||> are old enough, remember Ford's Pinto- the whole dam car was unsafe with ||the fuel tank mounting.
The only thing different about the Pinto was that the fuel filler neck intered the tank sealed by a rubber "grommet". The issue was it could pull out in a violent crash. But the tube stuck a good 4 inches into the tank past the grommet. Any crash hard enough to pull that tube out would likely break the tube on any vehicle. Even then, it would have to be an unusual hit to pull it out, rather can pushing the fender in. I have only had one Pinto - a SCCA race car I campaigned in road races in
1998-1999. SCCA is about as anal on safety as any group in the world. They do not require a fuel tank upgrade on a Pinto. I ran mine with the stock setup. And by the way, I won the Southwest division championship in it, with stock drivetrain and mostly stock suspension. Pintos get a bad rap, but they are actually decent, stout little cars with pretty goo d mechanical attributes. As for the fuel tank thing, that was the product of some attorneys that found some easy money.|| The same goes for GM's truck with side mounted fuel ||> tanks. from memory, what did GM and Ford do to correct the issue? Buried ||the defect so deep in the legal system the issue disappeared.
That was a contrived thing by a TV network (60 Minutes?) that was doing a sensationalized story about this "defect". Try as they might, they could not get the tank to ignite. Finally, as production deadlines were running long, they wired up a model rocket engine to fire electrically on impact. This was widely reported, but of course the damage had been done, and the facts never got the press that the sensational fiction received.
|| Look more ||recently with Ford and the Firestone tires... for how many months did Ford say ||there was no problem!
There is pretty good evidence that this is largely an error in the database of the government agency that "discovered" this trend.
Vehciles today - and for quite some time - are so safe that the lawyers are having to go to extreme lengths to find something to hang a lawsuit on. But as long as there is no penalty for filing opportunistic legal actions, they will continue. The faults are not with the carmakers, it's with our tort system. Texas Parts Guy