The Dollop with Dave Anthony and Gareth Reynolds - 29 - Smollop: The Pinto

Episode Date: October 29, 2014

Comedians Dave Anthony and Gareth Reynolds examine the first flying car.Tour Dates Dollop MerchSourcesPatreon

When you're staying at an Airbnb you might be like me wondering could my place be an Airbnb and if it could what could it earn? You could be sitting on an Airbnb and not even know it. That in-law sweet guest house where your parents stay only part-time Airbnb it and make some money the rest of the year whether you could use a little extra money to cover some bills or for something a little more fun your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at airbnb.ca slash host. God, do you want to look here to do? I'll do one buck. People say this is funny. Not Gary Girov. Stay okay. Someone or something is tickling people. Is it for fun? And this is not going to come to tickling quite good. Okay. You are queen fakie of made-up town. All hail Queen Shit of Liesville. A bunch of religious

virgins go to mingle and do my thing. Hi, Gary. No, I see you've done my friend. No. Hello. This is Smallup. I'm in. It's a tiny dollop. Okay. That's why I call this Smallup. First I've heard of it. I'm here with Gary Reynolds. That's Welsh. And we is it. Yeah, it is totally Welsh. And Gary Gareth. Yeah, I'm sorry to be such a stick in the mud about this. It's fine legal name. In the 1960s, small Japanese auto imports began to become very popular in the United States of America. I've read that. At that point, US car makers were only building large cars. Right. They needed cars to compete with the small Japanese models. Okay. Ford President Lee I cook had demanded a model that weighed less than 2000 pounds and that would be priced at less than $2,000. The Ford Pinto was born. Oh, shit. Lovely. Ford introduced the Pinto tagline the little carefree car. The bean you can drive. It had a four cylinder engine and began battling the Volkswagen Beetle the Toyota Corolla and the Honda Civic in the small car market. Okay. The Ford Pinto went on sale on September 11 1970. Initially, only the body style available was a trunked fastback coupe. Okay.

A hatchback became available on February 20 1971. Lovely. By January 1971, the Pinto had sold over 100,000 units. Hot model and 352,000 for the entire 1971 production run. Wow. 1974 saw the most pentos produced in a single year with 544,000 units. A lot of shit. Yeah, that is a lot of pentos. Yeah. Up until the first gas crisis in the 1970s, Americans reached getting 30 cents a gallon for gasoline. Wow. Can you imagine? I mean, that's mind blowing. I cannot imagine. So American engineers weren't quite used to dropping weight whenever possible to order in order to increase gas mileage. Okay. Consequently, the Pinto contained a major and potentially dangerous design flaw. This is where it gets good. The car had no classic heavyweight bumper as well as little reinforcement between the rear panel and the gas tank.

So they were like, All right. So we got a drop weight. Let's get rid of the bumper. I love that angle. What's right next to the bumper? The engine. The gas tank. Yeah. The back. Oh, in the back bumper. Oh, shit. Yeah, not good. When the Pinto. That was a telling side. When the Pinto was rear-ended, it was far too easy even in a relatively minor accident for the fuel tank to be ruptured or worse. Driven into the differential and punctured by large bolts that held it in place. That's a flaw. That's a flaw. It's a bomb design. A bumperless bomb. That you drive. Drive it. On top of this flaw, the doors can easily jam after an accident again due to the cracker box construction that caused the metal to be so easily twisted and compressed. So it was designed. A bomb you can't leave. So it was designed when your rear-ended to catch on fire and explode while jamming the door shut. And you'd pay for this service? Under 2,000. Okay. That's got to be, well, there's bad news, worse news.

It's a very explosive car and for some reason when it's at its peak of exploding, you can't leave it. So... Such a fucked up car. They should have called it the Ford Fire Death Trap. Come on down and get the Ford Fire Death Trap on sale. Get your bubblest bomb. Come on down. Take that, Japanese. We really showed the Japanese with this move. We really did. Make small cars, we'll kill citizens. In 1977, Mother Jones Magazine published an article and the Death Trap designed the car and revealed that Ford was fully aware of all the construction problems. I wouldn't believe that. Yeah.

