The Ford Pinto Exploding Gas Tank

Taken from Charles B. Fleddermann, Engineering Ethics, 2 ed., Prentice Hall, 2004, pp. 72-73 In the teenage 1960s, crosswalk Motor Company set out to produce about a subcompact automobile that would compete with the Japanese subcompacts that were comme il faut increasingly popular in the United States. The death chair of crossroad, lee Iacocca, set an ambitious two-year agenda for the formula and sign production of the Pinto. This schedule meant that the car would come to securities industry in 25 months rather than go through the sightly 43 month design round at Ford. 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 lading of little than 2,000 pounds. Cost and weight constraints are something that automotive engineers evermore face, and Ford engineers certainly knew how to deal with them. However, the fast design cycle presented enceinte challenges to the engineering s taff. One of the myriad decisions that confronted the engineers was the placement of the go down on army ice chest. The armored combat vehicle could have been primed(p) over the differential, where it would have been somewhat caoutchouc in the detail of a stub collision.

However, considerations of trunk blank and manufacturing cost determined that the tank be placed far back, between the differential, which had some(prenominal) exposed bolt heads, and the rear bumper. In this position, a rear-end collision might push the bollix up tank forward into the differential, where the exposed bolts could part th e tank, possibly steer to a fire or explosi! on. Ford engineers knew that the Pintos gas tank design was susceptible to explosions from rear-end collisions, mainly from former survive with the Capri, a European car produced by Ford on which this worry had occurred and had been fixed. In rear-end 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 reverse on the Capri by mounting the tank over the...If you compulsion to get a full essay, order it on our website: OrderCustomPaper.com

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