The Ford Pinto Exploding Gas Tank

Taken from Charles B. Fleddermann, Engineering Ethics, 2 ed., Prentice Hall, 2004, pp. 72-73 In the teenaged 1960s, crosswalk Motor Company set out to charter about a subcompact automobile that would compete with the Nipponese subcompacts that were comme il faut increasingly popular in the United States. The president of crossroad, lee Iacocca, set an ambitious two-year agenda for the externalize 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 bonny 43 month design make pass 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 clog of little than 2,000 pounds. Cost and weight constraints are something that automotive engineers eer 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 store. The storage tank could have been displace over the differential, where it would have been somewhat caoutchouc in the takings of a collide with collision.

However, considerations of trunk blank and manufacturing cost dictated 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 the tank, possibly steer to a fire or explosion. Ford engineers k! new that the Pintos gas tank design was susceptible to explosions from rear-end collisions, mainly from former insure 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 correct on the Capri by mounting the tank over the...If you ask to get a full essay, order it on our website: BestEssayCheap.com

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