Important: The following is a text only archive!
For full features; Go to The myth of the exploding Pinto, and others...
You may not have time to read all of this in one sitting. This is compiled
from numerous reputable sources over the last decade or so (some of it
pre-internet), like Automotive News, Wall Street Journal, Rutger's Law
review, etc. I'm just condensing it here to be more compact (yes, this is
compact...)
Remarkably, the affair of the "exploding" Ford Pinto--universally hailed as
the acme of product liability success--is starting to look like hype. In a
summer 1991 Rutgers Law Review article Gary Schwartz demolishes "the myth
of the Pinto case." Actual deaths in Pinto fires have come in at a known
27, not the expected thousand or more.
More startling, Schwartz shows that everyone's received ideas about the
fabled "smoking gun" memo are false (the one supposedly dealing with how it
was cheaper to save money on a small part and pay off later lawsuits... and
immortalized in the movie "Fight Club"). The actual memo did not pertain to
Pintos, or even Ford products, but to American cars in general; it dealt
with rollovers, not rear-end collisions; it did not contemplate the matter
of tort liability at all, let alone accept it as cheaper than a design
change; it assigned a value to human life because federal regulators, for
whose eyes it was meant, themselves employed that concept in their
deliberations; and the value it used was one that they, the regulators, had
set forth in documents.
In retrospect, Schwartz writes, the Pinto's safety record appears to have
been very typical of its time and class. In over 10 years of production,
and 20 years that followed, with over 2 million Pintos produced, no more
people died in fires from Pintos as died in fires from Maximas...
The supposed design flaw of the Pinto, according to Byron Bloch, was that
in a heavy enough rear end accident, the front of the gas tank could come
in contact with a bolt on the differential, rupturing it, and allowing fuel
to spill out, with the potential for a fire. it is, however, extremely hard
for the gas tank to come in contact with any bolts that might be abole to
accomplish this, unless the car is hit from behind at over 50 mph. And as
was shown in the autopsy for the intital accident in '78 that started this
controversy, teh occupants died from teh impact, not from teh fire (caused
by an inattentive driver in a chevy van driving onto the shoulder and
hitting their parked, but running Pinto from behind at over 50 mph).
In June 1978, at the height of the Ford Pinto outcry, ABC's 20/20 reported
"startling new developments": evidence that full-size Fords, not just the
subcompact Pinto, could explode when hit from behind. The show's visual
highlight was dramatic. Newly aired film from tests done at UCLA in 1967 by
researchers under contract with the automaker showed a Ford sedan being
rear-ended at 55 mph and bursting into a fireball.
"ABC News has analyzed a great many of Ford's secret rear-end crash tests,"
confided correspondent Sylvia Chase. And they showed that if you owned a
Ford--not just a Pinto, but many other models--what happened to the car in
the film could happen to you. The tone was unrelentingly damning, and by
the show's end popular anchorman Hugh Downs felt constrained to add his own
personal confession. "You know, I've advertised Ford products a few years
back, Sylvia, and at the time, of course, I didn't know and I don't think
that anybody else did that this kind of ruckus was going to unfold." You
got the idea that he would certainly think twice before repeating a mistake
like that.
If ABC really analyzed those UCLA test reports, it had every reason to know
why the Ford in the crash film burst into flame: there was an incendiary
device under it. The UCLA testers explained their methods in a 1968 report
published by the Society of Automotive Engineers, fully ten years before
the 20/20 episode. As they explained, one of their goals was to study how a
crash fire affected the passenger compartment of a car, and to do that they
needed a crash fire. But crash fires occur very seldom; in fact, the
testers had tried to produce a fire in an earlier test run without an
igniter but had failed. Hence their use of the incendiary device (which
they clearly and fully described in their write-up) in the only test run
that produced a fire.
The "Beyond the Pinto" coverage gives plenty of credit to the show's on-and
off-screen expert, who "worked as a consultant with ABC News on this story,
and provided us with many of the Ford crash-test records." His name was
Byron Bloch, and his role as an ABC News consultant was to prove a
longstanding one; over the years he brought the network seven different
exposes on auto safety, two of which won Emmys.
