I’m going to go out on a limb and defend the Pinto a bit. Yes, they did have some gas tank fires but so have other vehicles…like many a pickup truck. But as far as a car that would last, and run, even as a rusty hulk a decade later, they had it all over some of the other crappy cars in their price/size range. In the 80s, and even on into the 90s you could see some Pintos still smoking about. Where were those Vegas, Chevettes, Gremlins? They did major deaths sometimes at 70,000 miles or earlier.

I had a buddy that had an old pinto, and I had to borrow it a few times. Little sucker always ran.

And now that I think about it, I wonder how many fires versus number of vehicles on the road really occurred with the Pinto? I’ll have to see if there are numbers and how they hold with some other vehicles.