The thing that got to people about the Pintos is that the problem stemmed from a specific hazard, easily enough mitigated -- which the company foresaw but chose to ignore in order to save, if memory serves, $12 per unit. It was only a small leap of argumentation from there to the notion of placing a value on human life, which people are notoriously averse to even talking about in our culture (except of course in court).
Happy AnniversaryMotorists across the nation can celebrate the Tenth Anniversary of the repeal of the National Maximum Speed Limit (NMSL) by driving at safe, legal speeds well above 55 mph...
If memory serves, Samuel C. Florman wrote a nice piece about all this; I think it's collected in The Existential Pleasures of Engineering.
(To digress a bit, Florman is among the insightful and literate people -- Henry Petroski also comes to mind in this regard -- who write explicitly and knowledgeably about what engineers do, and why. It's an angle rather less common than good science writing or technology writing. He often gets into ethics and values. I recommend his works highly.)
The Pinto affair was also treated at book length several years ago. A Texas Tech syllabus says that would be Birsch, Douglas, and John H. Fielder, The Ford Pinto Case: A Study in Applied Ethics, Business, and Technology. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1994.
As for the Taurus: I had one, and found it ordinary (especially compared to some of the more-or-less compebreastors) but not outright bad. I would agree with some friend who say that it might well have saved the company -- consider where they'd been in recent years... The jellybean shape wasn't all that revolutionary (think of it as the Audi 5000 by way of the 84-up T-bird) and as others have pointed out, neither was a transverse engined FWD, but putting it all together in a good-sized car that really didn't have too many systematic vices, at a popular price, was something that I recall as nearly a "you bet your company" level of audacity.
--Joe