If the name is familiar, it's because the very same Byron Bloch starred as
NBC's on-screen expert in the ill-fated Dateline episode about teh GM
sidesaddle gastanks, that landed the network in serious trouble. More on
that in a bit. Bloch was present at the Indiana crash scene, and defended
the tests afterward. ("There was nothing wrong with what happened in
Indianapolis," he told Reuters. "The so-called devices underneath the
pickup truck are really a lot of smoke that GM is blowing to divert you
away from the punitive damages in the Moseley case.") And he played a key
role in assuring NBC the truck fire had been set off by a headlight
filament, providing a crucial excuse for not mentioning the igniters. (A
later analysis for GM found the fire had started near the igniters, not the
headlights.)
In 1978, as in 1992, Bloch wore two hats. One was as paid or unpaid network
consultant, advisor, and onscreen explainer. The other was as the single
best-known expert witness hired by trial lawyers in high-stakes injury
lawsuits against automakers. To many, NBC's Dateline fiasco seemed a freak,
a bizarre departure from accepted network standards. Would any half-awake
news organization have helped stage a crash test that was rigged to get a
particular outcome? Or concealed from the public key elements--the hidden
rockets, the over-filled tank, the loose gas cap? Or entrusted its judgment
to axe-grinding "experts" who were deeply involved in litigating against
the expose's target? Or, after questions came up, refused to apologize no
matter how strong the evidence grew?
CBS, for one, may want to revisit its 1986 "60 Minutes" segment on supposed
"sudden acceleration" in Audi 5000s. That show featured real-life footage
almost as riveting as that on "Dateline": An Audi was shown taking off like
a bolt without a foot on the accelerator -- seeming proof that the vehicle
could display a malignant will of its own. Ed Bradley told viewers that,
according to a safety expert named William Rosenbluth, "unusually high
transmission pressure could build up on certain model Audis causing the
throttle to open up . . . . Again, watch the pedal go down by itself."
Frightening stuff, eh? "What the viewers couldn't watch," wrote Peter Huber
in 1992's "Galileo's Revenge," "was where the 'unusually high transmission
pressure' had come from. It had come from a bottle. Rosenbluth had drilled
a hole in the Audi transmission," through which he'd pumped in air or fluid
at high pressure. (CBS still defends its segment.)
Clearly, NBC isn't the first network to run a dubious safety expose'. It's
just the first to get nailed. For years the networks have relied on a small
circle of outside experts to shape their coverage of safety issues. Most of
these experts turn out to be deeply involved in the business of suing the
companies and institutions targeted by the adversary coverage. And the
result is likely to be a widening circle of embarrassment for the media.
NBC had to eat two separate helpings of crow: first for producing the
rigged video, then for holding out far too long in its defense. In doing
so, it was led astray by its outside experts, especially Bruce Enz of The
Institute for Safety Analysis, hired by NBC to conduct the crash tests, and
Byron Bloch, interviewed as an expert on the "Dateline" segment and active
at the crash-test scene:
Enz's group rigged the truck with hidden incendiary devices, detonated by
remote-control radio. Later, Bloch and others defended the idea. This was
"among accepted test procedures," noted Clarence Ditlow of the Center for
Auto Safety, raising the eyebrows of many safety researchers.
Enz and Bloch assured NBC that the fire was actually set off by the
filament of a broken headlamp, which conveniently meant there was no need
to tell viewers about the Mother's-Little-Helper rockets. (According to
Automotive News, GM scientists found in a super-slow-motion video analysis
that the fire started near the rockets, not the headlamps.) The network
also cited the experts as its source for having told viewers that a "small
hole" had been poked in the GM gas tank at impact. Later tests showed the
recovered tank fully intact.
