Do a net search for Recalls involving fire hazards and one would find that there are no immune car makers for problems like this. Example below and it’s by no means that rare. Honda the same thing, newer Camaros, Subarus at one time for faulty headlight wiring, Toyota seat heater fire hazards, Jeep fires, you name it and it exists.
Toyota announced today its largest recall in the auto manufacturer’s 75-year history. 7.43 million cars, trucks and SUVs worldwide are being recalled to fix faulty power window switches that can cause fires. About 2.5 million of those recalled vehicles were sold in the United States.
I’m not a big fan of Ford, but I’m not trying to malign them. In fact we just replaced my gf’s ancient Passport (with the rusted out frame) with an Escape and it’s a decent little vehicle. I’m just saying that quite a few Ford recalls have been for things that can cause your car to go up in flames. Not saying that other manufacturers haven’t had recalls for things like this as well, just a few more with Fords than the average, and with very public instances of fires happening.
It's easy to look back on a lot of older cars and feel that a design was faulty after being conditioned to improvements on modern era cars
That is 100% true. You can always look back at ANY product in ANY industry and say…“What the heck were they thinking.” It’s how they learn from those mistakes that matters. In the most part the auto industry has learned. Unfortunately in some areas they were a little too slow in correcting the mistakes themselves.
It’s bad design was common in those days Exactly !
Scaling down big cars (Pinto) and chopping off the tail end of big cars ( Gremlin)produces unintended problems. It seems that using similar parts as the larger cars, especially the rear differential with it’s protruding bolts and brackets which contributed to tank puncture in crashes in Pintos were all design “easy way outs” in building smaller cars. The Corvair, a veiled Americanized copy of the Bug was another attempt at the small car market that failed for performance reasons. Even the Beetle couldn’t Americanize itself. IMO, American compacts really didn’t show any design initiative till they started using their own European versions of small cars.
Until that that time, all American compact cars were justly maligned. Borrowing motors and sometimes complete car designs from successful car manufacturresr gave them better compacts but in the same way we blame the Chinese copycats. All cars need be built from the ground up for dedicated purposes. If not, they explode, handle poorly or compromise their performance. America lost the small market to the Japanese for years specializing in muscle car. The were the real deals…but at great expense. GM still pays for it.
@asterskrain , I think those old cars got bad reputations because people tried to rely on them for everyday transportation. Yours is a hobby you enjoy. If you had to rely on it as a daily driver with no alternatives for when it breaks down, you might feel differently about it.
Regarding the comments about the Pinto, I think I remember the issue being that the tank wasn’t strapped down or secured an any way, so a rear end collision would cause gasoline to spew into the passenger compartment. Early Mustangs had the same issue, but they came before the Pinto, and they were much prettier than the Pinto, so Ford is often forgiven for early Mustangs being deathtraps.
Whitey, we BOUGHT them to rely on as daily transportation! The manufacturers ADVERTISED them as reliable daily transportation! If memory serves me correctly, one of the major car mags even chose the '71 Vega as their Car of The Year!
Fact is, by today’s standards all of the cars on the market were just terrible. But, as already stated, we cannot judge them by today’s standards.
@Whitey
The Pinto is the grandfather of the Mustang ? Whitey, what have you been drinking ? Do you know spreading stories like that is akin to saying the Ford Ranger used a Pinto based motor. Even if it is true, you have shaken my faith in Fords…forever. @same
Choosing the Vega as car of the year is an example of how much payola was being spread around. I agree we bought cars as reliable transportation. Cars like the Pinto and later the Maverick were engineered to be very reliable for about 50 to 80 k miles. But, we measured reliability differently. It was routine to have a muffler put on every year or two, tune it up every 5-10 k miles and swap it in well before 100k. If you did that regularly, along with 2k oil changes, they were as reliable as a Fiat Strata.
I really hate to say it, and not meant to be calous at all, and I’m not familiar with the Ford memos on the Pintos that caused so much grief, but when you ask the risk assessors for an analysis, they are going to try and determine the total risk and cost. That has got to include potential deaths and costs from lawsuits. I mean it sounds terrible, but you can’t assess risk and loss without trying to determine how many people might die as a result.
Everybody that has a product out there from airplanes to snowmobiles has to have looked at the risk analysis of people getting killed from their products. Now if it only costs $15 to dramatically reduce the loss of life, I can understand it was a very poor decision to not spend the money. Just sayin’ though an analysis of risk is pretty normal.
My 1950 Chevrolet pickup had the gas tank behind the seat. I think this was true of most pickup trucks through the 1960s. One exception, as I remember, was the Studebaker pickup truck. The gas tank in the Studebaker truck was under the cab.
Was it safe to have the tank behind the seat? Probably not.
The Model A Ford had the gas tank in front of the windshield. You didn’t need a fuel pump to get gasoline to the engine. Probably not really safe, but it did eliminate fuel pump problems.
I believe the Mustang 2 was built on the Pinto platform
I believe the “Pinto” motor did soldier on for decades . . . gaining in displacement, and a few other changes . . . and was used in the Ranger for many years
Since we are so far off topic, in case y’all don’t know and hopefully @ken_green can verify, if there is a space in a users name you need to put a _ or most keyboards shift and the key after 0 in the top row to get the notification to work!
I know that the Edsel has been the butt of many jokes, but the 1959 and the abbreviated 1960 run of the 1960 Edsels were often good purchases as used cars. These cars were essentially Fords with the Ford engines and drivetrains, so parts were readily available. However, as an “orphan car” the depreciation was quite steep.
There were actually two Edsel lines for its first 1958 model year. The lower line Edsels, the Range and Pacer were on the Ford Fairlane chassis, while the higher priced Edsels, the Corsair and the Citation were on a Mercury chassis. The lower trim line were reasonably good. However, the Corsair and the Citation had the infamous electrically operated pushbuttons in the steering wheel hub to control the automatic transmission and were quite troublesome. The lower line Ranger and Pacer used the conventional lever or could be had with a manual transmission.