Ford Pinto Essay

Ford Motor Company (“Ford”) began initial planning for the Ford Pinto in the summer of 1967. It was approved by Ford’s Board of Directors in January 1969 and hit the market on September 11, 1970 under the tagline The Little Carefree Car. (Wikipedia—“Ford Pinto”) The vehicle was built as a response to subcompact car imports that were popular with consumers of the time. Ford President Lee Iacocca directed the organization to produce a 1971 model that weighed less than 2,000 pounds and cost less than $2,000. The Ford Pinto came to be known inside the company as “Lee’s car.” At the time, the automobile industry’s average product development schedule, from conception through delivery, was 43 months. By conducting development processes in parallel, the Pinto project was completed in the shortest production planning schedule in automotive history up to that time—in 25 months. Machine tooling overlapped with product development. Therefore, any design changes that would have normally been made before production-line tooling would have to be made during it. Decisions which threatened the schedule were discouraged. The organization, led by Lee Iacocca, made it an important goal to bring the Pinto to customers as quickly as possible (Wikipedia—“Ford Pinto”).

Other American manufacturers were also producing vehicles to compete with the subcompact

Manufacturers employed scientific strategies, including psychological and marketing techniques, to create demand and consistently increase sales. The result was a stream of vehicles manufactured with increasingly dangerous and highly styled designs, often at the expense of safety. Ford’s chief stylist in the 1950s defended stylish but functionally useless and hazardous designs, such as tail fins, by claiming, “The American public is to blame. If they want it, who are we not to let them have it?” (Lee