And so forth. The use of a wrong-model, ill-fitting gas cap (it apparently
popped out on impact) would have been noticed beforehand, if at all,
presumably by those who groomed the truck for its big moment on film. NBC
reporters would probably not have relied on their own direct observation to
come up with what were later shown to be serious underestimates of the
actual crash speeds. One bad decision was presumably wholly NBC's to make:
showing only a brief snippet of the fire, which in fact burned out in about
15 seconds, after it exhausted the fuel ejected from the truck's filler
tube. NBC's camera angle also made it hard for viewers to see that flames
were not coming from inside the truck itself, as might have been expected
had its gas tank really burst.
Given a fuller look, viewers might have concluded that you can get a fire
from just about any vehicle if you bash it in a way that forces gas out of
its filler tube and then provide a handy source of ignition.
ChrisV
What kind of experts did NBC use, anyway? Byron Bloch, for one, has an
interesting set of professional specialties. On the one hand, he's a
frequent network consultant on auto safety -- "a combination of source,
field producer and technical adviser for ABC-TV in its auto safety
coverage," reports Autoweek, which notes that he's assisted seven ABC
segments on auto safety hazards, three of them since 1990.
When not doing paid media consulting, Bloch is perhaps the single
best-known hired expert witness in injury lawsuits against automakers. He
doesn't challenge reports that he lacks formal training in auto safety or
engineering, and he acknowledged in a 1980 case that his resume' listed a
degree he didn't have. Still, he's appeared in court to testify about
alleged defects not just in cars but in products ranging from coffee pots
to railroad cars. He also offers $ 400-per-person seminars for trial
lawyers, promising the scoop on such topics as "Key Graphic Exhibits for
Trial."
Enz, of The Institute for Safety Analysis, turns out to be another frequent
expert testifier against GM -- and indeed against every major car maker in
the U.S. market. He's not an engineer either, nor, he says, are any of the
25 staff members of his institute, which is a for-profit organization.
Then there's Ben Kelley, another frequent witness, who has boasted that NBC
used Enz's group "at our suggestion." Kelley himself has enjoyed success
providing crash-test footage to TV producers. When CBS's "Street Stories"
questioned the reliability of safety belts last fall, it relied heavily on
Kelley's Maryland-based Institute for Injury Reduction, which the show
blandly described as an "auto safety consumer group." Marion Blakey, head
of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, flayed the resulting
coverage as "factually inaccurate."
The network's description of Kelley's group was incomplete, too. As Kelley
acknowledges, his group was founded by a small group of trial attorneys,
and it continues to be largely supported by them. In a recent fundraising
letter, Kelley proposed carrying out a new series of GM-truck crash tests,
the results of which, unlike NBC's proprietary tests, could be distributed
to the public and used in litigation. The tests would follow "a modified
design further enhancing the likelihood of a real-world impact resulting in
fire." Note the word "further."
This post wouldn't be complete without an account of 60 Minutes's 1986
attack on the Audi 5000--perhaps the best-known and best-refuted
auto-safety scare of recent years. The Audi, it seemed, was a car possessed
by demons. It would back into garages, dart into swimming pools, plow into
bank teller lines, everything but fly on broomsticks, all while its hapless
drivers were standing on the brake -- or at least so they said.
"Sudden acceleration" had been alleged in many makes of car other than the
Audi, and from the start many automotive observers were inclined to view it
skeptically. A working set of brakes, they pointed out, can easily
overpower any car's accelerator, even one stuck at full throttle. After
accidents of this sort, the brakes were always found to be working fine.
Such mishaps happened most often when the car was taking off from rest, and
they happened disproportionately to short or elderly drivers who were
novices to the Audi.
The Audi's pedals were placed farther to the left, and closer together,
than those in many American cars. This may well offer a net safety
advantage, by making it easier to switch to the brake in high-speed
emergencies. (The Audi had, and has, one of the best safety records on the
road.) But it might also allow inattentive drivers to hit the wrong pedal.
