I washed them regularily, no rust even in New England, greased and did the oil changes on 3,000 schedule, drove Michelins and used good parts.
GF

Total POS, but i liked it at the time.

What, you don’t consider 224hp and 217 lb·ft adequate? Those were the specs of the ‘92-’93 Daytona IROC R/T model.

Yeah! Forgot about the IROC model. Though if I remember correctly it went 0-60 in something like 7 seconds, which for early 90s was pretty fast I suppose.

re: windswords

IIRC the Pinto ceased in 1980, with the last revision coming in 1979 – with squared headlights. I had one, also with a 4 speed. This was years after my 72 had gone to car heaven. My favorite was the middle seventies with the sloped nose and the glass hatch.

I had thought so too, until the kid down the street drove up in a 1982 Ford Pinto recently. When he told me the year I asked to see the title and sure ‘nuf, it said 1982 on it and it wasn’t a rebuild. I dunno if it came from Canada or Mexico but it was legit.

And I do remember the turbo model Daytona (I had one in my Mom’s Shadow ES). It took nearly a second to spool up and blew up 90% of the time after the 50K mark. However, when they worked, they were awesome fun.

Also I really like the other posts from the “front lines” I would love to hear more from all segments of auto industry.

I remember the ads touting the simpliciity of the Pintos.
I never owned one, but my remember my one of my neighbors buying the Pinto wagon. It looked pretty good, he used it like a truck for his carpentry business.
I remember some else buying the hatch. It was two tone orange and white. It had all the options, including the anntenas mounted under he front and rear bumpers. I did gave it a look of scorn, I think he saw me and looked pretty ticked off.
The repair stories brings back memories of growing up. ( Say, that would be a good best and brightest, what would be the best semi-classic car to get and restore)

I think the kids today are really missing out on things, you learn about about fixing old cars.

On the other hand, the car’s structure did seem to be flimsy. The Car and Driver reviewers noted this in their test, which was conducted in 1971, or long before the gas-tank controversy became a page-one story.

I believe that Ford chief stylist Gene Bordinat summed it up best – he said that Ford of North America just wasn’t that good at building really light cars. It didn’t have enough experience with keeping weight down while maintaining structural strength, primarily because really low weight and high fuel economy hadn’t been a priority with most American buyers.

Wow – no bumper on a car that definitely needed one. Don’t like any car with the gas tank right out back.

Did a small part of a project at my last employer for retrofitting Crown Vics where we built an assembly line/testing line for an automatic fire extinguisher system installed in the trunk. Was supposed to successfully prevent a fire from a rear-ender at highway speeds when a police car got hit by another vehicle travelling at 70 mph. Used airbag style components to propel the extinguishing agent under the car through ducts pointed at the gas tank.

One of the first cases the dumb driver had slowed down on a freeway in the fast lane to look for her gas cap [which she had left on the roof after filling up and was hit by a Chevy Van from the rear at about 60. A perfect storm of stupidity. The van driver had bent over to pick up a cassette. ["Reckless Homicide-The Ford Pinto Case"]

To this day, that little incident is the direct reason why the brake pedal must be depressed before the selector can be moved from the ‘Park’ detent on every single automatic transmission equipped vehicle.

a sensible modification if you ask me. what really made me crack up was the ugly warning sticker they retrofitted onto the transmission lever of the bauhaus interior of the 5000.

The 65 corrected the 63-64’s silly angled front fender character line with a simpler horizontal one, and the 64-65 dropped the trim to nowhere used on the tail light surrounds of the 63.

Plus the detailing of the tail lights and grille on the 65 are the best of the lot. 66s squared off a lot of the lines and sort of destroyed the whole theme that reached it’s peak in the 65. IMHO of course.

I own a 63 Valiant Signet. The 65 looks much better to me. The Dart didn’t fare as well. The 63 was the best of that lot.

When the author referred to a “Detroit” car, he meant a domestic one, not one actually designed and built by GM, Ford and Chrysler. I’m sure that he didn’t mean to exclude Nashes, Hudsons, Ramblers or Studebakers because they weren’t built by the Big Three.

As for the Pinto gas tank controversy – The infamous memo was taken out of context by Mother Jones. It performed a cost-benefit anaylsis of new regulations, which were required to be calculated in that manner by the federal government. Ford didn’t do anything wrong in that regard.

An article in a 1981 issue of the Rutgers Law Review noted that the number of fire-related deaths in the Pinto was not out of line with that of other small cars from that time.

On the other hand, everyone agreed that there was not a problem with Pinto wagons – they were not subject to the recall – and they accounted for a very high percentage of Pinto sales. The 1973 Pinto wagon is one of the best-selling wagons of all time.

The article did not break out sedans from wagons, if I recall correctly, and this could make the Pinto’s safety record look better.

You’re right, I forgot about that.

