I had a nice chat with the gentleman who owns this little jewel after he struck up a conversation at the carwash by noting his car was a little pony and my mustang was a big one. A pinto, when not a tag applied to an automobile, is a painted pony, and a mustang is a wild roaming horse, and at the carwash, the source of those names is good fodder for starting up conversations with strangers. Mr. Pinto picked up this beast for $200 and is fixing it up to take part in the Pinto Sprint Across America. The Pinto was a rear wheel drive car that Ford made from 1971-1980. Initially, it could be had with a 1.6L 4 cylinder with 75HP and 96 lb ft of torque or a 2.0L 4 cylinder that put out 100 HP. Brand new when they debuted, one could be had for right around $2,000.
The Pinto doesn’t fit with the figurative definition of a hot hatch as a performance oriented hatchback, but it was literally at hot hatch. It may be better known to some by its other name, "The Barbecue That Seats Four" -a title it garnered due to a fatal design flaw that caused the car to burst into a fireball of doom after rear impact collisions.
The fuel tank on the Pinto is positioned directly in front of the rear bumper with no significant framing around it to blunt any type of rear end collision. There were a number of things that could intrude upon the gas tank when the Pinto took a hit from behind, including the license plate screws, the shock absorber brackets, leaf spring suspension brackets, differential bolts, muffler mounting brackets, and of course, the front end of the striking vehicle. To make matters worse, the force would cause the wheel wells to separate from the floor pan of the car, which meant that when flames burst out, they had an easy means of entry into the cabin. But what sucks most about being in a flaming Pinto is that the rear impact could jut the door jambs ahead, which meant you couldn’t get the doors open to get out. This car was like the perfect storm of being completely screwed in an accident. The owner of this car claims that the Pinto's death-trap design feature can be remedied simply by replacing the rear license plate bracket screws with plastic ones that are less able to puncture the ill-placed gas tank. I'm happy not to be the one testing that theory.
To make matters worse -and not to put Ford in a negative light, because this was a long time ago and they’ve evolved into a different company with a solid product line these days -but when they realized that Pintos were apt to become death traps, instead of bucking up and paying the $10 or so per car it would have cost to make the Pinto safer, they had some egghead run a cost benefit analysis, comparing how much it would cost to recall and fix all pintos and start building them so as not to kill their drivers vs. how much it would cost to settle lawsuits from burn victims and next of kin. The conclusion of this comparison was that it was cheaper by nearly 70 million dollars to pay out on lawsuits than to do the right thing. The memo was eventually made public, and it was a shameful thing for Ford. In fact, if not for that memo, the whole debacle may have blown over a lot easier. After all, there were plenty of cars being built around that time that weren’t anywhere near what we would call safe these days, and studies have been done that show the Pinto to be no more fatal than any other car of its time. In fact, statistically, it had fewer casualties to its name than its competition of the day, the AMC Gremlin, the Chevy Vega, and the Toyota Corolla. The Pinto just had the misfortune of making the biggest spectacle of itself when it failed its precious cargo.
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