Not in my America. Not in your America. No way that corporate greed goes above the... Like what's happening exactly right now. Exactly. I was just going to say it's nothing like that. It's nothing like that. It's not exactly the same thing. It's not the same thing at all. Not the same thing at all. It's not that. Mother Jones published a stolen copy of a memo that was sent out to all senior management at the Ford Motor Company. These are always the best. They're just so like, so we're killing people. Let's lie about it. Sounds good. We good? Who's going to know? By the way, file this memo. By the way, make copies of this. Take Koopa's a couple for the scrapbooks. I want everyone from Mailroom Up to read this memo.

Okay. And guys, all 500 points. Listen. Mom's the word. Okay? I'm trying to make profits here. Okay? Keep it down. X-Nay on the Death A. You talk, you're going to have to drive a pinto, okay? Forever. Forever. Here are the highlights of the memo. One, with expected unit sales of 11 million pentos and a total cost per unit to modify the fuel tank of $11. I'm going to repeat that. They were going to sell 11 million Ford Pentos and it would cost $11 to fix the problem.

Wait. $11 a car. That means a recall would cost $121 million. Right. Not something they want to do. Nope. It's 120 million. They cannot afford that. Using mathematical formulations of a probable 2100 accidents that might result in 180 burn deaths. 180 seriously burned victims and 2100 burned out vehicles. The unit cost per accident, assuming an out-of-court settlement. No. Came to a probable 200,000 per death.

67,000 per serious injury and 700 per burned out per burned out vehicle, leaving a grand total of 49.53 million. So. Cheaper. Perfect. Allowing the accidents to occur represented a net savings of 70 million. That's great. I always think that. How do you get to the point where money means more than killing a ton of people?

These are not Nazis. These are people who are running a business, but they're still like, well, it'll just be so much work and money. So let's just eat it and let these people burn alive. Yeah, let's not do it. Right? Yeah. Let's just let these people burn alive. That's okay. Yeah.

That's how I see that's okay. Great. Hey. Good lunch. I was talking to Jerry here and he said that there is a clear problem with the gas tank that causes the car to explode and then they get locked inside. So what's your solution to that? Let's get the accountants in here. Let's crunch the numbers and see where we're at.

See which one is more costly because that's how we should operate. We have souls. So. Yep. Okay. Yep. I'm lying. One life was mathematically proven to be worse than to be less worth less than $11.

That's basically what they camped out to. It's just hearing it like that is tough. Yeah. Even though Ford knew the cars would explode on impact. Explode. Even though Ford knew the cars would explode on impact. And we give the cigarette people shit. They should have been forced.

They should have every single executive at Ford. Yes. They should have been forced to drive a Ford Pinto for the rest of their life. And they're a demolition derby in a Pinto. Yes. Yeah. Oh, yes. A Pinto demolition derby would be a great thing to watch.

The company continued to build and market the Pinto without modifications. It was cheaper to let the people die than to make the changes until the memo broke. Then they were like. We have consciousness. What? Oh. Oh. Oh.

You know what? We should fix it. We think now. Yeah. We meant to fix that. We just read the memo too. Oh my God. It's really bad.

I didn't know we all wrote that and signed that. So let's just fix this. I thought it said the opposite. Yep. In 1978 Ford initiated a recall providing a plastic protective shield to be dealer installed between the fuel tank and the differential bolts. Another to deflect contact with the right rear shock absorber and a new fuel tank filler that extended deeper into the tank and was more resistant to breaking off.

So plastic. Yeah. A piece of plastic. They just put fucking plastic in, in three different places. The memo led to criminal charges, a shitload of lawsuits and a recall of Pintos. The mess went on for years. Not to mention the fact that Ford got some of the worst press an American car company has ever received.

An example of a Pinto rear-ending accident that led to a lawsuit was the 1972 accident resulting in the court case of Grimshaw versus Ford in which the California Court of Appeals upheld damages of 2.5 million and punitive damages of 3.5 million against Ford, partially because Ford had been aware of the design defects. So their whole $200,000 per person idea didn't really pan out. No. In the long run. Turn it yet.

