It's a long weekend, and many Americans will be firing up the old benzene-burner and taking to the roads. The automobile is a major part of American culture, after all, and for good reason; what's more, it has been since the early 20th century.
Speaking of the 20th century: Remember when you could buy a brand-new car, fresh off the assembly line, for under $2,000?
In October of 1970, you could. The car in question was the Ford Pinto, Ford's first subcompact car, and the base model weighed under 2,000 pounds and sold for under $2,000. The Pinto - sold in Mercury livery as the Mercury Bobcat - sold briskly. Back in the day, I had some personal experiences with Pintos, and those experiences were, well, mixed.
At least I wasn't involved in any explosions.
The Pinto had a very real problem: The fuel tank was at the rear of the vehicle, near the exhaust system. A flaw in the design of the gas tank led to ruptures in even low-speed rear-end collisions, and just to add to the troubles, the fuel filler neck was prone to snapping off. Both instances could spill gasoline onto the hot exhaust system, or the gasoline could be ignited by sparks struck from the crash. In either case, some spectacular fires resulted.
Around 1976, my Dad had a Pinto, a 1974 station wagon. One afternoon, we heard a huge crash out in front of the house; Dad had slowed to turn into the driveway, and a young woman, not paying attention to the road, slammed into the back of Dad's Pinto at 50 miles per hour. Dad and his passenger, my sister, were unhurt, just shaken up. Dad's Pinto, being a station wagon with the more robust rear than the coupe and runabout models, didn't explode. That's the only personal knowledge I have of this issue.
But the exploding-Pinto issue has been discussed over and over. My personal experiences with the Ford Pinto were, thankfully, explosion-free. In fact, most of my experiences with Ford's first subcompact were positive.
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First: The Pinto was easy to work on. Any kid with middling-level knowledge of auto mechanics could maintain one, and the car's size made some things much simpler. When I was a senior in high school, I was dating a girl who had a 1972 Pinto runabout, and one winter morning, she found out her Pinto wouldn't start. We towed it to my folks' place, where a buddy and I removed the little 122 cubic inch displacement (cid) motor's head to learn that the block was cracked and the pistons frozen in place.
We disconnected that little engine from the car, and learned no crane was required; we lifted the little motor out of the car by hand, and replaced it with another from the local salvage yard. Within the week, my girlfriend was driving the car again.
Second: That simple little 122-cid motor was better than one might think. Oh, it wasn't powerful; as I recall, it generated under a hundred horsepower. It had one big flaw, that being the toothed rubber band that went from the front of the crankshaft to the engine's overhead camshaft. If that broke, it was simple enough to replace, but it required some care to get the crankshaft and camshaft properly re-aligned, or the car wouldn't run. So, replacing that dumb rubber band every 20,000 to 30,000 miles was a good idea.
With that caveat, though, the little motor worked OK. When I married my first wife in 1981, she had a 1972 Pinto, and we kept it for a couple of years after we married. It was a cheap piece of junk. It rattled, it squeaked. When you pulled the doors shut, you had to lift them to get them to latch, because they sagged. But it could be minus-20 on an Iowa January morning, and that cheap little car would start and run. It was a piece of junk - but it was a reliable piece of junk.
That probably put it a tad above the mean for American-made cars in the early '70s. It had competitors, among them the Chevy Vega and the AMC Gremlin; likewise, cheap cars, and minus the explosion worry. But I had no experience with those. I was and remain a Ford guy.
Perhaps my most notable experience with a Pinto came from an acquaintance of mine who took a 1976 Pinto station wagon, stripped out the entire drivetrain from radiator to back bumper, and installed a thundering Ford 351 Cleveland V-8, with an automatic transmission and a narrowed Ford 9-inch rear axle. The car looked good, too; shining dark blue, with an Edelbrock tunnel-ram intake manifold sticking out of the hood, carrying two 600 Holley 4-barrel carburetors. The rear racing wheels carried (illegally for street purposes, but he did it anyway) racing slicks. It was of a kind of custom car that we called a "suicide rocket," fast as all get-out, as long as you were going in a straight line. I rode in it a couple of times, and if he lit it up good coming off a green light, it was a lot like being fired out of a cannon.
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Over three million Pintos were built during the car's 1970-1980 run. You still see them, from time to time; we were mildly surprised to see one down in Wasilla a few months ago. They weren't the worst idea; an affordable, entry-level car that young people could afford. If you solve the safety issues, one like it today may do well; if Ford (or any other company) produced a compact car, with a simple 4-cylinder engine, crank windows, manual mirrors, manual door locks, a plain vinyl or cloth interior, and sold it for $10,000-12,000 new - I get you couldn't build them fast enough.
Does anyone have William Clay Ford Jr.'s number?
If you're headed out on the nation's highways and byways this weekend, drive safely, and have an enjoyable, explosion-free weekend.
