When I was a child, my father got the Pinto. even though it is a unsafe car as we knew later. But in a then poor Taiwan, it is like a luxury and it helped him to do his job.
I wrote "the ford pinto memo", not "the ford pinto".
The point wasn't whether the car was okay, it was about the amoral behaviour of the company. Ford crossed a line between wanting to produce something to a given spec; and depraved indifference to the damage the errors in the design would cause. It only sounds like a subtle difference.
Please read the article about the myth. The memo is not specially evil. Its decision is based on NHTSA. The company and the government agency are pretty rational. But it just tells us even we are rational, the complexity of the world is much more unpredictable.
Companies and governments should be amoral but rational. otherwise church and state will not be able to separated from each other. To me, moralistic companies/governments do more harm than welfare to humanity.
This is, indeed, an excellent article and, I would suggest, a must-read for anyone with an analytical mind.
Please do so and form your own understanding before reading the rest of my comment.
What I find fascinating adn distressing is the reliance on potentially meaningless statistics to determine relative safety of cars. (Fortunately, today, one can query quite a bit of data at http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov though there may still be a GIGO).
Specifically, I'm uncomfortable with denominators used in such statistics, as they appear to assume consistent driving patterns within a certain "class" of cars. (Is there a study which shows this?) For example, the denominator of units of a model in operation is deceptive, if one model is driven far more than another, or, perhaps, rather, that one model is overwhelmingly favored by those who drive more less.
I have, admittedly, begged defining what driving "more" or "less" means. It seems that miles traveled is commonly accepted, but overall time spent traveling may be equally, if not more, meaningful. Sadly, this latter information isn't readily available, contributing to the GIGO problem. Even person-mile data are elusive.
Since the "nonmotorist" number of fatalities shown by the FARS front page ("Sub Total2") is around one sixth the total, this could easily mask differences in safety between models, since, presumably, car safety features are, first and foremost, for the protection of the occupants, not nonmotorists (or motorcyclists).
Back to the (sub-)topic at hand, my biggest take-away is that the Pinto was not defective or inherently unsafe, as it did not burst into flames on its own, nor is a cost-benefit analysis (which requires putting a price tag on human injury and death when it comes to safety features) reprehensible. Instead, such an analysis is necessary and beneficial.
The most important concept here is risk. How systems behave "in the wild," especially when human users/operators are part of these systems, is far from a certainty. This is the uncertainty is the basis of the polish vs. ship tension, as well as, apparently, the basis for negligence jurisprudence.
That I consider the whole Pinto debacle to be primarily about imposed versus consented risk on the part of the purchaser might make this whole sub-thread irrelevant to the OP's topic, but I think a contrast would be instructive in any case.
Regardless, I personally do not believe it is up to an engineer to make a risk analysis. Rather, I am a firm believer in more "sunshine" on such information, despite the current practice of graffitying products with warning labels.