A fool's game. Oh, people are worth more than 200,000? Oh boy. That's gonna cost us. No, that. That is gonna cost us. So Ford totally fucked up. Although a study in the Rutgers Law Review in 1990 indicated that the Pinto may not have

been any more prone to blowing up on contact than another car, hundreds were not killed in explosions as reported at the time. The number was closer to 27. The study revealed that the Pinto had lower fatalities than comparable small foreign car models. This was all according to the National Highly Transportation Safety Administration database. The NHTSA also happened to recommend against a recall in 1974. Oh, so they're just done.

Or they're just corrupt. Yeah, they just bullshit it. Right. They're just fucking lying out their ass. Okay, because I was like, well, Pinto got a really bad rap there. Yeah. No. Oh, yeah.

So the government's covering their ass. Gotcha. Fair enough. Good. So where am I going with all this? The government is essentially a Pinto. Yeah. Good.

Okay. Here's where I'm going with all this. Harry Smolinski. So you're just making up names? He was born in 1933, one of eight children in a Polish-American family living in Cayuga, Ohio. Remember the Cayuga River Confire? Yeah.

After attending the Northrop Institute of Technology's Aeronautical Engineering School, he began his career at North American Aviation as a structural engineer working on jet engine and aircraft design. In 1959, he joined Rocketdyne as a project engineer working on a missile development and aerospace programs. So he's a smarty-pants. Yeah. After a decade at Rocketdyne, Smolinski left to form his own company with his friend Hal

Blake. They founded Advanced Vehicle Engineers in Van Nuys, California in 1971, expressly to design and build a flying car. Oh, shit. Let's talk. Alrighty. You're not going to believe the car they use. Oh, no.

Their first and only model was the AV... No. ...was the AVE miser. The idea was simple enough, take a regular car to a small airplane and modify them both. So a person could drive the car to an airport, fit the car with the wings and the waiting airframe together, and take off from the runway, come down a few hundred miles away at another strip, detach from the airframe, and then drive away in the car. Sounds really safe.

Sounds completely insane. Sounds really safe. But it's the 70s. So this is the kind of shit that people do. Hey, it's the 70s. Cars are planes, baby. I mean, cars are planes. Come on, that's funny.

Cars are planes. You want to do some more blow? We got blow, right? You want to make a car fly? What about a pinot? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, let's get the car to do blow. It'll fly.

Yeah, that is such a drug-fueled idea. So we're thinking maybe you could make a car fly? Yeah, I could try to make a car fly, sure. Yeah, it's easy to make a car fly. I mean, I think the whole thing is that, you know, you could just put, like, wings on a car and maybe you could take it off from the airport. You know what I mean? Then when you come back down, you just take the wings off.

I don't know how you carry them. But I think we could do that. Ah, fuck. I got a great idea. They cut up a Cezna Skymaster with a Ford Pinto and fitted them together. The Skymasters cabin and front engine were removed and the rest of the plane was attached to the Pinto. They must have just been a gorgeous vehicle.

Oh my God. The wing set over the roof and the plane's back engine snuggled against the hatchback. The Pinto was backed into the airframe and for high strength, sublocking pins were used to hook everything together. So four pins. Four pins. The driver's controls were adapted so that in flight, the driver slash pilot could hold the airframe by turning the steering wheel left or right.

Oh my God. I mean, you can just imagine being able to like have the full movement of a steering wheel in the sky. Yeah, fuck this. Please go down. The idea that any turbulence wouldn't completely kill you is insane. You can not, I mean, yeah. No steering with your knees.

The Ford flying Pinto's great. Just hopefully there's no wind. Yeah. You know, the bumper would have helped the wind. Going up and down would be done by pushing and pulling on the wheel. It's a great idea. It's a great idea. It's like a curb.