60 Minutes was having none of the theory that drivers were hitting the
wrong pedal. It found, and interviewed on camera, some experienced drivers
who reported the problem. And it showed a filmed demonstration of how an
Audi, as fixed up by, yes, an expert witness testifying against the
carmaker, could take off from rest at mounting speed. The expert, William
Rosenbluth, was quoted as saying that "unusually high transmission
pressure" could build up and cause problems. "Again, watch the pedal go
down by itself," said Ed Bradley.
Bradley did not, however, tell viewers why that remarkable thing was
happening. As Audi lawyers finally managed to establish, Rosenbluth had
drilled a hole in the poor car's transmission and attached a hose leading
to a tank of compressed air or fluid.
The tank with its attached hose was apparently sitting right on the front
passenger seat of the doctored Audi, but the 60 Minutes cameras managed not
to pick it up. It might have been for the same reason the Jeep weights were
tucked away in the wheel wells, rather than being placed visibly on top. Or
why the Dateline rockets were strapped out of sight underneath the truck
rather than conspicuously on its side, and were detonated by remote control
rather than by a visible wire. Doing it otherwise would only have gotten
viewers confused.
CBS continues to brazen out even its egregious Audi segment. Ed Bradley was
a guest on Larry King recently when a caller praised 60 Minutes in general
but politely suggested it might want to apologize for faulty or mistaken
stories like those on the Audi and on Alar, the apple spray. "First of all,
they're not mistaken. Secondly, they are true," Bradley replied with some
heat and more redundancy. He reminded listeners that among the Audi victims
the show had spoken to were a policeman and a state auto inspector,
supposedly unfoolable about such matters. "It's not a figment of our
imagination. It actually happened, whether you believe it or not."
Hewitt, on Crossfire, defended the Audi show in a different and, if truth
be known, contradictory way. If there was really nothing wrong with the
cars, he asked, then why had Audi recalled them after the 60 Minutes
episode? But the point of the main recall was to add an "idiot-proof"
device that kept drivers from shifting into gear unless their foot was on
the brake. If you accept Ed Bradley's theory that their feet were on the
brake all along, that fix should have been useless.
If you want to catch a vehicle doing something thrilling on camera, you
face a problem: statistics. Most cars, most of the time, perform as
intended. At a first approximation, then, any crash test where something
interesting or unusual happens will probably turn out to involve what have
been called strange inputs.
In itself, there's nothing wrong with simulating extreme adverse
conditions, so long as you make it clear that that's what you're doing.
(Automakers themselves frequently "test to failure," as it's called, to
find out how far a system can be abused before giving out.) When news
broadcasts air such videos, though, they tend not to bother listing the
artificial conditions. Disclaimers, as we know, make for dull journalism:
it's not very grabby to say, "This could happen to you on a rutted shoulder
with sleet on the ground, bald tires, and a fair bit of driver error."
Network execs want their safety exposes to match the emotional tone of a
murder trial, not a drivers' ed class. And so do trial lawyers.
ChrisV
In December 1980, 60 Minutes reported that the small army-style "CJ" Jeep
was dangerously apt to roll over--not only in emergencies but "even in
routine road circumstances at relatively low speeds." A Jeep is shown
crashing. "We'll get to precisely what the conditions were that made that
single-car accident happen in a moment," promises Morley Safer.
The footage, it seems, is of tests run by the Insurance Institute for
Highway Safety and was produced in collaboration with a CBS film crew. It
shows Jeeps going through what appear from a distance to be standard
maneuvers. Safer describes the first. "It is something called a J-turn: a
fairly gentle right-hand turn that a driver might make if he was going into
a parking lot." The Jeep flips over. Safer concedes that "it does not
happen every time," and a good thing too, since if it did the nation's
parking lots would be cluttered with overturned Jeeps spinning their wheels
helplessly like so many ladybugs.
The camera then shows a second test run, "an evasive maneuver, as if the
driver is trying to avoid something on the road." An unwanted object is
shown obstructing a roadway, lending a you-are-there touch. "The driver
would pull out of his lane to the left, go around the obstacle, then pull
back to the right into his lane," explains Safer. The Jeep flips over
again. Dummy occupants, outfitted in plaid shirts and farmer caps, tumble
out to their doom.
