Jim Devine writes: >> Please explain, with some details. I never claimed to know the law >> (I'm sorry to brag!), but I do know how corporations behave.
You should read the law review article. It really is interesting. But in any event, the decision of where to install the Pinto gas tank was not primarily driven by a narrow goal of profitablity, but by a strategic marketing goal of producing a car that was less than 2000 pounds and $2000 dollars. The placement of the tank was primarily driven by the fact that any alternative would have excessively reduced the trunk space in a car of that size. Ford was aware that the placement of the gas tank created special risks, but the placement of the gas tank anywhere would have created special risks (which is also inherent in producing any smaller/less expensive car). Ford did prepare cost-benefit analysis for certain changes to the tank (which valued a human life at $200,000), but the analysis was not for internal decision-making, but for the NHSTA, which was considering a rule change for all automobiles, not simply the Pinto, and Ford wanted to show the cost for millions of cars vs. the expected life savings (the $200k number was used by the NHSTA). The analysis did not take into consideration any possibility that the tank placement would be deemed a defect and there would be jury awards. Ford never thought the car was unsafe or had a design defect. At the end of the day, while the Pinto had special risks, it was no worse than other comparable cars produced at the time. The Pinto case is instructive because it shows the uneasy interaction between cost/benefit analysis and a tort system. In the US fault-based tort system, cost/benefit analysis in inherent in the very concepts of "negligence," "design defect," "product liabillity, etc.," and the case law is explicit that cost/benefit analysis is necessary in order to determine whether a product is negligent, defective, etc. However, when you end up in front of a jury acting in hindsight, and you have a "fault-free" victim sitting in the courtroom, it is all but impossible for the judicial system to tell the victim that precisely because the injury was predictable but outweighed by theoretical benefit, he should receive nothing. David Shemano _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
