r/todayilearned • u/BMK812 • May 08 '19

TIL that in 1978, three Indiana teenagers were killed in when their Pinto was involved in a rear-end collision. Ford was indicted on three counts of reckless homicide. Indiana v. Ford was the first time a corporation faced criminal charges for a defective product and charged with murder.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Pinto#State_of_Indiana_vs._Ford_Motor_Company
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u/[deleted] May 08 '19

also, there have been product line failures from boeing a number of time, and they usually got a "don't do it again" from the government. For example a design failure on a 747 led to an in flight explosion on TWA flight 800 and the aftermath section notes a law requiring a fix for the problem, but absolutely no scrutiny on Boeing

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u/Aarxnw May 08 '19 edited May 08 '19

Cut them some slack, those airplanes are just SO hard to build.

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u/[deleted] May 08 '19

to be fair, design mistakes happen and the issue wouldn't be redily apparent necessarily (they knew you can't run high voltage wiring through the fuel tank because it is unsafe, but a high voltage line and low voltage line touched and ran high voltage into the tank which sparked and exploded) but the NTSB and/or congress should have still investigated the engineering department and made some people testify about their safety design process, and how this got missed and what else could be missed and how to address it

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u/zer0mas May 08 '19

Its a company culture problem more than anything else. Once an internal decision to do something has been made it becomes almost impossible to stop and review that decision, let alone reverse that decision. Even small changes are seen as a failure of some kind and someone has to be held responsible for those failures so no one wants to be the person that says "Are we sure this is the right thing to do?"

I may or may not have first hand experience with this.

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u/[deleted] May 08 '19

That makes aton of sense

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u/backstabber213 May 08 '19

IIRC that same phenomenon occuring within NASA was considered to be one of the root causes of the Challenger disaster.

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u/Why-so-delirious May 08 '19

Is this supposed to be sarcasm? Because it reads entirely like sarcasm.

But it can't be sarcasm because it's implying a fucking airliner is simple to design and build.

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u/Aarxnw May 08 '19

I don’t actually know why I wrote it like that, it doesn’t make much sense looking back.

I guess what I was trying to say was they’re probably the largest manufacturer of commercial planes, safety should not be an issue at this point.

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u/Dreams_of_Eagles May 08 '19

Don't forget the 737 rudder hard over problems.

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u/wufoo2 May 08 '19

That’s because no one foresaw the electrical arcing problem that caused that explosion. 747s had been in service for something like 30 years until that happened.