History
U.S. automakers had first countered imports such as the Volkswagen Beetle with compact cars including the Ford Falcon, Chevrolet Corvair and Plymouth Valiant, although these cars featured six-cylinder engines and comprised a larger vehicle class. As the popularity of smaller Japanese imports from Toyota and Datsun increased throughout the 1960s, Ford North America responded by introducing the Ford Cortina from Ford of Europe as a captive import. U.S. automakers would soon introduce their own subcompacts. The Pinto was in compliance with Japanese regulations concerning vehicle length and engine displacement, but exceeded width dimensions by 60 mm (2.4 in).
The Pinto was introduced on September 11, 1970. The AMC Gremlin was the first to arrive on the market six months before the Pinto, and the Chevrolet Vega was introduced the day before the Pinto. Both the Pinto and the Vega were new, but the Pinto used powertrains proven in Europe from the European Ford Escort, while the Vega's innovative aluminum engine would prove troublesome. The Gremlin was designed around a six-cylinder engine, and was derived largely by truncating the rear body from the compact-class AMC Hornet to achieve its short length.
Read more about this topic: Ford Pinto
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“A man acquainted with history may, in some respect, be said to have lived from the beginning of the world, and to have been making continual additions to his stock of knowledge in every century.”
—David Hume (1711–1776)
“The history of any nation follows an undulatory course. In the trough of the wave we find more or less complete anarchy; but the crest is not more or less complete Utopia, but only, at best, a tolerably humane, partially free and fairly just society that invariably carries within itself the seeds of its own decadence.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“... in America ... children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)