated in 1972. Cost–benefit analysis was a standard tool accepted by both the industry and the regulator at the time.

"Pinto Madness" (1977)

In 1977, Mark Dowie's Pinto Madness appeared in Mother Jones. It presented the memo as proof that Ford was knowingly trading lives for profit. It also claimed that between 500 and 900 people had died in Pinto fires, a figure later analyses found unsupported. The article's impact was huge. The day after a press conference with Ralph Nader's Center for Auto Safety, NHTSA opened an investigation.

The 1978 recall

On May 8, 1978, NHTSA told Ford it had found the fuel system on 1971–1976 Pintos defective. On June 9, 1978, days before a formal order was expected, Ford recalled 1.5 million Pintos and Mercury Bobcats, the largest automotive recall in history at the time.

Grimshaw v. Ford (decided 1978, affirmed 1981)

A 1972 Pinto stalled on a California freeway, was rear-ended and caught fire. Driver Lily Gray died, and her 13-year-old passenger, Richard Grimshaw, was severely burned. In February 1978, an Orange County, California, jury awarded $125 million in punitive damages plus compensatory damages. The judge cut the punitive award to $3.5 million. A California appeals court affirmed the judgment in May 1981. It's still a landmark case on punitive damages.

State of Indiana v. Ford (1980)

On August 10, 1978, three teenagers, Judy, Lyn and Donna Ulrich, were killed when their 1973 Pinto was struck from behind by a van and caught fire. An Elkhart County grand jury charged Ford with three counts of reckless homicide, the first time a US corporation had been tried on criminal charges, as the Christian Science Monitor reported. After a 10-week trial in Winamac, a Pulaski County jury acquitted Ford on March 13, 1980.

So, was it a firetrap?

In 1991, law professor Gary T. Schwartz published The Myth of the Ford Pinto Case in the Rutgers Law Review. He pointed out that NHTSA knew of 38 rear-impact cases with fuel leakage or fire, resulting in 27 deaths and 24 nonfatal burn injuries. That's far below the 500 to 900 claim. He wrote that the Pinto had a real, "non-trivial" design problem. But looking at all vehicle fire deaths, he found it "less dangerous than the average subcompact and only slightly more dangerous than the average car." Hemmings and later researchers reached similar conclusions. Both things are true: there was a real flaw that hurt real people, and the legend outgrew the evidence.

The flying Pinto

Now the weirdest chapter, which also ends in tragedy. In the early 1970s, Advanced Vehicle Engineers of Van Nuys, California, founded by Henry Smolinski and Harold Blake, built the AVE Mizar, a roadable aircraft made by mating the rear of a Cessna Skymaster to a Ford Pinto. You'd drive to the airport, attach the wings and fly away.

A prototype was shown to the press on May 8, 1973. On September 11, 1973, during a test flight at Camarillo, a right wing strut detached from the Pinto, and Smolinski and Blake were killed in the crash. Their idea of a car you could fly is still being chased today.

What we left out

We wanted to include Pinto pop-culture jokes from film and TV, but we couldn't find sources solid enough to quote, so we've skipped them. There's no Pinto entry in our Quirk Database yet. When there is, we'll link it here. Meanwhile, fellow 1970s oddball the AMC Pacer is in there, along with plenty of Glorious Mistakes.