Now by this point even trusting viewers might have felt a gnawing canker of
doubt. Jeeps may be awkward, hard-to-control vehicles, but do they really
do that? After all, skillful stunt drivers can tip over many sorts of
vehicles on purpose. Chrysler/AMC, which makes the Jeep, sends out a tape
in which this trick is performed on various stock cars and trucks,
including a Toyota Corolla, a Ford Bronco, and a Datsun 4 x 4 pickup.
Tantalizingly, Safer seems to share or at least foresee these same doubts.
He chats with two guests from the Insurance Institute. "I'm trying to think
of some of the things that AMC would accuse you of doing if they were here
watching these tests along with us. For example, putting the vehicle
through the sort of turns and the sort of stresses that it just would never
be put through in normal real-world driving on the road." The guests are
reassuring, if that is the right word: yes, the test conditions "do occur
in the real world," at least "in panic situations." AMC, for its part, is
quoted as saying it suspects the tests of being "contrived to make the Jeep
turn over." But the detail stops there.
Too bad. Viewers might have profited by knowing, for example, that testers
had to put the Jeeps through 435 runs to get 8 rollovers. A single vehicle
was put through 201 runs and accounted for 4 of the rollovers. Make a car
skid repeatedly, Chrysler says, and you predictably degrade tire tread and
other key safety margins.
Was the J-turn, or for that matter the evasive maneuver, "fairly gentle"?
The Jeep was occupied by robot drivers that were twisting the steering
wheel through more than 580 degrees of arc, well over one and a half full
turns of the steering wheel. (Do not, repeat _not_, try this cruising in
your own vehicle.) More striking yet was how fast and hard they jerked the
steering wheel: in one case, at a rate in excess of five full turns a
second. A study for GM, apparently unrelated to the Jeep affair, found that
average drivers' maximum steer rate in emergencies reaches 520
degrees/second, while expert drivers can reach 800; rates above 1,000
degrees/second seem to happen mostly when drivers lose control. The robots
used rates of from 1,100 to 1,805 degrees/second in the obstacle-avoidance
maneuver. They were also gunning the accelerator-- not what you or I might
do if a crate of hens suddenly fell in front of us on the highway. (An
Insurance Institute internal memo had proposed arranging variables "to
ensure rollover.")
An investigative engineer at the National Highway Traffic Safety
Administration later wrote that the tests' validity was "questionable"
given their apparently "abnormal test conditions and unrealistic
maneuvers," and also found signs that the vehicles' loading had been
"manipulated in combination with other vehicle conditions to generate
worst-case conditions" for stability. The "vehicle loading" issue was
clarified by the testers' own internal report, which was not disclosed at
the time but emerged later in litigation. In their report, the testers say
that at the request of Insurance Institute personnel, they had taken the
step of _hanging weights in the vehicle's corners_ -- inside the body,
where they were not apparent to the camera.
ChrisV
ChrisV, I hope you don't take this the wrong way(which I'm sure you will)
This is not the book of the month club. I honestly tried to read your last
three post of some forty- some paragraghs. You seem to have a lot of
knowledge of vehicles. Write an Ebook, offer it up for free(or charge a
nominal fee) and I'm sure you will have a following. I just don't think a
lot of people on this forum are prepared to read all of your thoughts on
one subject, in one setting. I swear to God, this is not a flame.
lectroid
This was in response to a post about exploding Pintos in another thread
here.
You don't have to read it. It'd only take a couple moments, and it's only
one thread in a thousand anyhow. And as I said, it's cut down from a much
larger collection of resources. I wasn't born into the soundbite
generation.
I fully realize that most kids here won't take the time to read it, or
anything of this length. It's why vwhobo is constantly going after people
for not having their facts: no one spends the time it takes to read about
even the things they are interested in. They use soundbites and photo
captions to get all their "facts" and form opinions from. And as he's
noted, most of them end up being wrong, because they don't want to be
bothered by reading.
