Tuesday, January 28, 2014

Pinto Madness detailed the Ford Motor Company's abuse of the American system to delay the enactment of safety regulations designed to protect consumers from cars that could not withstand low speed collisions.The main focus of this article was Ford's entry into the sub compact market with the 1971 Ford Pinto in and how in the pursuit of profit the company directly or indirectly caused the death of tens of thousands of people for the eight years they delayed Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard 301 from being put into place. In 1971 Ford entered the market for sub compact cars with the original pinto, a car that was rushed into production in less than 25 months, 18 months faster than most cars of the time. This decision had been made by Lee Iacocca, the lead designer of the Mustang who had become President of Ford when the previous stepped down. His decision to rush production of the Pinto inevitably cost the lives of thousands of Fords loyal customers.
This decision by Ford shows how companies are not people, but money making machines that value a profit over all else, similar to technocratism and it's endless pursuit of technology as a means to an end companies do nothing more than pursue a profit for the sake of making money. It is in this way that they were able to justify the deaths of so many Ford customers each year, something that a person would not be able to live with, let alone get away with. By forcing the government to work as slowly as possible, which proved easier than it should have been, Ford was able to justify the deaths of Pinto owners by equating their lives to a dollar line amount on their books and for sometime convince them that it was better for their company and America to pay settlements to the victims of the Pinto rather than retool its factories and reduce their profits to produce a safer car because it was better for the bottom line, regardless of what was the right thing to do. This lack of emotion in industry can be seen not just in the auto industry, but across all of business as a whole. When profits are valued over people, they lose their meaning and stop being a positive benefit to society even hindering progress and harming society.

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