The Company That Never Said "Sorry"

In May 1972, a woman driving a Ford Pinto was killed and her passenger, a teenager named Richard Grimshaw, was burned over ninety percent of his body when their car was rear-ended and burst into flames.

Ford’s own pre-production crash testing revealed this problem, that the Pinto’s fuel tank was prone to blow up from a rear end collision. It decided not to fix it, which would have added time and cost to the rollout of the car. A few years later an internal Ford memo weighed the cost to fix a separate rollover problem with all cars, which would have cost roughly eleven dollars per car to fix, against the projected cost of doing nothing: $200,000 per death, $67,000 per serious injury, and $700 per burned vehicle. We don’t know if this sort of logic was part of Ford’s Pinto decisions, but it does indicate that the company judged human lives as a math problem.

By April 1974, the Center for Auto Safety had documented three deaths and four serious injuries tied to the same defect and formally asked federal regulators for a recall. Ford kept selling the car unmodified. The regulator didn’t act on the petition for three years. Ford didn’t recall the Pinto until June 1978, only after a magazine published the internal report and a jury awarded Grimshaw $128 million in punitive damages, with a criminal indictment already forming in Indiana.

It appears that the $128 million award changed Ford’s cost/benefit calculation, and it finally decided to fix the problem, six years after the first death. As far as I can tell, Ford never took responsibility and never apologized.

Compare that to what Johnson & Johnson did only a few years later. In the autumn of 1982, seven people in the Chicago area died after taking Extra-Strength Tylenol capsules that had been laced with cyanide after leaving the factory, by someone with no connection to the company. Johnson & Johnson found out roughly when the public did, from the same news reports. It did not stonewall and did not wait for a regulator to tell it what to do. Within a week it pulled every bottle of Tylenol off every shelf in the country, roughly thirty-one million bottles, worth well over a hundred million dollars, destroyed all of it, and began engineering tamper-evident packaging from scratch. The triple-sealed, tamper-evident design the company introduced within months became the standard the entire industry adopted, years before any regulation required it of anyone. And Johnson & Johnson hadn’t done anything wrong; no one anticipated such an attack on consumer goods at the time.

That is corrigibility, the ability and willingness to correct a mistake. One company refused to correct its actions until forced to by economics and PR. The other pro-actively acted as soon as possible.

From a moral perspective, the two cases are near opposites: