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Selects: SYSK Live: Back When Ford Pintos Were Flaming Deathtraps · Stuff You Should Know

• 0:01
  Speaker 1: Hi friends, It's me Josh, and for this week's select,
• 0:04
  Speaker 1: I've chosen our episode live show really from twenty eighteen,
• 0:09
  Speaker 1: back when Ford Pintos were flaming death traps. Now, this
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: episode actually came out with an intro from me and Chuck,
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: so it seems foolish to do an intro to an intro,
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: even though that's what I'm doing.
• 0:20
  Speaker 2: Now.
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: That's why I'm going to stop and just say, hope
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: you enjoy.
• 0:29
  Speaker 3: Welcome to stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
• 0:38
  Speaker 2: Hey, welcome to the podcast.
• 0:40
  Speaker 4: I'm Josh Clark, There's Charles w Chuck Bryant. Jerry's not here,
• 0:45
  Speaker 4: but we are with all these beautiful people live at
• 0:48
  Speaker 4: the Buckhead Theater in our own Atlanta, GA.
• 0:58
  Speaker 5: Good. Hey, yeah they are.
• 1:08
  Speaker 4: Not too shabby, everybody. Yeah, So let's start.
• 1:17
  Speaker 2: Man. I feel great.
• 1:20
  Speaker 3: So I feel great.
• 1:23
  Speaker 4: Since this is a live podcast and it's actually set
• 1:27
  Speaker 4: a little further back in time, we thought we would
• 1:29
  Speaker 4: all get into the Wayback Machine. So for those of
• 1:34
  Speaker 4: you who have seen us live before, you know the
• 1:37
  Speaker 4: Wayback Machine is made up. It's not a real thing,
• 1:42
  Speaker 4: but it does take a twinkle in your eye and
• 1:45
  Speaker 4: a heart full of magic. To get into the wayback machine.
• 1:48
  Speaker 4: So I hope all of you have that going on
• 1:50
  Speaker 4: right now. That was my best serious Silverman impression.
• 1:54
  Speaker 5: It's pretty good.
• 1:55
  Speaker 2: Thanks.
• 1:56
  Speaker 4: So we're all on the way back machine, okay, and
• 1:59
  Speaker 4: we're going back to Detroit, Michigan, back to like the
• 2:04
  Speaker 4: mid sixties or something like that.
• 2:05
  Speaker 3: We'll say, yeah, back when people still wanted to go
• 2:08
  Speaker 3: to Detroit.
• 2:10
  Speaker 2: On purpose.
• 2:11
  Speaker 3: Sorry man, Yeah, I told you.
• 2:14
  Speaker 2: And we're gonna fly in. That's the sounds, and.
• 2:19
  Speaker 4: We're very small and invisible, by the way, So we're
• 2:21
  Speaker 4: gonna fly in over the shoulder of an up and
• 2:25
  Speaker 4: coming auto executive with a beautiful head of hair named
• 2:29
  Speaker 4: Lee Aya Coca.
• 2:33
  Speaker 2: And Lee Lee.
• 2:34
  Speaker 4: At the time, he was what you might call a
• 2:36
  Speaker 4: young turk, up and coming, like ready to take on
• 2:39
  Speaker 4: the world. Great guy, and he had a lot of
• 2:42
  Speaker 4: cred around the company that he worked at called Ford
• 2:46
  Speaker 4: Motor Company.
• 2:47
  Speaker 5: I tried its pre Chrysler right, and he.
• 2:50
  Speaker 2: Had a lot of cred because he had.
• 2:52
  Speaker 4: Designed the Mustang right. It was known as Lee's car.
• 2:55
  Speaker 3: Even yeah, I mean, if you if you are the
• 2:59
  Speaker 3: guy and the of the Ford Mustang project, then you've
• 3:02
  Speaker 3: kind of bought your ticket in the car industry. If
• 3:04
  Speaker 3: you have be a great car, do you make.
• 3:06
  Speaker 4: The car that Vanilla Ice will eventually love, You've done something.
• 3:10
  Speaker 2: Quite right with your life, right.
• 3:12
  Speaker 5: Did he have a Mustang.
• 3:14
  Speaker 4: Rolling in my five point oh with the rag top down?
• 3:17
  Speaker 4: That's a Mustang, buddy, is it sure? I think it's
• 3:21
  Speaker 4: even in the video.
• 3:24
  Speaker 5: I've never been more ashamed.
• 3:28
  Speaker 2: To not know the lyrics of a song.
• 3:30
  Speaker 3: Yeah, because it's f and Vanilla Ice. So I don't
• 3:35
  Speaker 3: feel like I should have known it. I just feel
• 3:37
  Speaker 3: like a stooge.
• 3:38
  Speaker 4: Oh no, it's fine. No, you got a Wean shirt on.
• 3:40
  Speaker 4: You probably should know this. But I know I know
• 3:45
  Speaker 4: that lyric though. Yeah, I didn't know a five point.
• 3:47
  Speaker 2: Five point him? All right, it's my understanding, right everybody.
• 3:49
  Speaker 5: Yeah, I thought it was a Volkswagen Beatle.
• 3:52
  Speaker 4: No, no, but that does come up starting now because
• 3:55
  Speaker 4: Leik Coca was one of the few people in Detroit
• 3:57
  Speaker 4: at the time who realized that the American auto industry's
• 4:03
  Speaker 4: lunch was being eaten in the subcompact market, mainly because
• 4:07
  Speaker 4: no American car company was making subcompacts at the time.
• 4:10
  Speaker 3: Right now, we liked her cars very large at time.
• 4:12
  Speaker 2: Like land yachts.
• 4:14
  Speaker 4: Yeah, okay, so Li said, the Germans are eating our
• 4:18
  Speaker 4: lunch with their little Volkswagen Beetle Hitler's car.
• 4:22
  Speaker 3: Look it up, I had two Volkswagen Beetles.
• 4:26
  Speaker 2: Those were two Hitler's cars.
• 4:29
  Speaker 4: You supported Hiller in a way.
• 4:35
  Speaker 5: My mom is over there. She bought that car. I
• 4:37
  Speaker 5: don't know.
• 4:41
  Speaker 2: She's going like that.
• 4:45
  Speaker 4: And then the Toyota Corolla was also killing people, right,
• 4:48
  Speaker 4: killing Detroit. I should say, yeah, And so Lee said,
• 4:52
  Speaker 4: we need to get a car to market. But I'm
• 4:54
  Speaker 4: not the president. There's a man who is president. And
• 4:57
  Speaker 4: what is his name, Chuck?
• 4:58
  Speaker 3: I can't ever remember, honestly, Oh no, I do remember.
• 5:02
  Speaker 3: His name is Bunkie Knudsen.
• 5:06
  Speaker 4: If you're the president of a car company and your
• 5:08
  Speaker 4: name's Bunkie Knudsen, you gotta.
• 5:10
  Speaker 2: Know you have a target on your back.
• 5:11
  Speaker 4: Right, Nobody's gonna let that stand for very long, especially
• 5:15
  Speaker 4: not Leyah Coca.
• 5:16
  Speaker 5: Yeah.
• 5:16
  Speaker 3: The only thing Bunkie Muson in that year would have
• 5:19
  Speaker 3: been president of is the super Secret, super Secret Treehouse
• 5:23
  Speaker 3: Playboy Magazine club.
• 5:26
  Speaker 5: Led by Bunkie Knutson.
• 5:27
  Speaker 4: Right, are the local union of the guys who sell
• 5:30
  Speaker 4: those like monkeys that play the symbols on the street.
• 5:32
  Speaker 2: You know, they wind up once, all right.
• 5:35
  Speaker 3: So regardless of that, Bunkieknutson was in charge and Leah
• 5:39
  Speaker 3: Coca had his sight set on that job, and so
• 5:43
  Speaker 3: they settle things in the traditional way in the car
• 5:46
  Speaker 3: industry at the time, which was arm wrestling.
• 5:50
  Speaker 5: It's a little crazy serious.
• 5:53
  Speaker 4: So Leiah Coca had this thing where we think this
• 5:56
  Speaker 4: is probably how he rose to power. He could rip
• 5:59
  Speaker 4: the sleeve clean off of his shirt right at the shoulder,
• 6:02
  Speaker 4: right before an arm wrestling match.
• 6:04
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 6:04
  Speaker 4: It's very intimidating, and he always kept his arms oiled.
• 6:09
  Speaker 4: Every morning he would oil him up and very gingerly
• 6:12
  Speaker 4: put the shirt on over him so the oil wouldn't
• 6:14
  Speaker 4: show too So it really had like a pronounced effect
• 6:16
  Speaker 4: when he tore his shirts leeve off and went like that.
• 6:19
  Speaker 2: So when he did this, the Bunkie Nudsen and Bunkie
• 6:22
  Speaker 2: saw that oil bicep. He knew his time running four
• 6:26
  Speaker 2: Company had grown short.
• 6:27
  Speaker 5: That's right, Bunky Newton knew what time it was.
• 6:31
  Speaker 2: All that was totally made up. You all realized, right.
• 6:35
  Speaker 2: The stun silence threw me off a little bit.
• 6:38
  Speaker 5: It was back to the treehouse for Bunkie.
• 6:40
  Speaker 3: So Leah Koka found himself in charge of Ford, and
• 6:43
  Speaker 3: he said, we got to get a subcompact going fast, dudes.
• 6:47
  Speaker 3: So here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna get a
• 6:49
  Speaker 3: project going. I'm even gonna give it a code name,
• 6:52
  Speaker 3: which is really weird and sort.
• 6:54
  Speaker 2: Of Simon Mark, kind of a Nudsen move.
• 6:57
  Speaker 3: But he named it Project Phoenix. Very cute and a
• 7:01
  Speaker 3: little ironic once you know what this is about. And
• 7:03
  Speaker 3: he said, I want a car, I want to on
• 7:05
  Speaker 3: the market and what twenty four months?
• 7:09
  Speaker 4: Yeah, and normally it took like forty three months dated
• 7:12
  Speaker 4: car from concept to production. Iakoka said, nope, twenty four.
• 7:16
  Speaker 3: Yeah, twenty four so super fast and it can't weigh
• 7:19
  Speaker 3: more than two thousand pounds and it can't cost a
• 7:21
  Speaker 3: customer more than two thousand dollars. And he totally should
• 7:24
  Speaker 3: have called it Project two thousand, so that would have
• 7:27
  Speaker 3: been a super cool name.
• 7:28
  Speaker 5: In the early nineteen seventies.
• 7:31
  Speaker 4: That car would go on to be known as the
• 7:34
  Speaker 4: Ford Pinto. For those of you who aren't going, like, oh, colaps.
• 7:40
  Speaker 3: Couple of booze, a couple of groans, and a lot
• 7:43
  Speaker 3: of like what we're going to fill the people in
• 7:46
  Speaker 3: on this Okay, Yeah, So the deal with the Ford
• 7:49
  Speaker 3: Pinto was if you don't know, and you did grow
• 7:52
  Speaker 3: up in the seventies, it had a problem. We don't
• 7:59
  Speaker 3: know a lot about, but we know that the Ford
• 8:02
  Speaker 3: Pinto had a problem. If you would hit the Ford
• 8:05
  Speaker 3: Pinto from the rear going very very slow, sometimes it
• 8:12
  Speaker 3: would burst into a fiery ball. And that is not
• 8:17
  Speaker 3: a good thing for a car to.
• 8:19
  Speaker 2: Do, especially when you're still in the car.
• 8:23
  Speaker 5: That's right.
• 8:24
  Speaker 2: Has anyone seen the movie Top Secret?
• 8:27
  Speaker 5: Remember that one? There's Alkilmer.
• 8:29
  Speaker 4: There's a scene where Valcimra, I think, is on a motorcycle.
• 8:32
  Speaker 4: He's being chased by Germans and he somehow out maneuvers
• 8:37
  Speaker 4: them and they swerve off the road and slam on
• 8:40
  Speaker 4: their brakes and almost come to a complete stop right
• 8:44
  Speaker 4: before hitting a Pinto in the rear, but don't quite
• 8:48
  Speaker 4: make it. It makes that crystal thing sound and then
• 8:51
  Speaker 4: boom they just blow up into flames.
• 8:54
  Speaker 3: Right, And this was in the eighties, This was like
• 8:56
  Speaker 3: at least ten years after the Pinto had this reputation.
• 9:00
  Speaker 3: That's not that.
• 9:00
  Speaker 4: Far from the truth, actually, we found from doing this research.
• 9:05
  Speaker 4: So there's actually a lot of choice quotes that we
• 9:08
  Speaker 4: found a lot of people love taking potshots at the Pinto.
• 9:11
  Speaker 4: Some have written some pretty great stuff. You want to
• 9:14
  Speaker 4: take the first one.
• 9:15
  Speaker 3: Yeah, the first one was from Popular Mechanics magazine, and
• 9:18
  Speaker 3: they said, arguably the most dangerous fuel tank of all
• 9:22
  Speaker 3: time was a rear mounted vessel installed on the seventy
• 9:27
  Speaker 3: one through seventy six Ford Pinto. It's possibly the best
• 9:30
  Speaker 3: example of what happens when poor engineering meets corporate negligence.
• 9:39
  Speaker 3: Good quote, I got one.
• 9:41
  Speaker 4: There's this guy named doctor Leslie Ball. He was the
• 9:43
  Speaker 4: chief safety officer for NASA's manned Space program.
• 9:46
  Speaker 2: So this guy knew safety, right.
• 9:49
  Speaker 4: He said that the release to production of the Pinto
• 9:53
  Speaker 4: was the most reprehensible decision in the history of American engineering.
• 9:59
  Speaker 4: So there's a couple of things I want your right.
• 10:02
  Speaker 4: A couple of things to note in this quote. One
• 10:04
  Speaker 4: he said was the most reprehensible decision, not one of
• 10:08
  Speaker 4: the and he also qualifies it with American engineering, not
• 10:12
  Speaker 4: automotive engineering. He's including like easy bake ovens and other
• 10:18
  Speaker 4: stuff they have killed like millions of people.
• 10:21
  Speaker 2: You know.
• 10:22
  Speaker 3: He's including everything ever built basically, Yeah, easy bake ovens
• 10:27
  Speaker 3: or death traps too.
• 10:29
  Speaker 2: So the Pinto.
• 10:30
  Speaker 4: It was kind of an issue for Ford is we're
• 10:32
  Speaker 4: going to see but there's this one tibit we ran
• 10:35
  Speaker 4: a cost that we just love. There was a radio
• 10:37
  Speaker 4: spot for the Pinto in the seventies and Ford had
• 10:41
  Speaker 4: to get their their agency to get rid of it
• 10:45
  Speaker 4: because it had the line the Pinto leaves you with
• 10:48
  Speaker 4: that warm feeling for real, this is this is a
• 10:57
  Speaker 4: fun one of research, all right.
• 11:00
  Speaker 3: So again I want to reiterate, we don't know anything
• 11:03
  Speaker 3: about the design of cars. You know how to drive cars,
• 11:07
  Speaker 3: and that's about where it ends.
• 11:09
  Speaker 5: But we do know this.
• 11:10
  Speaker 3: The original design of the Pinto had a gas tank
• 11:13
  Speaker 3: that started six inches from the rear bumper. I know
• 11:18
  Speaker 3: that's not a good idea. If I was in Detroit,
• 11:21
  Speaker 3: I would have said, well, that's weird, and why would
• 11:24
  Speaker 3: you want to do that? Sure, because you know, accidents happened, right,
• 11:29
  Speaker 3: No one thought about it.
• 11:30
  Speaker 4: No. That's made even worse by the fact that a
• 11:34
  Speaker 4: car critic would later call that bumper little more than ornamentation, right, like,
• 11:40
  Speaker 4: car's supposed to have a bumper, just put that thing
• 11:42
  Speaker 4: that looks like a bumper on it. Basically, there was
• 11:45
  Speaker 4: a later improved version of the bumper on the Pinto
• 11:47
  Speaker 4: that could with stand a five mile an hour impact.
• 11:50
  Speaker 2: That was the improved version.
• 11:54
  Speaker 4: And again, this is all happening six inches away from
• 11:58
  Speaker 4: the gas tank.
• 12:00
  Speaker 2: That's that's just one side of the field tank.
• 12:02
  Speaker 4: There's a whole other side, and it had like its
• 12:04
  Speaker 4: own issues.
• 12:05
  Speaker 3: Basically, Yeah, there's there's something on a car called a differential.
• 12:10
  Speaker 2: Uh, we mechanics say it.
• 12:13
  Speaker 3: We don't know what that is, but I did some
• 12:16
  Speaker 3: research and here's what I'm gonna call it. It's the
• 12:20
  Speaker 3: magic box that makes the car go room.
• 12:23
  Speaker 2: I think it's pretty accurate.
• 12:25
  Speaker 4: What's what's so funny is like we pride ourselves on
• 12:28
  Speaker 4: chasing down every tidbit of information when it comes to cars,
• 12:32
  Speaker 4: We're just like, that's out.
• 12:35
  Speaker 2: No idea.
• 12:35
  Speaker 3: Who'd want to hear a live podcast about a car? So, uh,
• 12:39
  Speaker 3: this magic box on the Ford Pinto had four protruding
• 12:43
  Speaker 3: bolts facing the gas tank that uh see you're getting
• 12:49
  Speaker 3: it now that uh in court later on, and this
• 12:53
  Speaker 3: would end up in court that you see where this
• 12:55
  Speaker 3: is going. Lawyers would call them can openers, and we're
• 13:00
  Speaker 3: just gonna call them for this show, flaming death bolts.
• 13:05
  Speaker 4: I wish we had a sound effect or like a
• 13:06
  Speaker 4: jingle like Flaming Death Bolts.
• 13:10
  Speaker 3: And we should totally trademark Flaming Death Bolts.
• 13:12
  Speaker 4: I think so too, or at least that's a band name.
• 13:14
  Speaker 4: I think we should at least call it out as that.
• 13:16
  Speaker 5: Oh right, do you hear that?
• 13:19
  Speaker 3: Are they're Flaming Death Faults behind us?
• 13:22
  Speaker 2: That came out?
• 13:23
  Speaker 5: Uh, we're here on the wrong night.
• 13:27
  Speaker 4: So, like I said, there there's a lot of good
• 13:29
  Speaker 4: quotes out there, but probably the best of them, the
• 13:31
  Speaker 4: best came from this journalist named Mark Dowie who figures
• 13:34
  Speaker 4: big time into the story and he probably got across
• 13:38
  Speaker 4: the problem with the Pinto better than anybody. And if
• 13:40
  Speaker 4: I may please okay, Mark Dowie said, if you ran
• 13:45
  Speaker 4: into a Pinto you were following it over thirty miles
• 13:48
  Speaker 4: an hour, the rear end of the car would buckle
• 13:50
  Speaker 4: like an accordion right up to the back seat, and
• 13:53
  Speaker 4: the tube bleeding to the gas tank cap would be
• 13:55
  Speaker 4: ripped away from the tank itself and gas would immediately
• 13:58
  Speaker 4: begin squashing onto the road around the car. Right the
• 14:02
  Speaker 4: buckle gas tank would be jammed up against the differential housing,
• 14:05
  Speaker 4: which contained four sharp protruding bolts, likely to gash holes
• 14:09
  Speaker 4: in the tank and spill still more gas. Now all
• 14:13
  Speaker 4: you need is a spark from a cigarette.
• 14:15
  Speaker 2: And this is me interjecting here. This is the seventies.
• 14:18
  Speaker 4: So every single person in every single car was smoking
• 14:22
  Speaker 4: every single second of every moment they were driving.
• 14:25
  Speaker 3: There are four lit cigarettes in every car at all
• 14:28
  Speaker 3: times with the windows.
• 14:29
  Speaker 2: Up barring that.
• 14:31
  Speaker 4: You could also get it from the ignition or scraping metal,
• 14:34
  Speaker 4: and both cars would be engulfed in flames.
• 14:37
  Speaker 2: If you gave that pin to a.
• 14:38
  Speaker 4: Really good whack, say it forty miles per hour, chances
• 14:42
  Speaker 4: are excellent that its doors would jam and you would
• 14:45
  Speaker 4: have to stand by and watch its trapped passengers burn
• 14:48
  Speaker 4: to death.
• 14:53
  Speaker 3: You're that's not me saying this.
• 14:58
  Speaker 5: Your additional what do you call it? Pantomiming acting?
• 15:03
  Speaker 2: It's in the pantomime tradition.
• 15:05
  Speaker 5: Fantastic, Thank you.
• 15:09
  Speaker 3: Reading Rainbow with Josh give LeVar Burton a run for
• 15:14
  Speaker 3: his money. All right, So there was one thirty mile
• 15:19
  Speaker 3: per hour crash test with a pinto that found that
• 15:22
  Speaker 3: all thirteen gallons, all thirteen gallons, spilled out in less
• 15:27
  Speaker 3: than sixty seconds. So we all drive here in Atlanta
• 15:31
  Speaker 3: and you all pump gas. You know how fast when
• 15:34
  Speaker 3: you're pumping gas, it's coming out and you're like, oh
• 15:36
  Speaker 3: my god, that's so fast. Hole coming out so fast.
• 15:41
  Speaker 3: You can't pump take a gas in sixty seconds. So
• 15:44
  Speaker 3: the Pinto is spilling gas faster than you can pump gas.
• 15:48
  Speaker 5: Think about that next time you go to the gas station.
• 15:52
  Speaker 4: Yeah, thank god, I'm not driving an early nineteen seventies Pinto.
• 15:57
  Speaker 4: So the weird thing is this, despite the Pinto's reputation,
• 16:03
  Speaker 4: whether it's from top secret, you learned about it from
• 16:06
  Speaker 4: your older brother, who knows where you heard it from,
• 16:09
  Speaker 4: but a lot most people, I would even say, know
• 16:12
  Speaker 4: of the Pinto is a flaming death trap. It turns out,
• 16:15
  Speaker 4: in retrospect, the Pinto was really not much worse than
• 16:19
  Speaker 4: any other car in its class at the time, which
• 16:21
  Speaker 4: is not to say that the Pinto wasn't a flaming
• 16:24
  Speaker 4: death trap, but instead all cars were flaming death traps.
• 16:28
  Speaker 4: The idea of being safe if you got into a
• 16:32
  Speaker 4: crash was totally lost on Detroit at the time.
• 16:36
  Speaker 2: It wasn't a thing.
• 16:38
  Speaker 4: So we wondered, okay, well, how did the Pinto actually
• 16:40
  Speaker 4: get this reputation?
• 16:42
  Speaker 2: And to answer that question, we have.
• 16:44
  Speaker 4: To go to the Great Periodical Room in the sky
• 16:48
  Speaker 4: and we have to go back to the ninth.
• 16:50
  Speaker 5: We all have to die.
• 16:52
  Speaker 2: No, No, that's the great part about it. You can
• 16:55
  Speaker 2: go there alive.
• 16:56
  Speaker 5: Oh.
• 16:57
  Speaker 3: Usually when you say the great thing in the sky,
• 16:58
  Speaker 3: that means you're totally dead.
• 17:00
  Speaker 2: Just in the sky.
• 17:00
  Speaker 3: Okay, all right, Great, we're going to the Great Periodical
• 17:04
  Speaker 3: in the sky.
• 17:05
  Speaker 2: Why and we're all living?
• 17:06
  Speaker 5: All right, it's great.
• 17:09
  Speaker 4: We're gonna go back to the nineteen seventy seventh section
• 17:12
  Speaker 4: and we're going to find the nineteen seventy seven year
• 17:16
  Speaker 4: for Mother Jones Magazine. Has everyone ever heard of Mother
• 17:19
  Speaker 4: Jones Magazines still around today? So on one might characterize
• 17:24
  Speaker 4: it as slightly left of center maybe, And it was
• 17:27
  Speaker 4: very much the same back in the day.
