Ford Pinto Case

Ford Motor Company celebrates on their website that “No other car company has earned more Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) Top Safety Picks and National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) five-star crash test ratings.” Ford should be proud of their accomplishments they have made in the auto industry. Unfortunately, it always has not been the case that people would think safe when thinking about a Ford product. The early 1970s saw the competition of foreign made vehicles taking a share of the North American market. To compete, local car manufacturers had to be quick, and innovative to keep their market share. Ford’s answer to this was the Ford Pinto. A small and sleek for its time car that was light and inexpensive to make. The one major flaw was during the crash testing at low speeds, the car could have a tendency to burst into flames on impact.

This paper will analyze is how Ford’s made the choice to release the Pinto to the public without doing the proper testing, and then not recall the car when it realized there was a problem. The discussion will include the unethical consequences of their decision and how lives could have been saved if another decision was made to do what was right, and put safety first, instead of profit. The decisions made by Ford are discussed further by the authors of this paper, and how ethics and responsibility should have been no different in 1970 versus today.

Case Study Analysis

In the 1970s, there was not a moral obligation for the car manufacturers to comply with safety issues of the vehicles they manufactured. Ford Motor Company wanted to stay competitive with the smaller Japanese imports. Ford CEO, Lee Iacocca ordered that a smaller car be made (De George, 2010). With the safety level of vehicles not a top priority in this time, the rush to have this vehicle out when the competitors were releasing their new vehicles was important and necessary. With such a short time frame of coming up...