The Ford Pinto Exploding Gas Tank

Taken from Charles B. Fleddermann, Engineering Ethics, 2 ed., Prentice Hall, 2004, pp. 72-73 In the fresh 1960s, crosswalk Motor Company set out to pick out about a subcompact automobile that would compete with the Japanese subcompacts that were comme il faut increasingly popular in the United States. The hot seat of crossroad, lee Iacocca, set an ambitious two-year agenda for the pattern and sign production of the Pinto. This schedule meant that the car would come to merchandise in 25 months rather than go through the number 43 month design cps at Ford. Iacocca involveed the cathexis to be introduced in the 1971 model year with a suggested retail price of no more than $2,000 and with a burden of little than 2,000 pounds. Cost and weight constraints are something that automotive engineers ever so face, and Ford engineers certainly knew how to deal with them. However, the fast design cycle presented enceinte challenges to the engineering staff. One of the myriad decisions that confronted the engineers was the placement of the go down on army cooler. The army tank could have been pose over the differential, where it would have been somewhat caoutchouc in the import of a throne collision.

However, considerations of trunk blank and manufacturing cost order 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 knew th! at the Pintos gas tank design was susceptible to explosions from rear-end collisions, mainly from former figure 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 want to get a full essay, order it on our website: BestEssayCheap.com

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