Again, I know you're not flaming me. I also know that few people will read
it in it's entirety. But there is information in there that I'm sure a
number of people here will find interesting. The kinds of things that real
discussions can come out of.
ChrisV
You see, this is proof positive. I knew we agreed on the truly important
things in life. :thumbs:
vwhobo
All I can say is, WOW. Although I will admit I skimmed through the last
posts(I'm an impatient teenager) the information in that was eye opening.
The propaganda spread about the so-called "Exploding Pinto" probably put a
huge dent in Ford motor companys sales. I always believe that, you get
rear-ended in a pinto you're going to shoot 10 feet in the air in a
fireball, while rotationg 720 degrees onto another pinto, which would then
explode and flip you another 360. Very good piece of information right
there, you have a knack for writing.
My Kudos, great job :thumbs:
Integra_LS
It was umm...long...
StiMan
But of course. We both like air cooled VWs, so we pretty much HAVE to...
:mrgreen:
ChrisV
And you umm... didn't read it, right?
BTW it was shorter than the average front page newspaper article...
ChrisV
I just typed for five F%#%*ng minutes, and got dumped. Going to do the rest
of long replies in Word :cussing: This one is short.
VWHOBO, you are an asshole, such as I :asshake: and I will always be. I was
not born in the soundbite,cut,paste generation either. Everything
that(almost) I have learned, I had to read and educate myself,typing and
punctuating was not one of them,and that didn't have a lot of leverage in
what my job was. I love to have fun,or try to make others have fun.
ChrisV, what you need to do is get your point across, so it won't become
boring. Come down a few notches, we don't care how smart you are, you could
be alot of help to many. I am not a car buff / freak, or what ever you
would call them.I have driven motorcars for over 44 years, 31 of those in
my job (I started driving when I was a 9 yr old). I realize that I don't
contribute a lot to this forum, but you could. :2cents: OH, i think you and
the VWHOBO will never get along////shit happens. AIN"T THAT RIGHT?
:laughing: :laughing: Which is really entertaining, if you keep it short.
Damn whwerewug amii whgereis my bearr, looook inthe fridgege :mrgreen:
lectroid
Lectroid, calm down. I'm not sure what you're on about. The point that I
agreed on was people not taking the time to get all the facts prior to
making their statements. That's all dude. Maybe it's time for a beer, or
better yet it's time to get rid of your dial-up. :hi:
vwhobo
I really got tired of trying to read through 40 some paragraphs of ChrisV's
last 3 post. and i Typed for what seemed like 30 f$#$#@ minutes in my
reply, which wasn't rude My fault :laughing: Can't we all just get along?
Hell no, this is the USA. :laughing: :laughing: :laughing:
lectroid
Hell yeah, I agree 100%. F*ck you, f*ck me, f*ck everybody, there is no
favoritism here. :thumbs: :fu: :hi:
vwhobo
Get away from me you pervert :mrgreen:
lectroid
Hobo I thought you were the asshole and I was the nympho??? Now you're
going around F*cking everyone. Well :fu:. That's my job you f*cking f*ck.
Everyone, leave the f*cking to your Car Forums Grand Master Nympho! :fu:
F*CK!
Integra_LS
What the f*ck is going on? I leave for a f*cking 3 hours...and f*ck all
this sh*t happens...What the f*ck are yall talking about?
StiMan
my ADD had me read to the 3rd paragraph of your first post and then just
stop. :laughing:
i suppose it would be interesting reading it all through...
SuperJew
HUH! :doh:
lectroid
Turns out that in Portugese, Pinto means small chicken :laughing:
chris_knows
Props to you ChrisV for debunking some myths that have been floating
around!
Just out of curiosity, and because it was not mentioned, can an overfilled
gas tank really cause a fire in event of a crash?....
dodgerforlife
No, but the static spark from the gas nozzle and the car can create a
deadly fire. Sadly, it tends to happen a lot.
Godlaus
Hmmm...well the myth of the exploding Ford police cars is no myth - just go
and google it.