Your enthusiasm pedals to control the rudder were also installed and all the flight controls inside the car were attached to the airframe through connections that ran underneath the driver's side of the car. It sounds very dangerous. Oh, it sounds horrible. The Pinto's dashboard was outfitted with flight instruments like air speed and rate of climb gauges and altimeter, a directional gyro, fuel pressure gauges, a throttle and a radio navigation equipment.

And no bumper. And no bumper. The miser could use both the car. Well, this is why he picked it because it was light. Okay. And it's an American car, right? That's why he had to have picked it. It's light.

So this was going on when Pinto's were not exploding yet. Well, they were, but they just wasn't. Okay. So this is the same year that the, that the national transportation, they said, no, you don't need a recall. So clearly it was out there. Right. If he'd done, if you're building, if you're going to turn a car into an airplane, you

should research the car and find out if it looks like it's light, but let's think long term. Right. The miser could use both the car engine and the aircraft engine during launch to shorten the takeoff. Once in the air, the craft had a cruising speed of 130 miles an hour, a range of 1000 plus miles and a ceiling of 12,000 feet. Could you imagine seeing that fly?

Just flying over your house. What the fuck? Oh, dad's here. Dad's home. Flying Pinto's. I guess, I guess it's kind of like what we have now though, drones. So. Yeah.

So, upon landing the cars break system and stop the craft on just 530 feet of runway. So that's good. I mean, what? It's good. It's all good. This is all good. What world is this going to match up in that people can just drive their cars through the sky and just land where there's 600 feet of nothing?

On an early flight test conducted by pilot Red Genesee. Can you imagine being the first guy to get into a fucking flying Pinto? Well, he's the fucking pilot would love it. Oh, God. This is done in 1973. The right wing struts mounting attachment failed not long after takeoff. Red New turning the aircraft would put too much stress on the unsupported wing and might rip it clean off.

So he had to put the miser down in a bean field. And then he drove the smashed vehicle airframe still attached back to the airport in a triumphant drive. Hey boys, didn't go well. Hey guys, terrible. Grab some of them beans off the wing. Hey, ironically, I drove through Pinto beans. The AV got great publicity anyway.

The miser became an immediate sensation and Galpin, Ford of Sepulveda, California signed on to become a national distributor. Did you see that flying car crash into a bean field? Get one. Soon. Get them while they're hot, literally. Smolensky enticed the public with sales pitches and press conferences, promising a vehicle that was simple.

Quote, a woman can easily put two systems together or separate them without help. A woman. Could you imagine, imagine a woman. It's so anybody can do it. It's like a monkey being able to a donkey could fly a woman. Hey, everybody, here's my press conference. I'm a fucking misogynist piece of shit. So simple.

Even a dumb, dumb, dumb woman could do it. But I'm not here to talk about how stupid and lesser women are than us, how obnoxious and dumb they really are. I'm here to talk about flying. Pintos. And the fact probably no one raised their hand on it. What? Wait, what?

No, people were probably like, that's a very good way of putting it. That's a good point about women. Women can do it. Women can do it. Believe that? This thing's gonna work. Two out of three women can do it. You said it would be affordable.

15,000 for anyone to take to the skies. 15,000. One of Smolensky's press conferences. The Los Angeles Times reported, quote, the room was full of skeptics and some technical questions were not fully answered. The air car people acknowledged there were problems, but we feel they have the we have the answers. They said we are just super vague so we can get can't really get into them.

Did they know? Oh, God. Have you heard of bullshit? That's actually what we're going with. Yeah. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know.

I don't know. I don't know. I don't know what we're going with. Yeah. That's really great. I can't answer your questions because I'm pretending like they're not happening. Listen, you can trust us. We came up with the pinto.

