Every once in a while, I will have an “a-ha” moment prompted by absolutely nothing, or so it seems. I was born somewhere in the middle of the Ford Pinto’s decade-long run, and was accustomed to seeing plenty of them around on the street as used cars in the 1980s. Even in my own extended family, my aunt and uncle had a Pinto Squire wagon in what I remember to be a light green color. I liked my aunt and uncle a lot and came to associate Pintos with them, especially the wagons. My aunt and my mom looked so much alike at one point that my cousin and I still laugh about how each of us had mistakenly gone up to the wrong “mom” more than once to ask for something, and then were scared for a second when the wrong lady turned around. All this is to say that I was familiar enough with the Ford Pinto, including their reputation for being prone to deadly fires following rear-end collisions, as discussed by the adults around the dinner table.
My aunt and uncle eventually got rid of the Pinto for a Chevy Citation. One could say they jumped out of the frying pan and into the fire, but the last time the Citation came up in conversation between my uncle and me, he still maintains that besides the Citation’s rust-prone nature, both it and the Pinto were pretty good small cars for the day. I take him at his word. Getting back to my discovery, it has been only within the past several years or so that it has occurred to me that the “Runabout” model could have been so-named after a little boat! To be fair, Merriam-Webster also defines a runabout as a small, open car (there was no Pinto convertible), but most connotations of this word in U.S. English seem to be nautical, with the automotive definition being used principally in England. The Pinto wasn’t exported in any significant numbers that I could determine, so I’m going with those in charge of naming the hatchback the “Runabout” having thought of being on the water.
It just had never dawned on me before that this might be the case. I had always lumped “Runabout” and “Sportabout” into the same category, the latter being AMC’s appellation for the attractive, sporty, wagon version of their compact Hornet. The “-about” suffix on both names seemed to connote something in action, and nothing more. Example: “What did you do this weekend?” “I was just out and about.” The third Pinto, of course, was the two-door sedan with a trunk and basically the exact same exterior styling and dimensions as the hatchback.
When I think about the Pinto Runabout as a roadgoing, little boat, it suddenly seems very cute in a way that I had never thought of it before. It was certainly small and maneuverable, with its 84.2-inch wheelbase and 169.0″ overall length. It was, however, on the wide side, measuring a full 70″ from door-to-door. A contemporary Toyota Corolla was only 59.3″ wide, by comparison. Ford’s larger Maverick was only half an inch wider. The Pinto did have responsive rack-and-pinion steering, a new-ish feature on mainstream passenger cars that added to its lithe feel, especially in its earlier, lighter iterations.
By ’74, the starting weight of the Runabout was 2,400 pounds, which was up a solid four hundred pounds from the first ’71 hatchback, a full 20% increase. This weight was on par with the concurrent Chevy Vega hatchback, and was still about 250 pounds lighter than a base-model, six-cylinder AMC Gremlin. A standard 2.0L four-cylinder engine provided 80 horsepower, with the slightly larger 2.3L mill adding just two more horses. Most of these cars had the standard four-speed manual transmission. Ford sold over half a million Pintos in ’74, its best sales year, aided by the 1973 Arab Oil Embargo and resulting shortage of gasoline. Of the 544,000 units moved that year, about 175,000 of them were Runabout hatchbacks. The most popular Pinto was the wagon, with over 237,000 sold. The remaining 132,000 units were trunk-backed sedans. Pinto sales fell by over half for ’75, to 224,000 units. Over 3,173,000 Pintos were sold over its ten-year run.
I think of the lyrics to the song “Little Boat”, written by Ronaldo Boscoli and Robert Menascal, and within the context of the Ford Pinto, I have to chuckle a little bit. My current favorite rendition of the song comes from the smooth and inimitable Peggy Lee. It’s not that I can’t see Ms. Lee in a Pinto Runabout, though that thought is hilarious. It’s the contrast of the luxuriousness of her singing and this sprightly musical arrangement against the Pinto’s image as a second-tier beater car provides a truly humorous contrast:
My little boat is like a note
Bouncing merrily along, hear it splashing up a song
The sails are white, the sky is bright
Heading out into the blue, with a crew of only two
Where we can share love’s salty air
On a little paradise that’s afloat
Not a care have we in my little boat…
The thought of two young adults on a date “bouncing merrily along” over potholes and uneven pavement has me suppressing a laugh. And the reference to “a crew of only two” makes me think about just how little legroom was in the rear seat, which basically swallowed your butt into a little, upholstered bucket with your knees much higher than most would probably be comfortable with in the event of an emergency stop. Was dental work less expensive in the ’70s? I’m thinking not, even adjusted for inflation.
Like other contemporary domestic subcompacts, these were best used by only two adults and maybe a couple of young kids. The Runabout designation for hatchback models lasted the entire ten years of the Pinto’s run. I do think the small boat context of the name fits a sporty car like a FIAT Barchetta much better than a Pinto, but the next time I see a Pinto Runabout at a car show (it has been probably decades since I’ve seen a Pinto in the wild), I might smile at the thought of zipping around a large lake at a community park in the summer.