Over a dozen police officers have died when their Ford Crown Victory gas
tanks exploded - Ford has been hit with class action lawsuits over this.
No myth...
Carjones
Actually, if you googled the result, you'd find that Ford was absolved of
all blame in those, too.
http://www.consumeraffairs.com/news04/2005/mo_crown_vic.html
I'm constantly amazed at the number of noobs who WANT to believe a company
is to blame for this type of thing. But just like teh exploding Pinto myth,
this one is ALSO an agenda pushed by trial lawyers looking for deep
pockets, not an actual safety problem by the manufacturer.
http://www.dallas.net/~jvpoll/edw/
Now, if people actually read everything rather than rely on sound bites to
get information from... You really have to take a close look at ANY series
of lawsuits brought on by trial lawyer associations that stand to gain huge
settlements from the lawsuits. Follow the money!
ChrisV
All I have to say is......
THE PINTO STILL SUCKS!!!
try2playJAY
The Pinto can be a very sexy and quick car, just like CRXs.
Pinto drivers DIAF! Lollerz
Cliffnotes please, even though this thread is old.
Oomba
not sure how old this is, but, I read every last word in the whole scandal
story, i swear. and i hate the rolling jeep myth. what a load of sh*t to
put a car maker through just to keep the show's ratings up
:cussing: :cussing: :banghead:
good thing its all cleared up now thanks to chrisv
good job, i cant write that long :clap: :clap:
nighthawk
Nighthawk, can you please stop bringing up old threads? I have already read
a few by you that you dug up out of nowhere and half the people that posted
in the old threads and long gone by now.
Benson
I'd understand some other ones, but this one is good, and fun to read...and
when you go to car-forums.com, it's right there...been like that since I
joined :ohcrap::laughing:
chris_knows
Chris V actualy explains things fully when asked not just with like 20
words thats what makes him the coolest person here
Aondor
Cliffnotes please
PontiacFan27
A quick check of the dates would have sorted out the 'dunno how old this
thread is' part for ya! :banghead:
Cliffy
It's less length than the average newspaper front page story, and it IS
pared down.
Even Cliffnotes of a novel are their own book, many pages long. This IS the
Cliffnotes version, with not just a statement (which is what you want) but
the facts behind the statement.
If I just posted one paragraph that said "Pinto exposions were a myth."
then everyone would be like "where's your proof? I heard blah, blah blah
about it." So I give the proof at the same time as the statment, and what
do I get? Idiots bitching that they actually had to read more than a
paragraph of information at a time.
That's why I stopped posting reams of facts and instead just insult the
idiots. It's more concise and more fun.
ChrisV
chrisv were you on a pinto forum a while back arguing and they threatend to
ban you? just curious cause the guys handle was chrisv and i thought it
was kinda funny. we started posting pics of nice pintos, then after pics
of them derbied. it was pretty funny cause these guys would right stuff
like this...
"OH MY GOD! You have got to be kidding me! This website was intended to
promote and save the Ford Pinto. We as a collective group are here to
preserve the beauty that is Pinto. I have spent the past 10 years saving
these little cars. In that time, I have sent 12 of little cars to good
homes, where they are thriving today, not to mention I have saved four of
mine and one for my sister. I am currently restoring two more that would
have been destined for the crusher until I stepped in and rescued them. I
live, breathe and will die a Pinto lover. Then, today I log on and see what
you have done! What the hell are you doing posting on this website? Are you
deliberately trying to piss me off? You are killing them almost as fast as
Ford did. The Pinto does not need this kind of crap. I do not think this is
funny in the least and frankly I don't care how great you think they are to
destroy. I can only pray that the ones you have killed are beyond salvage
and from what you are saying, I think that some have been in better shape
than the ones on the road now. I'm sorry if I appear agitated, but why
don't you go ahead and wreck a few 65 mustangs and the write about how
sturdy they are and then post it on a Mustang forum. After they kill you,
why don't you tell me how THEY reacted! Oh, and by the way, here's a
picture of a car that I just saved, and no, you cant have it. It just got
sand blasted and will be getting painted and restored, like they should.
l
adamc44
:orglaugh: :orglaugh:
What a dumbass...and people say I need a life :laughing:
chris_knows
lol! Yeah. Some of them were running around insulting other cars for being
from other brands. Never got banned, and have contributed a lot to that
site (I did a bunch of PS work for the guy that runs the site.)