• 17:29
  Speaker 5: Yeah.
• 17:30
  Speaker 4: And in this September October nineteen seventy seven issue of
• 17:34
  Speaker 4: Mother Jones Magazine, there was an article by Mark Dowie.
• 17:37
  Speaker 3: That's right, it's called Pinto Madness. You can still read
• 17:40
  Speaker 3: this article today. It was one of the main sources
• 17:42
  Speaker 3: we used. It's a great deep dive if you want
• 17:45
  Speaker 3: to read some more stuff about the Pinto But Mark
• 17:48
  Speaker 3: Dowie was the quote you read earlier, and he was
• 17:50
  Speaker 3: a journalist there at the time.
• 17:52
  Speaker 5: And this is this is one reason you know. This
• 17:55
  Speaker 5: is also the seventies.
• 17:56
  Speaker 3: When they released this article in a print magazine, they
• 18:00
  Speaker 3: had a press conference about it, which is adorable when
• 18:03
  Speaker 3: you think about it, especially through today's lens. So they
• 18:07
  Speaker 3: even traveled. They went to Washington, d C. From San Francisco,
• 18:11
  Speaker 3: held a big press conference there on Capitol Hill about
• 18:14
  Speaker 3: a magazine article, and they invited Ralph Nader to attend, which, yeah, yeah,
• 18:22
  Speaker 3: if you don't know who Ralph Nader is, he is
• 18:24
  Speaker 3: a great American. He was a consumer crusader who cared
• 18:29
  Speaker 3: really about one thing in life, and that is making
• 18:31
  Speaker 3: sure that corporations didn't screw you over and they kept
• 18:37
  Speaker 3: you safe. And it's not like he got rich doing it.
• 18:40
  Speaker 3: Ralph Nader was a great, great dude, right.
• 18:42
  Speaker 4: He lived like a hermit to show that he wasn't
• 18:45
  Speaker 4: being influenced by one side or the other. He had
• 18:47
  Speaker 4: like a mattress on the floor of like a studio apartment.
• 18:51
  Speaker 2: I think he had a hot plate that he lived with.
• 18:54
  Speaker 3: Ironically, it's very dangerous how they think about it.
• 18:59
  Speaker 4: It was like probably the safer hot plates, but yeah.
• 19:01
  Speaker 5: I bet it was the best hot plate on the market.
• 19:03
  Speaker 2: Yeah, for sure, you would think so. But he bought
• 19:04
  Speaker 2: it with his own money.
• 19:06
  Speaker 3: He did so anyother Ralph Nader was there. They got
• 19:08
  Speaker 3: everyone together and they had this big press conference in Washington, DC,
• 19:13
  Speaker 3: and Dowie starts to poke around a little bit and
• 19:17
  Speaker 3: do a little more research for this article and say,
• 19:21
  Speaker 3: you know, I need to go to these need to
• 19:22
  Speaker 3: go to dot and need to go what was the.
• 19:24
  Speaker 4: Other one called NHTSA ones that stand for National Man
• 19:29
  Speaker 4: the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration. Correct, it's a mouthful,
• 19:35
  Speaker 4: very good, so a lot of common words, but when
• 19:36
  Speaker 4: you put him together like that, it's tough.
• 19:41
  Speaker 3: So he went and started doing some investigating and he
• 19:44
  Speaker 3: found out that Ford had been carrying out well, they've
• 19:48
  Speaker 3: been carrying out crash tests in secret. And when you're
• 19:52
  Speaker 3: carrying out crash tests in secret, that's probably not a good.
• 19:55
  Speaker 2: Thing, right.
• 19:56
  Speaker 4: It means that you didn't get the results you were
• 19:58
  Speaker 4: hoping for, so you you suppressed the results you had.
• 20:03
  Speaker 2: All the scientists murdered.
• 20:07
  Speaker 3: Lea totally. Did He's like you see that?
• 20:09
  Speaker 2: Sure?
• 20:09
  Speaker 4: He probably like was like, go to sleep forever. But
• 20:15
  Speaker 4: that was just to get the ball rolling. He had
• 20:17
  Speaker 4: goons killed the rest of them. Oh sure, and you
• 20:20
  Speaker 4: then you filed the crash test with the dot.
• 20:23
  Speaker 2: That was the normal thing.
• 20:25
  Speaker 4: So Dowy's sitting there going through all these file cabinets,
• 20:28
  Speaker 4: and you know, there's all these bureaucrats going like, oh God,
• 20:30
  Speaker 4: why does he keep saying Eureka.
• 20:34
  Speaker 5: Here's the guy in there with the spy camera.
• 20:36
  Speaker 4: And he figured out very very quickly that Ford was
• 20:39
  Speaker 4: well aware of the notion that its Pintos were flaming
• 20:44
  Speaker 4: death traps. Right, And from those forty crash tests, he
• 20:49
  Speaker 4: found that eleven of them, this is really important, eleven
• 20:53
  Speaker 4: of those crash tests had been carried out before the Pinto,
• 20:57
  Speaker 4: the first one, had ever rolled off of the production line.
• 21:01
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 21:02
  Speaker 4: He found in these crash tests that every single one
• 21:05
  Speaker 4: of those forty crash tests, if it was a Pinto
• 21:08
  Speaker 4: that had not been altered, meaning it was the same
• 21:10
  Speaker 4: one that you would buy at like the dealership, they
• 21:13
  Speaker 4: lost gas and an impact of twenty miles an hour
• 21:16
  Speaker 4: over Not very good, right, No, not.
• 21:18
  Speaker 5: Good at all.
• 21:20
  Speaker 3: So three of these cars passed the tests, and all
• 21:22
  Speaker 3: three of them had been had been tweaked for safety
• 21:26
  Speaker 3: like these aren't the ones that you would end up buying.
• 21:29
  Speaker 3: They changed three of them and they all three passed.
• 21:31
  Speaker 3: Yet they still didn't use it. And here are the
• 21:33
  Speaker 3: three things they did. They one was a plastic baffle,
• 21:36
  Speaker 3: a little square plastic that costs.
• 21:38
  Speaker 5: One dollar and it weighed one pound.
• 21:41
  Speaker 3: And it went between the flaming death bolts and the
• 21:44
  Speaker 3: gas tank.
• 21:45
  Speaker 5: Solved the problem pretty sensible.
• 21:47
  Speaker 3: Did not use it because remember two thousand pounds two
• 21:52
  Speaker 3: thousand dollars, which I don't know what that is today.
• 21:54
  Speaker 2: It's a two pounds and twelve thousand.
• 21:57
  Speaker 3: Dollars the pounds and change.
• 22:00
  Speaker 2: Okay, gravity is read relatively the same.
• 22:03
  Speaker 3: The other thing they did, and this ostensibly was a
• 22:07
  Speaker 3: little heavier, They put a metal plate to reinforce that
• 22:11
  Speaker 3: ornamental bumper.
• 22:12
  Speaker 5: In other words, they gave it a bumper and that worked.
• 22:17
  Speaker 3: And then the finally, the final thing they did was
• 22:19
  Speaker 3: a I think they lined that was the inside of
• 22:21
  Speaker 3: the outside of.
• 22:21
  Speaker 2: The gas tank, the inside of the gas tankah.
• 22:23
  Speaker 5: The inside of the gas tank with a rubber bladder.
• 22:25
  Speaker 5: And that worked.
• 22:27
  Speaker 3: But no one likes saying the word bladder head forward.
• 22:29
  Speaker 3: Be honest, it's too gross.
• 22:31
  Speaker 2: It works, but it's crony, So we're getting rid of
• 22:33
  Speaker 2: that one.
• 22:34
  Speaker 3: The point is they had three solutions before the Ford
• 22:37
  Speaker 3: was being rolled off the line, and they chose to
• 22:39
  Speaker 3: ignore all three of them, right.
• 22:41
  Speaker 2: Big point here, right.
• 22:43
  Speaker 4: And in addition to this two thousand pound, two thousand
• 22:46
  Speaker 4: dollars limitation that I Coca imposed, that radically shortened timeline
• 22:52
  Speaker 4: also created a climate where really really dangerous engineering decisions
• 22:56
  Speaker 4: were being made.
• 22:57
  Speaker 5: Right.
• 22:57
  Speaker 2: Normally, when you make.
• 22:59
  Speaker 4: A car, you sketch it out, somebody makes a model
• 23:03
  Speaker 4: of it, some dude like works it in clay. Yeah,
• 23:07
  Speaker 4: you run it into like a couple of walls or
• 23:09
  Speaker 4: something like that. If you figure out how many like
• 23:12
  Speaker 4: light like cigarette lighters are going to go into it,
• 23:16
  Speaker 4: there's a lot of thought put into it. And then
• 23:18
  Speaker 4: once all this stuff, this pre production stuff is done
• 23:22
  Speaker 4: and you know what the car is going to look like,
• 23:25
  Speaker 4: then you begin this process called tooling. And tooling is
• 23:28
  Speaker 4: where you make the machines that are going to make
• 23:32
  Speaker 4: the car that you're manufacturing. Right with the Pinto, they
• 23:36
  Speaker 4: didn't do that. They started designing the car and at
• 23:39
  Speaker 4: about the same time they started making the machines that
• 23:42
  Speaker 4: were going to make that car. Before they even knew
• 23:45
  Speaker 4: ultimately what the final design was going to be. So
• 23:48
  Speaker 4: by the time they figured out that they had a
• 23:51
  Speaker 4: really dangerous fuel tank on their hands, it was too late.
• 23:55
  Speaker 4: The tooling was underway, two hundred million dollars worth of
• 23:58
  Speaker 4: machines had been made, and Ford.
• 24:00
  Speaker 3: Said, yeah, so when they discovered this, we have a
• 24:09
  Speaker 3: couple of quotes here from actual engineers that worked there
• 24:12
  Speaker 3: at the time, and they said, did anyone go to
• 24:15
  Speaker 3: le Ayacoca and say, hey, we have a problem on
• 24:17
  Speaker 3: our hands with his gat stank And this one engineer
• 24:20
  Speaker 3: from the Mother Jones article said hell no.
• 24:24
  Speaker 4: But if it was like nineteen seventy seven, so we
• 24:26
  Speaker 4: didn't say it like that, he went like, hell no.
• 24:29
  Speaker 3: Right in my mind he went, hell no, hell no.
• 24:35
  Speaker 5: Uh, that person would have been fired.
• 24:37
  Speaker 3: Safety wasn't a popular subject around Ford in those days,
• 24:40
  Speaker 3: and with Lee it was taboo.
• 24:43
  Speaker 2: Or taboo, like if you're a normal.
• 24:45
  Speaker 3: Person, if you talk normally, tattoo, taboo, tattoo, taboo. All right, deletrious,
• 25:00
  Speaker 3: it's that's a deep cut. Yeah, there's about twenty people
• 25:04
  Speaker 3: in here that got that one. That's all right, all right,
• 25:07
  Speaker 3: So I had a cocata saying around Ford at the time,
• 25:10
  Speaker 3: which was safety doesn't sell. And here's another quote from
• 25:15
  Speaker 3: another engineer. Safety is in the issue trunk spaces. You
• 25:19
  Speaker 3: have no idea how stiff the competition is over trunk space.
• 25:22
  Speaker 3: Do you realize that if we put a safer gas
• 25:24
  Speaker 3: tank in the Pinto, you can only get one set
• 25:26
  Speaker 3: of golf clubs in the trunk.
• 25:29
  Speaker 5: And that's a real quote. Yeah, And here's something that
• 25:32
  Speaker 5: you can do when you get home.
• 25:33
  Speaker 3: You can go and look up Ford Pinto ad and
• 25:37
  Speaker 3: search Google images or being images? Is that of thing?
• 25:41
  Speaker 2: Yahoo?
• 25:42
  Speaker 3: Yeah, you have to be Google. Yeah, go to netscape.
