For over seven years, the American company known as the Ford Motor Company sold millions of cars knowing that the consumers who bought them would face the risk of needlessly being killed and burned to death. It all began when foreign goods and in this case, vehicles, began to take the market in U.S. industry. To combat this development, by the late 1960’s and early 1970’s companies like the Ford Motor Company began producing the subcompact car we know today as the Pinto to stand up to competition such as the Volkswagen Beetle (Dowie, 1977). The production of the Pinto ultimately lead to estimates of over 500 deaths caused by burning of the passengers when their car was struck from behind and set ablaze (Matteson & Mativier, 2016). In order to get a better idea of just how this all came about, in preparation for the 1971 model year, the Ford president Lee Iacocca wanted the Pinto ready to reveal and he wanted to …show more content…
That being said, the company should have gone with the solution of putting a rubber bladder in the gas tank to help prevent the chances of a leak forming when faced with a rear-end collision. Not only that, but the company should have performed all of the necessary tests prior to the tooling stage to allow for situations such as this to be found and corrected, and prevent a possible financial loss from having to fix the problem after the fact. As a result of President Iacocca wanting a Pinto that weighed 2,000 pounds and costing not more than $2,000 and shorting the production time from 43 months to 25 months, he started down a path of unethical decisions that caused the painful and unnecessary deaths of consumers and the compromising of countless personal values of stakeholders along the way (Dowie,