Still want to build a killer custom Pinto.
ChrisV
Personally I think Pintos are pretty cool looking (depending on the year).
Wouldn't mind a nice 2 door or 2 door wagon (with the port hole on each
side).
car_crazy89
As an owner of a Crown Victoria, I see and hear all the FUD (fear,
uncertainty, doubt) about the safety characteristics of my vehicle, and
it's sister vehicles, the Mercury Grand Marquis and the Lincoln Town Car.
The three are built effectively on what's called the "Panther" platform,
much akin to how the Mustangs were (are? I dunno) built as "fox-body"
vehicles.
Blah, enough of that.
I my humble opinion, I feel that this is one of the safest cars that I have
owned and driven. I've seen many after-accident pictures of Crown Vics
that have been utterly demolished by rear-end accidents. Now, some of
these, I honestly don't expect anyone to have survived from, you want to
know what was missing for the most part? Yep, a burnt out carcass of a
car. Go take a look at wreckedexotics.com and look through their Police
gallery. The only ones that I've seen that were burnt were of the
police-involved and of the recently profiled on CNN limo accident back in
2003.
Food for thought, but accident-for-accident, the entire Panther platform
fares only slightly worse than average on rear-end collisions w/ fire, but
as a whole (all accident types) they fare better than the average.
Would I sell my Crown Vic for a non-Panther platform vehicle? Most likely
not. In fact I'm shopping around for a Lincoln Town Car.
Thank you all, and good night.
Thundercleese
those crown vics, merc., lincolns are all tough cars, most of them bend in
the back under the back doors where there is a big notch in the top of the
frame. in the front they will bend around the crush boxes, the front frame
rails bend up and push the boxes back. also, watch cause your air
condiditoning unit will drip right down on the frame rails by the fire wall
and rust the right side crush box out. the left side the brake cylinder
will rust them out. most derbys are running 80s and newer cars and the
ford is the car of choice. heres the one im working on right now....
86 lincoln
http://pic15.picturetrail.com/VOL628/2683405/7913619/109986434.jpg
ive got the body off the frame right now and im welding up all the seams,
also placing a ford 9" w/ 5.50 gears under the rear. should be a bad
puppy. im running it march 25th.
20 years down the road when your sitting there at your house one evening,
maybe reading a newspaper, someones going to knock on your door. "hey
mister you want to sell that old crown vic you got sitting out back, we
want to restore it"
well the wifes been tearin your ass here lately about that junk car sitting
in the yard and you get a little tear in your eye:cry: thinking of that
vic in its former glory. "ill take 400 for it"
"ok buddy ill be back with the trailer in a little while"
hour or so later
as they quickly shove it up on the trailer"heres your 400 bucks, thanks for
the car buddy,":thumbs:
you hand them the tital as they roll down the windows and throw chains
through them binding the chains and smashing the chrome.
"hey guys what are you going to do with my crown vic?":eek:
" where going to run it in the local demo derby":hi:
"no!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" :ohcrap:
WAHAHAHHAHAHHAHAA.......:orglaugh:
its snowed here and im bored hehe..... :screwy:
adamc44
Uhm... I don't seem to have that "rust" issue that you so kindly warned me
about. Might be because I don't have that particular body-style Crown Vic.
In '92 and '98 they got facelifts, and in '92 they got the 4.6l modular,
as opposed to the 5.0 that you have in your 'box' Vic.
Also, I would sell the Vic to get the Town Car. I'm not a "good old boy"
that had cars on cinderblocks in his back or front yard. *shakes his
head*
G'night.
Thundercleese
