Shades of Pinto
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Seventeen years ago, Ford Motor Company faced public wrath when MoJo's Mark Dowie ("Pinto Madness," September/October 1977) revealed that Ford had placed a $200,000 value on its customers' lives and decided against spending $11 per car to protect Pintos from exploding. What the public didn't know was that General Motors had made a somewhat similar calculation in 1973. GM attempted to figure out how much fire-related deaths were costing it on a per-car basis. In an internal memorandum, a company engineer estimated five hundred fatalities in GM-vehicle fires per year, at a cost of $200,000 per fatality, and divided the total by the 41 million GM cars then in operation in the U.S. to arrive at a $2.40-per-car cost for each human life lost.
Over the years, U.S. courts repeatedly helped GM keep this information out of public view by issuing secrecy orders when fire-related lawsuits were settled--a practice revealed by the Washington Post in 1988. Only last summer did the 1973 memo finally find its way to a jury, in a Kansas City case involving a woman who died in the fiery crash of her Chevy Blazer. After the judge ruled that the Blazer's fuel-pump design was defective and hazardous, the jury awarded the woman's two sons $11.3 million.
That decision, which GM is appealing, was only the latest in a series of controversies surrounding GM-truck fires. A Georgia jury awarded $105 million in one case last year, after concluding that the fuel tanks' side location was dangerous. Earlier, "Dateline NBC" aired a report on the issue, only to retract it and apologize for staging an explosion while it filmed a collision.
