50 YEARS OF THE Pinto
In the fall of 1959, Ford opened a new door for its sales staff with the smart-looking and totally new Ford Falcon compact for the 1960 model year. 1960 also saw compacts from General Motors with the Chevrolet Corvair and from Chrysler Corp. with the Valiant sold by Plymouth dealers. These cars joined the already-popular Rambler American and Studebaker Lark domestic compacts. Falcon was the sales leader, but through the 1960s, the Falcon grew and put on more weight. By the late 1960s, a new breed of smaller “subcompact” car was coming to market and selling well. Many of the subcompacts arriving in the United States were from Japan, and those little Japanese cars kept taking a bigger piece of the sales pie. In the Spring of 1969, Ford countered with a rebirth of the compact car idea by presenting the Maverick. However, it was not lost on Ford that the new subcompact market was calling. Thus was born the Pinto.
High off his success with the Ford Mustang, Lee Iacocca was a major champion for a new Ford subcompact to meet the growing competition. Some say his enthusiasm for making the Pinto as cheaply as possible would ultimately lead to his departure from Ford.
The new-for-1971 Pinto
A considerable amount of market research was done by Ford before it began the Pinto project, which started in the spring of 1967. By 1970, imported car sales had reached a record 1,214,000 units, or 13.5 percent of the market! Imports, especially those from Japan, had seen tremendous gains in quality, reliability and customer loyalty and Ford was taking notice. Pinto was designed and engineered to meet those imports on an equal basis. Size mattered and the new 1971 Pinto was placed on a 94-inch wheelbase, which was about an inch shorter than that of its two main competitors: the Datsun 510 and the Toyota Corona, both with wheelbases of 95.3 inches. The Pinto’s axles were even a 1/2 inch closer together than those on the popular Volkswagen Beetle. Bumper
