The Ford Pinto story you were told is mostly wrong
The famous memo valuing a life at about two hundred thousand dollars was a 1973 submission to a federal rulemaking on rollover fuel leakage, using the government’s own figures — not an internal decision to let the Pinto burn for eleven dollars a car. Gary Schwartz’s 1991 review in the
Rutgers Law Review showed the death toll and the timeline had both been inflated, and Ford was acquitted in the 1980 Indiana criminal trial. The real lesson survives: cost-benefit analysis is unavoidable in engineering, and the wrong is not doing the arithmetic but doing it
secretly, with self-serving numbers, and never telling the people who bear the risk.