• 25:46
  Speaker 4: And or if you're a paranoid type, duck dut gout.
• 25:52
  Speaker 5: That even flew over my head.
• 25:53
  Speaker 4: Uh, it's like they don't like track or use cookies
• 25:56
  Speaker 4: or anything like that.
• 25:58
  Speaker 3: Oh yeah, so you're creep.
• 26:00
  Speaker 4: I guess. I guess are you stockpile weapons or something?
• 26:04
  Speaker 5: Gotcha?
• 26:05
  Speaker 3: So anyway, you can look up four Pinto ads and
• 26:08
  Speaker 3: there are all kinds of great ads from the old days.
• 26:10
  Speaker 3: And there's one where there's where there's this couple that
• 26:13
  Speaker 3: I guess is unpacking for like a camping trip from
• 26:16
  Speaker 3: their Pinto. But it doesn't look like anywhere you would
• 26:18
  Speaker 3: want to go camping. It's just kind of like a field.
• 26:20
  Speaker 2: There's like a ditch.
• 26:21
  Speaker 3: Yeah, it's kind of weird looking. And it says this
• 26:25
  Speaker 3: in the text. Just slip down the Runabout's rear seat.
• 26:28
  Speaker 3: The Runabout was one of the Pinto models. Open up
• 26:31
  Speaker 3: the big back door, which we call a hatchback these days,
• 26:36
  Speaker 3: and the big back room makes packing easy. Pack in
• 26:39
  Speaker 3: your golf clubs, those groceries and those big pieces of luggage,
• 26:43
  Speaker 3: pack it all in.
• 26:45
  Speaker 2: You make it sound really.
• 26:46
  Speaker 3: Dirty, there's a big room in your little Pinto.
• 26:56
  Speaker 2: I'm the sicko because I'm using Duck Duck.
• 26:59
  Speaker 3: It's a sexiest out of the seventies as read by me.
• 27:03
  Speaker 4: I like old ads in old magazines because like you
• 27:06
  Speaker 4: can smell them after work, you know what I'm saying.
• 27:08
  Speaker 4: Like if you go into Google images, the ads there,
• 27:11
  Speaker 4: but not the smell. But you know what an old
• 27:13
  Speaker 4: magazine smells like. But it's a great fantastic smell.
• 27:18
  Speaker 3: You mean, like musty, what magazines are you reading?
• 27:23
  Speaker 2: Just any old magazine? Pick up? Just like.
• 27:32
  Speaker 3: All right, Jerry cut that part.
• 27:37
  Speaker 5: Now, I'm not doing my shot yet.
• 27:39
  Speaker 2: And everybody calmed down. My niece left to go to bed.
• 27:41
  Speaker 3: So oh, okay, are there any other kids here?
• 27:46
  Speaker 5: All right?
• 27:48
  Speaker 3: You have a very deep voice, young boy right here.
• 27:55
  Speaker 5: I'm seven, bear me screw.
• 28:00
  Speaker 4: So everybody, I think we can all agree this is
• 28:03
  Speaker 4: going pretty well.
• 28:12
  Speaker 2: You're not gonna like this. That means that we need.
• 28:14
  Speaker 3: To put an ad break in here.
• 28:17
  Speaker 2: Calm down, We'll be right back right after these messages.
• 28:23
  Speaker 2: Stuff we Josh shop.
• 28:28
  Speaker 6: Soft your shore.
• 28:43
  Speaker 3: Hey, everybody, we're back.
• 28:48
  Speaker 2: Magic about words.
• 28:51
  Speaker 3: Yeah, thank you, sir. I am wearing me Undies. Oh
• 28:54
  Speaker 3: you know what we should say this?
• 28:57
  Speaker 2: That's a freebie man.
• 28:59
  Speaker 3: Well this part out too, but uh, I have to
• 29:02
  Speaker 3: share this we got.
• 29:03
  Speaker 5: This is a legit tangent like you know, like all
• 29:06
  Speaker 5: of them.
• 29:08
  Speaker 4: The heavily scripted and reversed tangents that you've heard him.
• 29:11
  Speaker 5: We got an email yesterday. You saw it. I did
• 29:14
  Speaker 5: where a woman?
• 29:16
  Speaker 3: This is so weird. A woman wanted to send a
• 29:21
  Speaker 3: new pair of me Undies to us for us to
• 29:24
  Speaker 3: autograph so she could frame underwear for her husband's Christmas gifts.
• 29:32
  Speaker 5: Now that is a deep cut.
• 29:34
  Speaker 4: Sure, that's a true fan. At least she wasn't like
• 29:38
  Speaker 4: and you wear them first? Yeah, each of you passed
• 29:42
  Speaker 4: it off to the other one and then mail them
• 29:44
  Speaker 4: back to me.
• 29:45
  Speaker 5: Those are like, oh yeah, send him in right, totally
• 29:47
  Speaker 5: do that I.
• 29:48
  Speaker 2: Sent you will smell them like an old magazine, you know.
• 29:53
  Speaker 2: Right when she got that in the mail.
• 30:00
  Speaker 6: Oh chuck, uh said, I didn't what guys, what why
• 30:11
  Speaker 6: would you do that?
• 30:12
  Speaker 2: No one else saw that. We should probably edit this
• 30:17
  Speaker 2: part out.
• 30:17
  Speaker 5: To Jared, this guy right here.
• 30:21
  Speaker 3: So I send that email to our head of sales though,
• 30:23
  Speaker 3: and he was just so delighted. He was like, oh,
• 30:25
  Speaker 3: I can't wait to send this to me Undies. They're
• 30:28
  Speaker 3: you're autographing underwear. They're not gonna believe it.
• 30:31
  Speaker 4: That's that's like David Lee Wroth level, except we're autographing
• 30:35
  Speaker 4: me undies for a fan some dude.
• 30:40
  Speaker 5: It's not David right.
• 30:42
  Speaker 3: All right, everybody, we're back, kind of thinking, sure you
• 30:49
  Speaker 3: may do it again though, because you just said that, right, Okay,
• 30:51
  Speaker 3: Hey everybody, we're back.
• 30:53
  Speaker 4: I think I just stepped on you again. And stop laughing, everybody.
• 30:57
  Speaker 4: We need to clean I said, stop laughing.
• 31:03
  Speaker 5: Hey, everybody, we're back. Thanks for hanging there.
• 31:08
  Speaker 2: Thank you. That was a really long app We know
• 31:11
  Speaker 2: where we were now. I got it.
• 31:13
  Speaker 3: I got it you right, I got creepy right before
• 31:17
  Speaker 3: I know that, I know, all right, I got you. Hey, everybody,
• 31:22
  Speaker 3: we're back. Everyone's gonna be like, what the hell happened
• 31:32
  Speaker 3: in Atlanta?
• 31:33
  Speaker 4: That's good enough. We're leaving that dinn right. So by now,
• 31:38
  Speaker 4: everybody you may be saying, Chuck, Josh, WTF, how how
• 31:44
  Speaker 4: could this possibly be going on?
• 31:46
  Speaker 2: How could Ford be doing.
• 31:48
  Speaker 4: This kind of stuff. We're gonna tell you WTF. It
• 31:52
  Speaker 4: turns out that back in the sixties, the American auto
• 31:55
  Speaker 4: industry was like the last great unregulated industry the entire country.
• 32:01
  Speaker 4: And the reason why was because most Americans considered the
• 32:06
  Speaker 4: auto industry the backbone of the American economy. Right, so
• 32:10
  Speaker 4: everyone said, we should probably just let the auto industry
• 32:13
  Speaker 4: decide what's best for it and us it's consumers, because
• 32:17
  Speaker 4: we don't want to mess with them.
• 32:19
  Speaker 3: Yeah, and big corporations love to look out for everyday Americans,
• 32:22
  Speaker 3: all right.
• 32:24
  Speaker 4: But at the time, there was a fatality rate aka
• 32:28
  Speaker 4: death rate on the America's highways reaching fifty thousand people
• 32:33
  Speaker 4: a year.
• 32:35
  Speaker 2: We did the math. That's a lot.
• 32:39
  Speaker 5: That is a lot.
• 32:40
  Speaker 3: Ralph Nader had a book called Unsafe at Any Speed
• 32:42
  Speaker 3: that was a big hit.
• 32:44
  Speaker 5: He also had one called hot.
• 32:46
  Speaker 3: Plates Unsafe at any temperature, So does cell quite as well.
• 32:52
  Speaker 4: Has anyone actually read Unsafe at Any Speed? Don't feel bad,
• 32:54
  Speaker 4: We haven't either, Okay, good. So he released his book
• 32:58
  Speaker 4: in nineteen sixty five, and it was basically like a
• 33:01
  Speaker 4: chapter by chapter, really wonky detailed description of how your
• 33:06
  Speaker 4: car was ready and willing to murder you, right, not
• 33:10
  Speaker 4: kill you, murder you intentional.
• 33:14
  Speaker 2: They were like chapters.
• 33:15
  Speaker 4: On like the steering column it's going to impale you,
• 33:18
  Speaker 4: or that dashboard it ain't padded, and your head's going
• 33:22
  Speaker 4: to open up like a ripe candle op when it
• 33:23
  Speaker 4: comes in contact with it.
• 33:25
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 33:25
  Speaker 5: It was amazing chapter I think that.
• 33:27
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 33:27
  Speaker 4: And the reason that this would happen for both instances
• 33:30
  Speaker 4: is because there's no such thing as seat belts, right,
• 33:33
  Speaker 4: So he goes to the truck.
• 33:35
  Speaker 5: There were seat belts. It was your mom doing that, right, And.
• 33:38
  Speaker 4: That's how you knew, like a really dedicated mom in
• 33:41
  Speaker 4: the in the sixties, because she was missing an arm, right,
• 33:44
  Speaker 4: that's right, like her kid was all messed up at
• 33:47
  Speaker 4: a den on his head or whatever because it didn't
• 33:49
  Speaker 4: quite work because her arm came clean off when they
• 33:51
  Speaker 4: both went forward. But he was still alive. She didn't
• 33:55
  Speaker 4: have an arm. It was a badge of honor back then.
• 33:58
  Speaker 4: So Ralph Nader makes this makes writes this book, and
• 34:04
  Speaker 4: it gets released and it becomes like a best seller
• 34:06
  Speaker 4: almost immediately, and it has so much of an impact
• 34:09
  Speaker 4: that the next year Congress passed the Highway Safety Act
• 34:13
  Speaker 4: of nineteen sixty six.
• 34:14
  Speaker 3: Yeah, and this is another way you knew it was
• 34:17
  Speaker 3: a day from way back in the day. The House
• 34:21
  Speaker 3: and the Senate passed it unanimously.
• 34:25
  Speaker 2: This is so quaint.
• 34:26
  Speaker 3: They all got together and said, well, this is what's
• 34:28
  Speaker 3: good for the American people.
• 34:30
  Speaker 5: So this is our job to do this.
• 34:32
  Speaker 3: And they went yeah, yeah, pretty sweet, pretty sweet time.
• 34:38
  Speaker 4: Pretty sweet. So they passed this thing. And the upshot
• 34:42
  Speaker 4: of it was that now the auto industry would be regulated.
• 34:45
  Speaker 4: It was just the way it was going to be. Okay,
• 34:48
  Speaker 4: And the auto industry said, okay, okay, fine, fine, but
• 34:51
  Speaker 4: what about this. Why don't we agree to use something
• 34:56
  Speaker 4: called a cost benefit analysis to decide if we a
• 35:00
  Speaker 4: actually undertake any regulations you propose? Deal and the DOT
• 35:05
  Speaker 4: and NHTSA was like, well oh no. In the auto
• 35:07
  Speaker 4: industry went like that, and the DOTWO is like, all right, fine, fine,
• 35:10
  Speaker 4: we don't want to arm wrestle over this one. Fine
• 35:13
  Speaker 4: cost benefit analysis for everybody.