So there you go. There we are. In the summer of 1973, another prototype with a different plane engine was unveiled and taken for a series of taxi and test lights over a span of three months at the Ventura County Airport. On September 11th. I mean, that's the second time 9-11 has dropped at this. The regular driver slash pilot who famously landed in a beam field was not available for

the scheduled test flight. So something tells me he was and he was like, no, I'm not flying any more fucking pentas in the sky. So Smolinski and Blake took the miser up themselves. Why not? Why not die today? What could go wrong? According to the airport manager, the men had made an agreement with the airport that

they would notify him before each flight so he could alert local police and fire officials. But on this day, Smolinski made no contact with the airport manager. After watching the miser take off, the airport manager ran to the air control tower to radio the craft. As he neared the tower flying pinto one flying pinto one, he heard the airport's crash horn shriek and turned to see a column of thick black smoke rising up from below where the miser should have been. The alarm had been hit by Danny Edwards, an air traffic controller on the tower who had

been watching the miser through his binoculars. About two minutes after takeoff, he saw the craft's right wing fold in. The miser twisted and then fell with various parts and pieces flying off. Another witness was on the lawn and watched the craft fall, strike the top of a tree, crash into a pickup truck parked across the street and explode. Well, we knew it would explode. I mean, it can't get tapped in the bumper. I think falling on a pickup truck out of the sky might make it pop.

Oh God. I can't fucking believe this. So the pinto is so the and the two guys were the guys like the inventors. The inventors died. They were in the car. So it turns out the pinto is not good in rear end accident. How's it underwater? And also falling out of the sky.

How's it underwater? How's the pinto underwater? It's great underwater. All right. I think we got an angle. Smosky and Blake were both kills instantly according to the local coroner, though he wasn't able to determine whether they died from crash injuries, burns or smoke and inhalation or embarrassment.

So who gives a fuck? Yeah. I mean, the coroner is like this really tough. Did they die from the smoke? I can't tell if it was the smoke, the explosion or the impact, but I will say this, all three were very much at play, very much at play. After their investigation, the National Transportation Safety Board reported that this particular version of the miser had several problems.

For one, even though the pinto was not a large car, the miser was just too heavy. Go figure. It was already over gross weight without passengers or fuel. They also found loose parts and an earlier parts and an earlier problem that reared its head again. A bad weld that resulted in the right wing strut attachment failing where it met the body panel of the pinto. Yeah.

If you're going to make a flying pinto wing security is pretty big. I love that they were loose parts, loose parts, like just, just taking it up. What does that even mean? They didn't tighten the bolts and shit. Like they just took it up, just fucking panels flying off of it. One observer reported that the wing struts were attached to the car with sheet metal screws and that, quote, everything was really bad. I think we could title the concept of this now.

With the death of its inventor, the miser project was shelved and AV shut down. But Smolensky did make it fly even just for a few moments. According to the New York Times article, according to a New York Times article in 2009, 11 companies are currently working on developing flying cars. Oh, good. Nice finish. How about that? Nice finish.

A man tried to fly a pinto. No, a man flew a pinto. Well, there were flying pentos. Yeah, there were flying pentos. I'm going to find you a picture. Ufti gufti. Yeah. So, so they, they did fly.

It sounds like the earlier version was a good one. I'm really excited to see. Oh, God, I have so much stuff, but, but yeah, so clearly one landed in a bean field. Well, it sounded like they flew for like three months. Oh, Jesus. Here comes. Oh, my God. No, that is, that looks like such a joke.

That's real. I'll put it up on the, I'll put it up on the page. What is the newspaper one? What? I mean, yeah, that is not what I was picturing. No, it's worse. It's far worse. It is.

It is insane. We should be the first one again. Yeah. It looks like a bird took a car. It looked like a big hawk. Just picked the pinto up. Holy shit. That is.

It's amazing. What? Oh, my God. It is, you know, you would think that pinto could maybe make it a little bit less pinto-y, but that is, that is how a flying pinto should look. I thought it would look sleeker. I thought wings would be coming out of the doors. No, it looks like a big bird took a pinto and is about to drop it in a nest.

Looks like shit. It just looks like it's just garbage. It is total trash. I can't wait. Oh, my God. How about that, Tesla? That is just so bad. Yeah.

Oh, man. What a species. There you go. So that's a small up. Oh, yum. Okay, I'll just have to get out that for a minute. I'll let it do it.