These things were everywhere when I was in high school in the early 1980s. It was the beginning driver’s cheap, disposable car. My one friend bought a 1.6 for $75 because it needed a fender. His 1964 Dodge 880 was killing him on gas and repairs so the Pinto was his ‘reliable’ car, which it generally was. Copius amounts of Bondo fixed the quarter panels enough for it to get a inspection sticker.

Another friend bought a ‘77 for about the same price that didn’t have a straight panel on it. He carried a wooden mallet in the car for nighttime use: it was common to see him get out at a traffic light and whack the fender to get the one headlamp to illuminate. Funny stuff.

My own Pinto experience was a 2.0 stick 1974 model in metallic lime green with matching interior. I paid $300 for it out of the junk line at a used car dealer to replace a totalled Fiesta. Unfortunately, it suffered from multiple Pinto problems: bad cam, failing head gasket and a rotten exhaust system that was surprisingly expensive. I offed it onto another stupid person for $500 and lost money.

I once worked on a V6 auto version that surprised me with it’s amount of zip, but the extra weight didn’t do the handling any favors. Panel fit on these was atrocious. I remember replacing a fender on the V6 for the owner and it was totally impossible to make the gaps line up. If you got 2 out of 3 you were doing good. We also used to have a “grille spotting” contest for Pintos. The plastic grilles were so fragile they were almost all missing at least a couple of their ‘teeth’. Spotting one still intact was cause for a small celebration as we rode around in ours. I think Pintos were the VW Beetles of my age group. Not a good car, but not as bad as history may make you believe.

Of course the real irony is that these days most safety improvements are evaluated by exactly the same sort of cost benefit analysis, by companies, industries and governments.

The CV really got an unfair rap for being a firetrap. Because of their use in law enforcement, far more CVs found themselves sitting on the side of the road in a prone position, with high speed traffic whizzing by. How many other cars routinely get rear ended at such high speeds?

I do not believe for a moment that it was Ford Company Policy, yet I still believe that it is the top brass job to know what goes on in their plants; especially with as highly a visible item as the Pinto gas tank.

Back in thoses days all that mattered everyday in production, was how many cars do you get off the line. We were on mandatory overtime for years and so the product must be good enough because we were running 56 hours a week on one shift.

When the fix came out for the gas tank, we called it the tupperwear shield, a white hard plastic sheild that fit under the gas tank strap and prevented bolts in the differential cover from tearing the gas tank open in a rear end collision.

Of course they had to do a recall and retrofit millions of cars in the field as well as put them on the current production cars. Any one in manufacturing knows that it is an expensive proposition to have enough tooling to retrofit all the past cars and keep the current production running.

If you made enough tooling to do it all at once you would end up with some pretty expensive tooling sitting around. So they had to spread out the plastic shields between production and recall. For a several month stretch we used to run out of the shields on the line, and it was a part that could be put on later and you didn’t want to shut down the line for a part like that.
The cars would be markes as shield missing and continue down the line. Normal in an auto plant.

Unfortunately sometimes the parts didn’t come in, so the production manager would have people go out after dark into the shipping yards and remove shields from completed cars, bring them into the plant and install them on cars again. You really can’t blame the Production Manager as this kind of behavior was recognised as good problem solving skills and rewarded with promotion.

50merc: “The old joke was “Bad luck is when you’re waiting in line behind a Pinto and see in the rear-view mirror an Audi 5000 behind you.””

Now there’s a car that got a bad rap, thanks entirely to one, hysterical, yuppie soccer mom who crushed her kid when she mashed down on the wrong pedal (which was admittedly of a similiar size and shape as the brake pedal).

Then, when 60 Minutes decided to do one of their great, tabloid-style exposés on it (complete with a tampered 5000 rigged to slip out of Park on cue for the cameras), well, it’s an understatement to say that sales of the Audi 5000 took a major nosedive.

To this day, that little incident is the direct reason why the brake pedal must be depressed before the selector can be moved from the ‘Park’ detent on every single automatic transmission equipped vehicle.

“Ford rushed the pinto into production in 1971 to compete with foreign imports. In doing so, they did not discover that the gas tank could explode if the car was hit from behind until the tooling for the car was underway (Sherefkin 2003). Rather than slow production or spend on expensive retooling, they introduced the car as-is. Their decision was determined by cost-benefit analysis: the exploding tanks could be fixed at a cost of $11 per vehicle, or $137 million over the life of the Pinto. Estimated deaths and injuries from the gas tank would cost Ford $48 million (Anon 2003). The company sold Pintos to unsuspecting customers for eight years before the gas tank problem was brought forth by independent journalists. It is hard to consider ethical a course of argument that considers a human life worth less than an eleven-dollar repair.

My stepmom had a Pinto —no idea what year since I was all of about 5 years old— and all I really remember about that car is that it was DooDoo Brown, had a manual trans, and I loved riding in it! I don’t know why, but even today the Pinto strikes me as a rather good looking little car, especially the earlier ones with the thinner bumpers and thinner (shorter?) grill. Back in the day, cars were more easily distinguished. Ah, those were the days.