• 35:15
  Speaker 3: Yeah, So if you don't know what a cost benefit
• 35:17
  Speaker 3: analysis is, we call it the cruelest of all analyzes
• 35:21
  Speaker 3: because it's basically just a math problem. You plug in
• 35:24
  Speaker 3: numbers and you say, I plug in this, I plug
• 35:27
  Speaker 3: in this.
• 35:28
  Speaker 5: Is it worth it to do this?
• 35:29
  Speaker 2: Right?
• 35:29
  Speaker 5: Which works great in.
• 35:31
  Speaker 3: A lot of circumstances if you're talking about I don't know,
• 35:33
  Speaker 3: like a like what's a good example.
• 35:35
  Speaker 4: Or like if you're trying to figure out whether to
• 35:37
  Speaker 4: go with tire distributor A or tire distributor, be kind
• 35:41
  Speaker 4: of easy.
• 35:41
  Speaker 5: Right exactly.
• 35:42
  Speaker 3: But if you're talking about replacing a fuel tank because
• 35:46
  Speaker 3: it's killing people, it gets a little sticky. Because one
• 35:50
  Speaker 3: of the inputs on those math problems has to be
• 35:54
  Speaker 3: the value of a human life.
• 35:56
  Speaker 5: There's no getting around it, no way around it.
• 35:58
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 35:58
  Speaker 4: So the NHTSA say said, well, I guess we should
• 36:02
  Speaker 4: go ahead and figure out how to quantify a human life.
• 36:06
  Speaker 4: They all went home and like kissed their children. Then
• 36:09
  Speaker 4: they came back to work, and what they came up
• 36:13
  Speaker 4: with they actually did it. There was a nineteen seventy
• 36:15
  Speaker 4: two document that said, everybody, this is the value of
• 36:20
  Speaker 4: a human life. We figured it out two hundred thousand,
• 36:23
  Speaker 4: seven hundred and twenty five dollars. And what they did
• 36:27
  Speaker 4: was it was just like, who, yeah, really, I.
• 36:30
  Speaker 2: Thought mine was half that. So what they did was
• 36:36
  Speaker 2: they figured out.
• 36:38
  Speaker 4: The average life span or the average age I guess,
• 36:42
  Speaker 4: of a person who dies in a car wreck, and
• 36:44
  Speaker 4: then subtracted it from the average lifespan of the Americans
• 36:48
  Speaker 4: at the at the time in the Iraq such as
• 36:55
  Speaker 4: and they came up with They came up with thirty
• 36:59
  Speaker 4: seven years. Those people who die in a car wreck
• 37:01
  Speaker 4: would have lived thirty seven more years. And then they said, well,
• 37:04
  Speaker 4: how much would those people make in that time? And
• 37:07
  Speaker 4: they said, well, two hundred thousand, seven and twenty five dollars.
• 37:11
  Speaker 4: The problem with this is is that really what they
• 37:14
  Speaker 4: calculated was the cost to society and lost productivity if
• 37:18
  Speaker 4: it's just wages, right, They didn't take into account some
• 37:21
  Speaker 4: very important stuff like the value that the individual places
• 37:25
  Speaker 4: on his or her own life, or whether their family
• 37:28
  Speaker 4: wants them to come home after a car wreck, stuff
• 37:31
  Speaker 4: like that. But they came up with this dollar amount
• 37:34
  Speaker 4: and they said they're there. We'll get better at it
• 37:36
  Speaker 4: over time. But here's what it is, and it's a primitive.
• 37:40
  Speaker 3: Stab exactly again, the cruelest of all analyses. So Mark
• 37:45
  Speaker 3: Dowie is sorting through all the file cabinets of the
• 37:48
  Speaker 3: DOT and the.
• 37:51
  Speaker 4: The National Highway Transportation Safety Administration. It's no faster to
• 37:56
  Speaker 4: say it abbreviated.
• 37:57
  Speaker 3: I know, I would just mess it up though. So
• 38:00
  Speaker 3: he's sorting through all this stuff, he's going through file cabinets.
• 38:02
  Speaker 3: Everyone's worried, and he comes across to document a memo
• 38:05
  Speaker 3: called Fatalities associated with the Crash induced fuel Leakage and Fires.
• 38:10
  Speaker 3: And over the years people come to think like, this
• 38:12
  Speaker 3: is the smoking gun.
• 38:13
  Speaker 5: This was pinto.
• 38:14
  Speaker 3: It was about pinto fires from getting hit in the rear,
• 38:17
  Speaker 3: and that's what it is. It really wasn't that. What
• 38:20
  Speaker 3: it was was it was about all cars in the
• 38:22
  Speaker 3: United States.
• 38:23
  Speaker 5: And whether they caught on fire when they rolled over.
• 38:27
  Speaker 3: However, the one damning thing in this memo was that
• 38:31
  Speaker 3: Ford used that number, well almost that number to quantify
• 38:38
  Speaker 3: the value of a human life. But Ford rounded down.
• 38:42
  Speaker 4: They rounded down the value of a human life, just
• 38:46
  Speaker 4: you know, to make the math easier.
• 38:48
  Speaker 5: Yeah, they made it two hundred grand.
• 38:49
  Speaker 3: They cut off the seven hundred and twenty five dollars,
• 38:52
  Speaker 3: just made it a straight up two hundred.
• 38:54
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 38:54
  Speaker 4: So they estimated like one hundred and eighty fatalities and
• 38:58
  Speaker 4: one hundred and eighty injuries in car fires post collision
• 39:03
  Speaker 4: car fires every year in the US. And they said, well,
• 39:07
  Speaker 4: that would cost society forty nine million dollars in lost productivity.
• 39:13
  Speaker 4: But if you want us to do this eleven dollars
• 39:15
  Speaker 4: per car safety improvement that would save those lives and
• 39:18
  Speaker 4: those injuries, well it cost us the auto industry one
• 39:21
  Speaker 4: hundred and thirteen million dollars, So don't have to do
• 39:25
  Speaker 4: it right, great, see it Racquetball's head.
• 39:31
  Speaker 3: That was kind of a do you guys see fight club?
• 39:34
  Speaker 3: Remember Edward Norton's job. That was kind of what he
• 39:37
  Speaker 3: did right a little bit.
• 39:39
  Speaker 4: Yeah, he had to kind of calculate whether or not
• 39:42
  Speaker 4: it was worth taking a recall exactly. And Ford, thanks
• 39:45
  Speaker 4: to Dowie, had just been caught red handed with one
• 39:48
  Speaker 4: of these submitted in the public record.
• 39:51
  Speaker 3: All right, so part of the Motor Vehicle Safety Act
• 39:55
  Speaker 3: was something and all these bills this gets a little wonky,
• 39:58
  Speaker 3: but bear with me. They're all broken down into subcategories,
• 40:01
  Speaker 3: and one of them was called Vehicle Safety Standard three
• 40:03
  Speaker 3: oh one and three yoho one was basically our government
• 40:06
  Speaker 3: getting together and saying, you know what, we feel like
• 40:10
  Speaker 3: you should be able to get hit from the rear
• 40:13
  Speaker 3: at like twenty miles an hour and not explode it
• 40:17
  Speaker 3: into a fiery ball.
• 40:19
  Speaker 4: We've talked about it. We know what you're going to say, Detroit,
• 40:21
  Speaker 4: what we've talked about. We feel very strongly about this.
• 40:25
  Speaker 5: We feel that's reasonable.
• 40:26
  Speaker 3: Democrats push for thirty, Republicans pushed for ten. They met
• 40:29
  Speaker 3: in the middle at twenty.
• 40:32
  Speaker 2: There are people from copp County here on sure. They
• 40:36
  Speaker 2: are not happy with you right now, so that's right.
• 40:40
  Speaker 2: They are going to let us know via email after
• 40:42
  Speaker 2: this show.
• 40:44
  Speaker 3: I'm so angry that the way you feel about life.
• 40:50
  Speaker 3: So they settle in twenty miles an hour and that
• 40:51
  Speaker 3: was Safety Standard three oh one. But here's the rub
• 40:56
  Speaker 3: for Ford and the Pinto is they had a problem
• 40:59
  Speaker 3: on their hands. They could with stand twenty miles an hour,
• 41:02
  Speaker 3: they could barely withstand five, so this would have meant
• 41:05
  Speaker 3: a complete redesign on the Pinto.
• 41:07
  Speaker 5: So they came up with a.
• 41:10
  Speaker 3: Plan basically to shall we say delay the process.
• 41:14
  Speaker 4: Yeah, I Coca went kill it, killed that thing, killed
• 41:17
  Speaker 4: that standard three oh one, I hate it.
• 41:20
  Speaker 5: And they were happy because they didn't have to kill
• 41:21
  Speaker 5: a human.
• 41:22
  Speaker 2: Right for once.
• 41:25
  Speaker 4: So what Clowson is, Oh, yeah, I didn't even mean
• 41:28
  Speaker 4: to say that, but.
• 41:29
  Speaker 2: Getting dark pretty well.
• 41:31
  Speaker 5: So here's what they did.
• 41:32
  Speaker 3: They got attorneys on the case and they said, here's
• 41:34
  Speaker 3: what you'll do. You're gonna you're gonna file these arguments
• 41:38
  Speaker 3: on the last day that you can file an argument,
• 41:41
  Speaker 3: and you're gonna get all this data together and you're
• 41:43
  Speaker 3: gonna shove it in their face and say here's an argument,
• 41:46
  Speaker 3: dot dot U, and now you got to look through
• 41:50
  Speaker 3: all this stuff and you have to satisfy that argument.
• 41:52
  Speaker 3: So they may not have even cared if the argument
• 41:55
  Speaker 3: held up or not. The point was they just wanted
• 41:57
  Speaker 3: to delay things so they could keep selling the very
• 42:00
  Speaker 3: dangerous pinto So they did this, and they didn't They
• 42:03
  Speaker 3: didn't file them concurrently, all at once, which is sort
• 42:06
  Speaker 3: of what you usually do in the law in court.
• 42:09
  Speaker 3: They would file one, they would go look through them
• 42:11
  Speaker 3: all and say, yeah, this holds water. It doesn't They
• 42:13
  Speaker 3: go great, They'd wait till the next deadline and file
• 42:15
  Speaker 3: another one, and all of a sudden, they have delayed
• 42:18
  Speaker 3: this process for nine years.
• 42:21
  Speaker 2: Nine years.
• 42:22
  Speaker 4: They started arguing against it in nineteen sixty eight, and
• 42:26
  Speaker 4: standard three oh one went into effect in nineteen seventy seven.
• 42:30
  Speaker 2: Right, yeah, boo. So there's kind of like.
• 42:37
  Speaker 4: A silver lining to this whole thing, and that Ford's
• 42:41
  Speaker 4: objections actually forced the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration to
• 42:46
  Speaker 4: study the problem of car fires, to answer Ford's objections
• 42:51
  Speaker 4: and say, no, actually, you're wrong, they're kind of a problem.
• 42:54
  Speaker 5: Yeah.
• 42:54
  Speaker 3: They were giving them reams of data and then they went, oh,
• 42:57
  Speaker 3: we just gave them.
• 42:58
  Speaker 4: Right, But the NHTSA also had to like contract with
• 43:02
  Speaker 4: people to study this stuff. And what they were finding
• 43:04
  Speaker 4: was that car fires in America were way, way more
• 43:08
  Speaker 4: of a problem than even Ford I think realized at
• 43:11
  Speaker 4: the time. They turned up some stats like four hundred
• 43:15
  Speaker 4: thousand cars were burning up on the American Highway every year,
• 43:19
  Speaker 4: burning more than three thousand.
• 43:21
  Speaker 2: People of death. Is that high?
• 43:23
  Speaker 5: Four hundred thousand cars.
• 43:25
  Speaker 2: Yeah, maybe it's a little high. I don't know, but
• 43:28
  Speaker 2: this is what they turned up.
• 43:29
  Speaker 3: It sounds high. Here's a here's one forty percent of
• 43:33
  Speaker 3: all calls to all fire departments in the United States
• 43:37
  Speaker 3: and the nineteen sixties were cars on fire.
