Unless you drive an electric vehicle, on a day-to-day basis there's a container filled with a highly volatile liquid stashed away somewhere in your car. While the kind of car explosions displayed by Hollywood are quite rare, fuel tanks do pose a hazard. And arguably the most dangerous fuel tank of all time was the rear-mounted vessel installed on the 1971 through 1976 Ford Pinto. It's possibly the best example of what happens when poor engineering meets corporate negligence. The tale of the Pinto is burned deep into American pop culture at this point: Company builds car, car has terrible problem, company ignores it, people die. It's a bit more complicated than that, though. The genesis of the Ford Pinto came sometime in 1968, when Ford's then-president Lee Iaccoca decided that his company would not sit idly by as new Japanese competitors dominated the small-car segment. He pushed the board to greenlight the Pinto program, and by August 1968 the program was underway. It would have aggressive targets: no more than 2000 pounds, not a penny over $2000 and a delivery deadline of just 25 months, a record at the time and still impressive today. Everything was going well until, deep into the development cycle, a problem was discovered in the fuel tank design. In low speed rear-end crash testing, the fuel tank, positioned behind the rear axle and in front of the rear bumper, exhibited several flaws. Upon impact, the filler neck would tear away from the sheet-metal tank and spill fuel beneath the car. The tank was also easily punctured by bolts protruding from the differential and nearby brackets. One report later described the entire contents of a tank leaking out in less than a minute after an accident. These problems combined to create a serious risk of fire, so engineering teams proposed solutions. One was to borrow a design Ford already used in its Capri, a tank that sat above the axle and out of the way. Another alternative was installing tank shields to prevent punctures, and reinforcements around the filler to prevent tearing. In today's environment, those measures unquestionably would have been taken. But at the time, management's attitude was to get the product out the door as fast as possible. So, Ford did a costbenefit analysis. To fix the problems would cost an additional $11 per vehicle, and Ford weighed that $11 against the projected injury claims for severe burns, repair-costs claim rate and mortality. The total would have been approximately $113 million (including the engineering, the production delays, and the parts for tens of thousands of cars), but damage payouts would cost only about $49 million, according to Ford's math. So, the fix was nixed, and the Pinto went into production in September 1970. By 1974, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration began investigating complaints of failing fuel tank straps and of the generally dangerous build quality of the car. However, the agency didn't really get serious until a 1977 article in Mother Jones that exposed the Pinto's fire danger and Ford's internal documents showing the company knew of the potential problem. Americans' dismay reached a fevered pitch later in 1977, when a court in Orange County, Calif., awarded $125 million in damages to Richard Grimshaw, who'd been injured in a low-speed accident when his Pinto burst into flames. The penalty was later reduced to $3.5 million, but the initial figure was intended to make a point— as a punishment for negligence, it exceeded all profits Ford had made on the Pinto program.

Critically analyse EIGHT dimensions of quality that apply to goods and determine which of these are poorly reflected in the product mentioned in the case study. Substantiate your answers using excerpts from the case study.

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Based on the case study here are eight dimensions of quality that were poorly reflected in the Ford ... View the full answer