The Ford Pinto

Did Schwartz have an ethical responsibility to inform the government about the pessimistic conclusions she had reached about TRW s discrimination technology To answer this question, let us revisit my revised versions of DeGe-orge s five necessary conditions (C1-C5) for blowing the whistle to be an ethical responsibility for an engineer, as laid out in Case 11, the Ford Pinto case study. " ... 

Hazarika, Sanjoy. (1989). Bhopal Payments by Union Carbide Set at 470 Million, New York Times, February 15, 1989, http //www.nytimes.com/ 1989/02/15/business/bhopal-payments-by-union-carbide-set-at-470-million.html Hormby, Tom. (2010). The Story Behind Apple s Newton, Gizmodo, January 19, 2010, http //gizmodo.com/5452193/the-story-behind-apples-newton Hoffman, Michael W. (1984). The Ford Pinto, in Michael Hoffman W, Jennifer Moore, eds.. Business Ethics (McGraw-Hill New York), pp. 412 20. 

The consumer will not tolerate products that are prone to failure cars such as the Skoda Felicia or the Ford Pinto, motorbikes such as the BSA Dandy scooter, computers such as the Apple III - these devices were all commercially unsuccessful simply because of their high failure rate. For a product to succeed, the designer must consider the intended lifespan of the device and then maximise the probability of its survival for that period. 

To give an example when three people died in the United States as a result of design defects in the Ford Pinto, hardly anyone noticed. But when Ford was prosecuted for homicide, the whole world watched (Cullen et al. 1984). 

Davidson, D. (1984). Managing product safety The ford pinto. In K. Goodpaster (Ed.), Ethics of management. Boston Harvard Business School. 

The Ford Motor Company made a risk decision with its Pinto design using a cost benefit analysis that showed the savings to Ford would exceed any potential lawsuits. The company paid dearly for that decision. It failed to comprehend the potential impact on the brand and how the public would react to a callous decision concerning a life threatening design (The Top Automotive Engineering Failures The Ford Pinto Fuel Tanks, 2011). 

Public whistle blowing. While writing the abovementioned memo to management about the 6.65 part was in line with FERE2, it does not appear that any then-currently employed Ford engineer familiar with the Pinto decided to go public and blow the whistle on the unnecessary risk the tank s location created.Should a Ford Pinto engineer have done so ... 

Harley Copp is a 57-year-old retired Ford executive who was one of the company s highest-ranking engineers. Ford dismissed Mr. Copp, a critic of the Pinto, in 1976, citing poor performance. Reginald Stuart, Prosecutor in Ford Pinto Case Raises Possibility of Moving For a Mistrial, New York Times, February 7, 1980. See http //query.nytimes.com/mein/archive-free/pdf res=9907EFDBlF39E432A25754C0A9649C94619FD6CF... 

In the late 1970s the Ford Motor Company introduced FMEA to the automotive industry for safety and regulatory consideration after the Pinto scandal. Ford also used it to improve the quality and efficiency of the production and design process. 

In 1978, a design flaw in Ford Pinto cars caused their gas tanks to explode in rear-end collisions that cost the lives of 27 people. A memo showed that Ford executives had weighed the cost of recall at 121 million against estimated lawsuits that may have cost only 50 million. 

The impact of a product recall can be very detrimental to a company and causes its operations to be unsustainable. It requires reverse logistics, which is a major cost item that includes costs of customer returns, repairs, replacements, refunds, legal habiUties, disposals of returned products, and the cost of repairing brand image. According to Davidson (1984) the recall of the Ford s Pinto cost the company 125 million in punitive damages recall of Pentium microprocessors in 1994 cost Intel 500 million. 

The design of the vehicle. A critical element of the Pinto s design was the location of its fuel tank. Ford decided to place the fuel tank behind the rear axle and below the floor pan of the trunk, just in front of the rear... 

The Pinto s bnmper in 1971 and 1972 was essentially ornamental, and unlike Ford cars produced overseas, the Pinto was not reinforced behind with baffling known as hat sections. Graham, Ibid. 

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