• 43:41
  Speaker 2: Isn't that nuts?
• 43:42
  Speaker 4: Just the last time you guys trust a car on fire.
• 43:45
  Speaker 4: This would be like an like you would see one
• 43:47
  Speaker 4: and a couple of miles later, there's another one.
• 43:49
  Speaker 3: Well yeah, And this was people didn't have cell phones,
• 43:52
  Speaker 3: so you would have to see a car on fire,
• 43:54
  Speaker 3: have a dime in your pocket, be near enough to
• 43:57
  Speaker 3: a payphone.
• 43:58
  Speaker 5: To report it, right, And that was forty percent, and
• 44:01
  Speaker 5: have made.
• 44:02
  Speaker 4: The judgment that there was a chance that the person
• 44:04
  Speaker 4: was going to make it in the time that you
• 44:06
  Speaker 4: went to the payphone. You know, there's a lot of
• 44:09
  Speaker 4: factors here. Forty percent seems high. Like if you had
• 44:12
  Speaker 4: a Christmas parade in your town, there was a pretty
• 44:15
  Speaker 4: good chance a couple of those cars were just going
• 44:17
  Speaker 4: to catch fire in the middle of the parade. This
• 44:21
  Speaker 4: is insane. And this is what the NHTSA was finding
• 44:25
  Speaker 4: from studying this problem. There's a University of Miami study.
• 44:29
  Speaker 4: They found that rear end impact fires were quote a
• 44:31
  Speaker 4: clear and present hazard to all Pinto owners.
• 44:35
  Speaker 2: That was the cane saying that.
• 44:38
  Speaker 3: All right, so.
• 44:41
  Speaker 4: Wait, wait, wait, we got to take another Mbrank Okay, everybody.
• 44:46
  Speaker 2: We'll be right back.
• 44:47
  Speaker 4: Don't get up, We'll be right back right after these messages.
• 44:52
  Speaker 7: Softly soft, Hey, everybody, we're back.
• 45:16
  Speaker 2: It's a lot better live. Huh.
• 45:20
  Speaker 5: They get it now.
• 45:22
  Speaker 3: So, the original draft of the Motor Vehicle Safety Act
• 45:25
  Speaker 3: had had a part that provided it was very controversial.
• 45:28
  Speaker 5: It provided for criminal.
• 45:29
  Speaker 3: Sanctions, criminal sanctions against executives of auto companies, and these well,
• 45:37
  Speaker 3: let's be honest, these white dudes that were executives of
• 45:40
  Speaker 3: these auto companies said, well, I think I don't think
• 45:44
  Speaker 3: you really mean that right.
• 45:45
  Speaker 2: That means we could go to prison, you understand.
• 45:48
  Speaker 3: I like, I think we should. Uh, we have some
• 45:50
  Speaker 3: lobbyists on the case. And so they put the lobbyists
• 45:54
  Speaker 3: on the case, and they did get that lobbied out
• 45:57
  Speaker 3: of the Safety Act. Unfortunately, Yeah, I say, unfortunately, that's
• 46:02
  Speaker 3: me talking.
• 46:03
  Speaker 2: Sure, Well, you're speaking for both of us, buddy, And.
• 46:06
  Speaker 3: They end up with like five or ten thousand dollars.
• 46:08
  Speaker 4: Yeah, in nineteen seventy seven, money which today translates to
• 46:11
  Speaker 4: like forty grand. So if you were an auto executive
• 46:14
  Speaker 4: who knowingly put a dangerous car out on the American market,
• 46:20
  Speaker 4: you could face a fine of forty thousand dollars and
• 46:23
  Speaker 4: from what we understand, that's like once one time.
• 46:26
  Speaker 2: Fine, Yeah, that was it.
• 46:27
  Speaker 4: So it would be up to the media and the
• 46:29
  Speaker 4: courts to force Forward to do something about its Pinto
• 46:33
  Speaker 4: And boy.
• 46:33
  Speaker 3: Did they ever the drumbeat started, isn't that right?
• 46:36
  Speaker 2: Yeah?
• 46:36
  Speaker 4: It started with Dowie, right, Like, Mark Dowie gets this
• 46:39
  Speaker 4: gets a lot of credit for the Pinto article, and
• 46:44
  Speaker 4: definitely he definitely had a big impact, but he gets
• 46:47
  Speaker 4: some undue credit for getting Standard three to ZHO one
• 46:50
  Speaker 4: to come into effect because it came into effect pretty
• 46:52
  Speaker 4: shortly after the Pinto madness article came out. It turns
• 46:57
  Speaker 4: out later research turned.
• 46:58
  Speaker 2: Up that the NHTSA had.
• 47:02
  Speaker 4: Said, Ford, we're so sick of you arguing against standard
• 47:06
  Speaker 4: three oh one. How long will it take for you
• 47:08
  Speaker 4: guys to get your cars up to standard three TOZHO
• 47:11
  Speaker 4: one level, which again is a twenty mile an hour
• 47:14
  Speaker 4: rear impact that doesn't lead to fuel loss.
• 47:17
  Speaker 2: And four it was like, I don't know, seems like a.
• 47:21
  Speaker 4: Big job, right, four years And the NHTSA was like,
• 47:27
  Speaker 4: you know, it took you two years to design the
• 47:30
  Speaker 4: car from scratch, right, They're like like, yeah, this is huge,
• 47:33
  Speaker 4: massive improvements to make it safe. So four years so
• 47:36
  Speaker 4: the NHTSA said, fine, fine, in nineteen seventy seven, it'll
• 47:40
  Speaker 4: come into effect. So it was just coincidence, but Dowy's
• 47:43
  Speaker 4: article did have a big impact in the way of
• 47:45
  Speaker 4: like shaping public opinion.
• 47:47
  Speaker 5: Yeah, for sure.
• 47:48
  Speaker 3: So what happens is there's starting to be some lawsuits.
• 47:52
  Speaker 3: People that are getting burned alive in pintos and other
• 47:55
  Speaker 3: cars say well, maybe maybe we could sue somebody, and
• 48:00
  Speaker 3: that is that a duck.
• 48:01
  Speaker 4: Class a duck in the house. Well, okay, let's get
• 48:07
  Speaker 4: back on tracks. Get back on track.
• 48:14
  Speaker 2: Works, doesn't it. You're all charmed? Thank you for taking
• 48:20
  Speaker 2: that one for us, Chuck.
• 48:21
  Speaker 3: Jerry cut that part all right, so by that's delicious,
• 48:28
  Speaker 3: it's good.
• 48:29
  Speaker 2: Yeah, bullet bullet, bran bourbon.
• 48:34
  Speaker 3: It's called buzz marketing everyone. They don't even pay us
• 48:36
  Speaker 3: for that yet. So they're these people that have this
• 48:44
  Speaker 3: job where they recreate accidents for sometimes it's for court,
• 48:49
  Speaker 3: for attorneys for the state. Sometimes it's for insurance companies.
• 48:53
  Speaker 3: But they recreate these accidents to kind of show what
• 48:55
  Speaker 3: went down. And some of them started to say, and
• 48:59
  Speaker 3: again it was a rat started to say, wait a minute,
• 49:04
  Speaker 3: I think that if you get in a car wreck,
• 49:07
  Speaker 3: you maybe should be able to live through it. It's
• 49:11
  Speaker 3: a radical idea, but like maybe they should make cars safer.
• 49:16
  Speaker 2: Yeah, they go back to San Diego hippie.
• 49:20
  Speaker 5: Well the notion from from America.
• 49:22
  Speaker 3: Everyone sort of agreed to the thing where like you
• 49:25
  Speaker 3: get in a car wreck and die, like you got
• 49:27
  Speaker 3: in the car wreck, it's your fault.
• 49:29
  Speaker 2: It was a driver's fault.
• 49:30
  Speaker 3: Yeah, it's a driver's fault. You can't make cars safer
• 49:32
  Speaker 3: in the case of an accident. It seems weird now
• 49:35
  Speaker 3: because it's all we think about is auto safety, but
• 49:38
  Speaker 3: it was just not on the radar. LEI Coca was
• 49:40
  Speaker 3: not the only one, but that.
• 49:41
  Speaker 4: Was thanks to Detroit, like saying, it's your fault, you're
• 49:44
  Speaker 4: a dummy.
• 49:45
  Speaker 5: But everyone agreed to it. Everyone was.
• 49:46
  Speaker 4: Yeah, in in Detroit's defense, at the time, everybody was
• 49:51
  Speaker 4: drunk while they were driving, way more than today, so
• 49:56
  Speaker 4: they kind of had a point. But still they could
• 49:58
  Speaker 4: still make the cars safe and should have even even
• 50:01
  Speaker 4: more back then.
• 50:02
  Speaker 5: Yeah, for sure.
• 50:03
  Speaker 3: So these I don't know, we call them accident recreationists.
• 50:08
  Speaker 4: Reconstruction reconstructionists, recreationists, or the Civil War dudes.
• 50:14
  Speaker 3: Does anyone here do that?
• 50:16
  Speaker 5: Any Civil War reenactors?
• 50:17
  Speaker 2: There's three who are just sitting there like right.
• 50:19
  Speaker 3: Now, all right, quick sidebar Emily and I went hiking
• 50:26
  Speaker 3: at you guys ever go to Sweetwater.
• 50:27
  Speaker 5: State Park.
• 50:30
  Speaker 2: See local show.
• 50:32
  Speaker 5: Emily remember this.
• 50:33
  Speaker 3: We went hiking in Sweetwater and there were some Civil
• 50:36
  Speaker 3: War reenactors, but it wasn't like what I know about
• 50:40
  Speaker 3: Civil War reenactors is that they throw a big battle
• 50:44
  Speaker 3: party or whatever it's called, and they act like it's
• 50:47
  Speaker 3: a big war and they go bang you die or
• 50:50
  Speaker 3: don't die and bang bang, and then that's sort of
• 50:53
  Speaker 3: what happens.
• 50:55
  Speaker 5: I have no idea what they do, but.
• 50:57
  Speaker 3: It's a big show, like on a field like I
• 50:59
  Speaker 3: went to one when I was a kid.
• 51:00
  Speaker 5: I remember that.
• 51:01
  Speaker 3: But these dudes were just hanging out in the woods
• 51:05
  Speaker 3: at sweet Quater State Park. They were like they had
• 51:09
  Speaker 3: a fire going and it was it was like three
• 51:11
  Speaker 3: or four people. It was a couple of dudes and
• 51:13
  Speaker 3: a couple of ladies and in their outfits and they
• 51:16
  Speaker 3: were cooking like I guess, like a squirrel on a spit.
• 51:20
  Speaker 2: That's Huckeby style.
• 51:21
  Speaker 3: It was no organized thing, and I was just hiking by.
• 51:24
  Speaker 3: It was like a year ago. I was like, well,
• 51:26
  Speaker 3: that's weird.
• 51:29
  Speaker 4: Did you guys just like back slowly into the ward,
• 51:32
  Speaker 4: don't make eye contacted me.
• 51:33
  Speaker 3: I guess I approved because it wasn't war, so that's
• 51:36
  Speaker 3: kind of cool.
• 51:36
  Speaker 2: It was you know, they were prepping for war.
• 51:39
  Speaker 4: So oh okay, they were gathering their strength from squirrels,
• 51:43
  Speaker 4: plowing their muskets to go faint.
• 51:46
  Speaker 5: Very strange.
• 51:47
  Speaker 3: Don't go to Sweet Waters, by the way, don't go there.
• 51:50
  Speaker 2: No, not after that, Okay.
• 51:53
  Speaker 4: I didn't know if there's something out like there's a
• 51:54
  Speaker 4: lot of abandoned tires in the ravine or something.
• 51:58
  Speaker 3: All right, so where are you Jared cut that whole story.
• 52:01
  Speaker 2: I don't know. I think it was a good story.
• 52:04
  Speaker 2: I think we should keep it.
