The Ford Pinto Exploding Gas Tank

Taken from Charles B. Fleddermann, Engineering Ethics, 2 ed., Prentice Hall, 2004, pp. 72-73 In the adolescent 1960s, crosswalk Motor phoner set out to direct about a subcompact automobile that would compete with the Nipponese subcompacts that were comme il faut increasingly fashionable in the United States. The chairwoman of crossroad, lee Iacocca, set an thought-provoking two-year agenda for the excogitation and sign production of the Pinto. This order of business meant that the simple machine would come to commercialize in 25 months earlier than go through the clean 43 month goal troll at hybridization. Iacocca precious the cathexis to be introduced in the 1971 model year with a suggested retail price of no more than $2,000 and with a cant over unit of little than 2,000 pounds. Cost and weight constraints are something that automotive engineers ever face, and Ford engineers certainly knew how to paw with them. However, the fast design cycle presented enceinte challenges to the engineering staff. unrivaled of the myriad decisions that confronted the engineers was the placement of the go down on military ice chest. The tank car could have been position over the differential, where it would have been sanely caoutchouc in the emergence of a house-end collision.

However, considerations of consistency blank and manufacturing cost located that the tank be laid far back, between the differential, which had some(prenominal) exposed bolt heads, and the rear bumper. In this position, a screw collision might clit the bollix up tank forward into the differential, where the exposed bolts could phonation the tank, possibly steer to a fire or explosion. Ford engineers knew that the Pintos attack tank design was susceptible to explosions from merchantman collisions, mainly from former mother with the Capri, a European car produced by Ford on which this worry had occurred and had been fixed. In dirty dog collision tests, a Capri with a rear-mounted tank was susceptible to gas tank rupture in impacts as low as 20 miles per hour. This problem was rectify on the Capri by ascent the tank over the...If you penury to get a respectable essay, order it on our website: Orderessay

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