• 52:04
  Speaker 3: Jerry, is she dead?
• 52:11
  Speaker 2: Skyticle? Remember the sky?
• 52:15
  Speaker 5: All right?
• 52:15
  Speaker 3: So these recreationists that's where I was, are saying, uh,
• 52:19
  Speaker 3: maybe you should sue the car company, like because cars
• 52:23
  Speaker 3: should be safer, And people went, oh, well that's not
• 52:25
  Speaker 3: a bad idea. Yeah, because every revolutionary idea.
• 52:28
  Speaker 4: These guys were saying. With the Pinto in particular, I'm
• 52:31
  Speaker 4: starting to notice a lot of charred bodies that are
• 52:34
  Speaker 4: otherwise in perfect shape, look great aside from the charred part, right,
• 52:39
  Speaker 4: Like they don't have any contusions, they don't have any
• 52:42
  Speaker 4: broken bones. So like these accents are happening and really
• 52:45
  Speaker 4: low speed. Maybe it's actually a design flaw with Ford.
• 52:48
  Speaker 4: And so the lawyers were like, that sounds great, and
• 52:51
  Speaker 4: they started circling the.
• 52:52
  Speaker 2: Courthouses like the flying Monkeys and.
• 52:55
  Speaker 4: The Wizard of Oz and dropping lawsuits down on the
• 52:58
  Speaker 4: Ford's head. And at first it was like, bring it,
• 53:01
  Speaker 4: We're Ford. You know, juries are made up of like
• 53:04
  Speaker 4: upstanding registered voters, right, We're going to be just fine.
• 53:09
  Speaker 4: And Ford won a couple at first, and then they
• 53:12
  Speaker 4: started losing them and Ford was still kind of like,
• 53:15
  Speaker 4: we're still we're still taking the jury trial on. But
• 53:19
  Speaker 4: the whole thing turned on this one trial in nineteen
• 53:22
  Speaker 4: seventy seven in Orange County, California, and Ford lost big time.
• 53:28
  Speaker 4: Actually in a Pinto case.
• 53:30
  Speaker 3: Yeah, they lost, and this was in seventy seven. They
• 53:32
  Speaker 3: lost one hundred and twenty five million dollars and damages
• 53:36
  Speaker 3: to a boy named He's thirteen years old, Richard Grimshaw
• 53:40
  Speaker 3: was very sad. He's burned very badly, and the driver
• 53:43
  Speaker 3: of the car died and one hundred and twenty five
• 53:46
  Speaker 3: million bucks back I mean, it's a lot of money now,
• 53:48
  Speaker 3: but back then it's a ton of money. And it's
• 53:51
  Speaker 3: what they call, you've heard of like a symbolic award,
• 53:54
  Speaker 3: where they'll just hit a company with a ton of
• 53:57
  Speaker 3: ton of money and it later gets reduced. But all
• 53:59
  Speaker 3: they can about is that the media knows that they
• 54:02
  Speaker 3: got hit with this ton of money. That was sort
• 54:04
  Speaker 3: of the case here. It got reduced to what three
• 54:08
  Speaker 3: and a half million bucks.
• 54:09
  Speaker 2: It's still pretty It seems a lot.
• 54:11
  Speaker 3: Of money back then, of course, but that initial figure
• 54:14
  Speaker 3: like really made a point and sent shockwaves through the auto.
• 54:19
  Speaker 4: Industry, and so Ford changed its tactics. They're like, okay,
• 54:23
  Speaker 4: well maybe we'll start settling.
• 54:25
  Speaker 2: And we got another quote and.
• 54:27
  Speaker 4: Chuck reads it way better than me, so if you
• 54:30
  Speaker 4: don't mind, Yeah, this.
• 54:31
  Speaker 3: Was an attorney for Ford, and I'll read it in
• 54:35
  Speaker 3: the voice of Lionel Hunts of the Simpsons, the great
• 54:40
  Speaker 3: Phil Hartman. Uh, here we go. We'll never go to
• 54:45
  Speaker 3: a jury again, not in a fire case. Jury is
• 54:49
  Speaker 3: a just too sentimental. They see those charred remains and
• 54:53
  Speaker 3: forget the evidence. No, sir, we'll settle thanks for that.
• 55:01
  Speaker 3: That is a he wasn't overheard saying that a TV
• 55:06
  Speaker 3: reporter stuck a microphone in his face and he said that.
• 55:10
  Speaker 4: Right, that was his quote that he gave, Like Amazon
• 55:13
  Speaker 4: Alexa didn't overhear him saying that to his wife at
• 55:16
  Speaker 4: home later, right exactly.
• 55:20
  Speaker 2: So Ford was like, Okay, kill that guy, that lawyer.
• 55:25
  Speaker 5: Yeah, we're going.
• 55:26
  Speaker 4: To start settling. And so they did start settling. There's
• 55:29
  Speaker 4: some benefits to settling. Well, there's some drawbacks too. One
• 55:32
  Speaker 4: is that it tells the entire world that you know,
• 55:34
  Speaker 4: your case is terrible, but it says, well, there's going
• 55:38
  Speaker 4: to be lower payouts to the lawyers, and there's going
• 55:42
  Speaker 4: to be lower payouts.
• 55:43
  Speaker 2: To the defendants.
• 55:44
  Speaker 4: And it also cuts down on discovery. So discovery, if
• 55:47
  Speaker 4: you go to jury, the plaintiff, the person filing the case,
• 55:51
  Speaker 4: has legal access to any and all documents that you
• 55:55
  Speaker 4: have that prove their case against you.
• 55:57
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 55:58
  Speaker 4: So with all these jury there was this steady trickle
• 56:02
  Speaker 4: or flow even of Yeah, it wasn't even a trickle.
• 56:06
  Speaker 4: It was a flow of damning evidence coming out of
• 56:09
  Speaker 4: Ford going into the hands of lawyers who were happily
• 56:12
  Speaker 4: turning it around and handing it to the media who
• 56:15
  Speaker 4: were reporting on this stuff, which was getting the public
• 56:18
  Speaker 4: just good and picked and that drum beat that Chuck
• 56:20
  Speaker 4: was talking about started to really pick up, and like
• 56:23
  Speaker 4: people were really looking at Ford like in this weird,
• 56:26
  Speaker 4: like unsettling, non blinky way.
• 56:29
  Speaker 5: You know.
• 56:30
  Speaker 2: Everyone took their shirts off and they put like.
• 56:32
  Speaker 4: War paint on, and just FOURB was starting to get
• 56:35
  Speaker 4: a little nervous. They were like, like US America said, you.
• 56:44
  Speaker 5: So that got a little weird. Yeah, thank you for clapping,
• 56:50
  Speaker 5: Thank you, buddy.
• 56:51
  Speaker 3: You get a T shirt that bordered on performance art,
• 56:56
  Speaker 3: did it?
• 56:56
  Speaker 5: I think so?
• 56:57
  Speaker 2: Had I taken my shirt off, it would have been.
• 56:59
  Speaker 5: For oh my god, do it.
• 57:02
  Speaker 4: No, you're out of your mind, you guys until blood comes.
• 57:08
  Speaker 2: Out of your mouths.
• 57:09
  Speaker 4: And I still wouldn't take my shirt off. There's nothing
• 57:12
  Speaker 4: you can do to make me take my shirt.
• 57:15
  Speaker 3: Actually, I would probably be my shirt off, which would
• 57:19
  Speaker 3: be uh.
• 57:25
  Speaker 4: That does feel good, though. Now we've reached David Lee
• 57:30
  Speaker 4: Roth level.
• 57:32
  Speaker 5: I wish I had another shot.
• 57:33
  Speaker 3: Oh my god, all right.
• 57:35
  Speaker 2: That's so shy. That's just having common values. Not taking
• 57:39
  Speaker 2: your shirt off in public when people tell you to.
• 57:42
  Speaker 4: That's normal stuff. Man, you did good is what I'm saying.
• 57:47
  Speaker 4: You Jerry cut out the last series.
• 57:55
  Speaker 2: Shame on all of you.
• 57:58
  Speaker 5: I'metown show, all right.
• 58:00
  Speaker 3: So finally, in nineteen seventy seven, safety three oh one
• 58:04
  Speaker 3: came into effect. What we talked about, would you should
• 58:06
  Speaker 3: be able to hit a car from twenty miles an
• 58:08
  Speaker 3: hour not be a flaming death ball? And the nineteen
• 58:12
  Speaker 3: seventy seven new Pento debuted with a very brand new
• 58:16
  Speaker 3: safety feature that one dollar one pound piece of plastic
• 58:20
  Speaker 3: in between the flaming death bolts and the gas dagg.
• 58:23
  Speaker 4: That they've known since nineteen sixty eight would save lives.
• 58:28
  Speaker 5: Boom, thank you.
• 58:33
  Speaker 4: So Leiah Coca by this time and Ford in general,
• 58:38
  Speaker 4: were scared to death of the PR crisis that had
• 58:42
  Speaker 4: been growing and growing. And the whole thing again was
• 58:45
  Speaker 4: started by Dowie's article. Not only did he get the
• 58:47
  Speaker 4: Mother Jones readership involved, he really kind of awakened the
• 58:51
  Speaker 4: mainstream media to the thing. So everybody was reporting on this,
• 58:54
  Speaker 4: people were suing for it.
• 58:55
  Speaker 2: It was a huge, big.
• 58:56
  Speaker 4: Problem, and I had Coca told everybody clam up. That's
• 59:00
  Speaker 4: actually a direct quote from his book, his nineteen eighty
• 59:04
  Speaker 4: eight book. I used to think in a happier time.
• 59:07
  Speaker 4: That was called straight Talk. That's a Dolly Parton movie.
• 59:11
  Speaker 4: It's called talking Straight job.
• 59:13
  Speaker 3: I gotta say you sent me this initial Josh said
• 59:16
  Speaker 3: this wrote this show, and he sent it and he
• 59:18
  Speaker 3: said straight talk, And I was like, did Dolly Parton
• 59:20
  Speaker 3: play lee?
• 59:21
  Speaker 2: Still it still says I never corrected it.
• 59:24
  Speaker 3: I never saw the movie. That would be great.
• 59:27
  Speaker 2: You never saw straight talk?
• 59:29
  Speaker 5: Oh no, that's so ashamed. Is that gonna be your movie?
• 59:32
  Speaker 5: Crush pick?
• 59:33
  Speaker 2: Oh maybe that's buzz marketing. Now I have to do it.
• 59:42
  Speaker 3: No, no, no, no, So yeah, it was called talking
• 59:45
  Speaker 3: Straight In the end, I think straight talk might have
• 59:49
  Speaker 3: been the working title.
• 59:50
  Speaker 4: Okay, but in it he says, like we were so
• 59:53
  Speaker 4: afraid of this PR crisis bankrupting forward. If you could
• 59:59
  Speaker 4: imagine that that they just said, no one talked, don't
• 1:00:02
  Speaker 4: talk to anybody, just clam up. And they thought that
• 1:00:07
  Speaker 4: if somebody said something the wrong way and like there
• 1:00:09
  Speaker 4: was a scary turn of phrase or something like that
• 1:00:12
  Speaker 4: that was just taking the wrong way, it would be
• 1:00:14
  Speaker 4: seen as an admission of guilt. The problem was to
• 1:00:16
  Speaker 4: the public that the fact that they weren't talking was seen.
• 1:00:21
  Speaker 2: As an admission of guilt. More than anything.
• 1:00:23
  Speaker 5: Yeah, it was a big deal.
• 1:00:24
  Speaker 3: Like sixty Minutes was literally knocking at the door, like
• 1:00:28
  Speaker 3: morally safer?
• 1:00:29
  Speaker 5: Was it? Ford knocking at the door?
• 1:00:32
  Speaker 3: And he said, I'm morally safer And if you're not intimidated, now,
• 1:00:37
  Speaker 3: I got Ed Bradley with me. We've sent two of
• 1:00:41
  Speaker 3: our best dudes, so you should be pretty worried.
• 1:00:44
  Speaker 4: And Ford was crouched down under their window, like are
• 1:00:47
  Speaker 4: they still out there?
• 1:00:49
  Speaker 5: It's just so funny. Is I used to love sixty Minutes?
• 1:00:52
  Speaker 2: Sure?
• 1:00:53
  Speaker 3: You know when I was like thirteen. It's so such
• 1:00:56
  Speaker 3: a weird show to watch as a kid.
• 1:00:57
  Speaker 2: It's sophisticated.
• 1:00:59
  Speaker 5: Yeah, that was not so investigated, apparently you were. Yeah,
• 1:01:02
  Speaker 5: I was not. I don't know what.
• 1:01:04
  Speaker 4: I like the little right, and then after that you're
• 1:01:07
  Speaker 4: just like all right, I'll turn the channel.
• 1:01:09
  Speaker 3: Well, and you know, and also now I think about
• 1:01:12
  Speaker 3: I think it came on after either like the Wonderful
• 1:01:17
  Speaker 3: Warble of Disney.
• 1:01:18
  Speaker 5: Or that was great or Wow Kingdom or something. Anyway,
• 1:01:24
  Speaker 5: I don't know what that is, sir.
• 1:01:25
  Speaker 2: That was like Full House was on there, that was
• 1:01:27
  Speaker 2: like the nineties.
• 1:01:28
  Speaker 5: You're way off, but yeah, I'm so old.
• 1:01:31
  Speaker 2: Do you see this?
• 1:01:32
  Speaker 5: Beard?
• 1:01:33
  Speaker 4: So much gray, like the Davy Crockett story Hour was
• 1:01:37
  Speaker 4: that one?
• 1:01:38
  Speaker 2: Let just make that up.
• 1:01:39
  Speaker 5: Well, I'm not that old night writer.
• 1:01:48
  Speaker 2: That was a good I had a good theme song.
• 1:01:50
  Speaker 3: This has devolved into like shout out your favorite old thing.
• 1:01:54
  Speaker 2: We're almost done. Everybody call that.
• 1:01:56
  Speaker 5: All right, we're hit in the end.
• 1:01:58
  Speaker 3: So uh. Nineteen seventy eight, In June, they started their
• 1:02:05
  Speaker 3: own recall proceedings. In sixty minutes, was on the on
• 1:02:08
  Speaker 3: the door, they're knocking, they're knocking, and Ford says, you
• 1:02:11
  Speaker 3: know what, We're gonna undertake a voluntary recall if anyone
• 1:02:16
  Speaker 3: believe that the will make us look so good of
• 1:02:19
  Speaker 3: one point four and I don't know if we mentioned
• 1:02:21
  Speaker 3: the Pinto was a big, big seller, Like, despite all this,
• 1:02:25
  Speaker 3: it was a super super popular car.
• 1:02:27
  Speaker 4: It was like the best selling subcompact of the seventies.
• 1:02:31
  Speaker 5: It very much was.
• 1:02:32
  Speaker 3: It was It's Winona Ryder's car and Stranger Things Too.
• 1:02:36
  Speaker 2: Oh yeah, I haven't seen it. I don't know.
• 1:02:40
  Speaker 5: Was it her car and Stranger Things one?
• 1:02:42
  Speaker 3: I don't remember, but they feature the Pinto and Stranger
• 1:02:44
  Speaker 3: Things too.
• 1:02:46
  Speaker 2: Night Rider.
• 1:02:50
  Speaker 3: Spoiler thanks a lot, right now, I know what car
• 1:02:54
  Speaker 3: she drives, all right? So they undertake a one point
• 1:02:59
  Speaker 3: four million car recall on just the Pinto alone, but
• 1:03:04
  Speaker 3: also another car they had, right.
• 1:03:07
  Speaker 4: The Mercury Bobcat right, which was its like more luxurious
• 1:03:11
  Speaker 4: but equally deadly twin. And we're not quite sure like
• 1:03:15
  Speaker 4: what made it so luxurious?
• 1:03:17
  Speaker 5: No idea.
• 1:03:18
  Speaker 4: Maybe it had like an onboard like blow dryer brush
• 1:03:21
  Speaker 4: to like to feather your hair with while you were
• 1:03:23
  Speaker 4: going home.
• 1:03:24
  Speaker 3: What were you sit in the back seat and they
• 1:03:26
  Speaker 3: just have the thing from the hairplace that just right
• 1:03:28
  Speaker 3: lowers over your head.
• 1:03:29
  Speaker 4: That is the pinnacle of luxury that we can think
• 1:03:31
  Speaker 4: of for the nineteen seventies.
• 1:03:33
  Speaker 5: God bless the seventies.
• 1:03:35
  Speaker 2: All right.
• 1:03:36
  Speaker 5: The bad news is, though, and this.
• 1:03:37
  Speaker 3: Is very sad to stop laughing, between the time four
• 1:03:41
  Speaker 3: decided to undergo that recall in June and the time
• 1:03:44
  Speaker 3: it told consumers, like internally they said, all right, June,
• 1:03:47
  Speaker 3: we'll do this September we announced it to the public.
• 1:03:50
  Speaker 3: In those few months, that was a very very sad crash.
• 1:03:56
  Speaker 5: Rear rear end.
• 1:04:01
  Speaker 3: You need another shot, no, a re random impact where
• 1:04:07
  Speaker 3: where some young women died. And there was a prosecutor
• 1:04:10
  Speaker 3: in Indiana named Michael Constantino that said you know what,
• 1:04:14
  Speaker 3: I've had it, I've done.
• 1:04:16
  Speaker 5: I know the deal.
• 1:04:17
  Speaker 3: I'm going to bring these dudes on trial for murder.
• 1:04:21
  Speaker 4: Murder, like he filed criminal homicide charges against the executives
• 1:04:26
  Speaker 4: at Ford for that crash.
• 1:04:27
  Speaker 5: Yeah, very big deal.
• 1:04:28
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:04:29
  Speaker 4: So, and it wasn't just like a flash in the
• 1:04:32
  Speaker 4: pan like this trial actually or these charges went to trial.
• 1:04:36
  Speaker 2: It was over like three years.
• 1:04:38
  Speaker 4: And over the three years, everybody was reporting on Ford
• 1:04:41
  Speaker 4: executives on trial for murder every day, and the charges
• 1:04:46
  Speaker 4: got dismissed, but the public criminalizing of Ford's executives were
• 1:04:50
  Speaker 4: it was huge. Like it was a bad PR crisis
• 1:04:53
  Speaker 4: before that. It couldn't get worse than that, your executives
• 1:04:57
  Speaker 4: on trial for murder, right.
• 1:04:59
  Speaker 5: Yeah, for sure.
• 1:05:00
  Speaker 3: So despite all this, despite the fact that the Pinto
• 1:05:03
  Speaker 3: was a flaming death trap to a certain extent, when
• 1:05:06
  Speaker 3: you look at the numbers today and when you look
• 1:05:08
  Speaker 3: at the real statistics, it was not much worse and
• 1:05:13
  Speaker 3: sometimes better than other cars on the market at the
• 1:05:17
  Speaker 3: time that would kill you from.
• 1:05:19
  Speaker 4: Fire, like the Vega or the Grimlin. They would kill you, right,
• 1:05:25
  Speaker 4: So we tried to figure out and actually it turns
• 1:05:28
  Speaker 4: out there was this nineteen ninety three article in Harvard
• 1:05:32
  Speaker 4: Law Review where this guy said, I've done the math.
• 1:05:35
  Speaker 4: I've actually figured it out, and here's the number I
• 1:05:39
  Speaker 4: came up with.
• 1:05:40
  Speaker 2: It was twenty seven.
• 1:05:42
  Speaker 4: Twenty seven people is probably the number of people who
• 1:05:45
  Speaker 4: died in low speed rear collision impact fires in pintos.
• 1:05:50
  Speaker 5: And it's over like ten years, like millions of cars.
• 1:05:54
  Speaker 2: Twenty seven. It's not that bad, actually.
• 1:05:56
  Speaker 4: Right, it was way less than I I think Mother
• 1:06:00
  Speaker 4: Jones said like five hundred to nine hundred. Yeah, and
• 1:06:03
  Speaker 4: this is so mother Jones. They said that was a
• 1:06:05
  Speaker 4: conservative estimate that we just made up. And then I
• 1:06:10
  Speaker 4: think sixty minutes Chuck's beloved sixty Minutes said like thousands
• 1:06:14
  Speaker 4: of people had died in Pinto's, no one knew, so.
• 1:06:16
  Speaker 2: They were just making up numbers.
• 1:06:18
  Speaker 4: But this nineteen ninety three article said, no, it was
• 1:06:20
  Speaker 4: probably twenty seven actually exactly.
• 1:06:23
  Speaker 3: So in the end we look back and the Pinto was,
• 1:06:29
  Speaker 3: even though it could have been a flaming death trap,
• 1:06:31
  Speaker 3: what it really was was a very bad victim of
• 1:06:34
  Speaker 3: pr Yeah, you know, yep.
• 1:06:36
  Speaker 4: So, like the problem was was that the way you
• 1:06:40
  Speaker 4: could die in a Pinto was just too bad to
• 1:06:43
  Speaker 4: be allowed to continue, right, the idea that, like if
• 1:06:46
  Speaker 4: you got in a rear in collision and the passenger
• 1:06:50
  Speaker 4: compartment filled up with gas.
• 1:06:52
  Speaker 3: That's bad enough.
• 1:06:53
  Speaker 4: But the idea that it could happen at such a
• 1:06:55
  Speaker 4: low speed that you would still be conscious when you
• 1:06:58
  Speaker 4: caught fire and burned a death. The American public said, Nope,
• 1:07:01
  Speaker 4: that can't happen. It doesn't matter. And so thanks to
• 1:07:04
  Speaker 4: Dowie's article and sixty minutes, eventually, for sure, the Pinto
• 1:07:11
  Speaker 4: was basically laid to waste as far as the American
• 1:07:15
  Speaker 4: public was concerned, and still has a bad reputation today.
• 1:07:18
  Speaker 5: That's right.
• 1:07:19
  Speaker 3: In the end, the Pinto took career impact, but not
• 1:07:24
  Speaker 3: in the good.
• 1:07:24
  Speaker 4: Way, not in the good way, in every kind of bad.
• 1:07:28
  Speaker 5: You know, that's true. I never thought about that.
• 1:07:37
  Speaker 3: So in the end, mister Lee Ayacoca would go on
• 1:07:40
  Speaker 3: to write his legend with the Chrysler Corporation by bringing
• 1:07:45
  Speaker 3: them back from kind of the brink of bankruptcy into
• 1:07:49
  Speaker 3: huge success.
• 1:07:49
  Speaker 5: In the nineties.
• 1:07:51
  Speaker 3: In the eighties, and he was named I think by
• 1:07:55
  Speaker 3: Portfolio magazine as the eighteenth greatest CEO of all time,
• 1:07:59
  Speaker 3: just ahead of Oprah, which is.
• 1:08:02
  Speaker 5: Both team Oprah. Up Here.
• 1:08:12
  Speaker 3: Wrote A couple of books wrote that biography that Josh
• 1:08:14
  Speaker 3: talked about, that Dolly Parton did not star in, and
• 1:08:17
  Speaker 3: another called Where Have all the Leader's Gone? And mister
• 1:08:21
  Speaker 3: Iacocca is still live today, the ripe old age of
• 1:08:24
  Speaker 3: ninety two in bel Air neighborhood of Los Angeles, California.
• 1:08:28
  Speaker 2: Where there is nary a Pinto to be found.
• 1:08:31
  Speaker 5: That's right, and that is the story of the Ford Pinto.
• 1:08:37
  Speaker 3: Yeah, thanks, yeah, good luck. Stuff you should Know is
• 1:08:49
  Speaker 3: a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my heart Radio,
• 1:08:52
  Speaker 3: visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
• 1:08:56
  Speaker 3: to your favorite shows.