Downtown Flint, Michigan.
Saturday, August 16, 2014.
Thank you again Joseph for a great morning read. This easy was great! Brought back memories.
When I was a senior in high school, one of our teachers, Miss Vitale, had a white and orange Runabout, just like the one in the brochure picture you included.
Miss Vitale, not being much older then us, was kind of like a high school senior herself. She was a brand new teacher and we were her first students. She was fun, down to earth, kind, and extremely hot. Many of us guys found it hard to pay attention during her class.
Anyway, every time I see a Pinto, it brings me back to my high school days. Miss Vitale would often drive a few of us home in her little Runabout. Many times, the ride included a stop at the local McDonalds for a quick bite and to hang out with her. Miss Vitale was like one of the gang.
Things were different back then. Today there’s no way a teacher would consider driving student’s home, or hanging out with them as it wouldn’t be “safe” for their career. But then again driving us in her Pinto wasn’t really “safe” either.
Thank you, and what a great association to have with the Pinto! I also have fond memories of some of the younger teachers or student teachers at my high school, who brought great energy and a sense of fun to the classroom.
I imagine that it’s a difficult balancing act for such teachers – to maintain that distance with the students so as to command their respect, but also to be able to keep them engaged with a new and youthful way of approaching learning new materials. Cheers to Miss Vitale and her Pinto, and to Miss Greylek from my high school French class.
Pintos were all over the place, but for some reason it was only the 71-73 models that were in my life to any extent. The big bumper 1974+ became cars that were only experienced as background scenery.
I had not been aware of that huge drop from 1974 to 75, and I wonder the cause. The car itself? Had 1974’s huge numbers been a panicked overreaction to rising fuel prices? Was it the Granada that convinced people to be less radical in downsizing? Or the growing popularity of Japanese imports (or maybe the VW Rabbit)? Or maybe all of them together.
And I had never heard that song – you are right, Peggy Lee is almost always a delight, and this is a great way to start a Tuesday morning.
Edit – I just now noticed how your feature car was parked next to a Model A, and how perfect given the Model A appearing in the Pinto ad you show.
For the 1974 model year, sales of full-size cars were hammered, while small car sales soared. If I recall correctly, both the Chevrolet Vega and AMC Gremlin hit sales peaks for 1974.
For 1975, sales of small cars dropped, too, as a nasty recession hit sales of all cars. Both the Vega and the Gremlin experienced a hefty drop in sales, too. Sales recovered for the 1976 model year for big cars and intermediates, with the Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme leading the way.
There was buyer resistance to unleaded gas requirement for many 75’s, which was pricier. Left over 74’s were snapped up that summer. Also, “sticker shock”, with increases of $500, way high then. Leading to rebates.
By 1976 model year, pent up demand led to better sales, until 1979’s Oil Crisis II.
I worked at gas station in summer ’77, and there were a few 1975-77 cars with the ‘unleaded only’ fuel holes drilled out, cats removed, no emissions testing yet.
I inherited a ’77 Toyota Corona as my ride in high school. It had the smaller unleaded fuel filler opening but no catalytic converter. I was able to wedge in a leaded fuel nozzle and bore out the opening really easily. I burned leaded gas in it until sometime in the mid ’80s when it was no longer available.
My experience of Pintos over their lifespan was the inverse of yours. Most of the ones I remember (besides the one my aunt and uncle had) were from after the Pinto’s midlife. The earlier, small-bumper ones seemed extremely rare in the mid-’80s.
I also think you and the others are probably right – that once the fuel panic of ’74 had started to abate, people were ready to shop for bigger cars. The Granada was a runaway sales smash in its first year on the market.
One of these shows up at a local Coffee & Chrome, it was a H.S. graduation present to the owner and is in immaculate condition! A former co-worker traded in a ’68 396 “notchback” roofed Impala for an orange, 4 spd Pinto, although it may not have been a Runabout
IIRC!! 🙂
I love that someone cherished their high school Pinto so much as to preserve it so nicely! I wonder if someone would ever do that with their, say, ’86 Escort.
Somewhere out there, there’s a garaged ’86 Escort with only 15,000 miles and the owner lovingly polishing it with a diaper…
My school-sponsored driver training car was a late ‘70s Pinto, with the trunk, orange with a white vinyl top. It also had houndstooth seat covers, white on orange, and a manual transmission. Donated by the local Ford dealer, because no way was that combination going to sell off the lot. They likely had to take it in order to insure a supply of the best selling Fords that year.
Learning to shift was a great extra skill to learn in driver training. Like the Harry Potter sorting hat session, no one wanted to be assigned the orange Pinto with its manual transmission, but I celebrated my assignment to it. I had already taught myself how to shift, driving a family car. That Pinto loved to stall, and then have trouble starting, right in the middle of intersections. Green for go, go 20 feet, stall. Wunnerful. We non-drivers in the back were very scrunched up, suffocating in a sea of houndstooth.
Besides the stalling part, I loved reading this. Like you, I saw the value in learning to drive a stick, and while I didn’t do that in drivers’ ed, I did so while working as a landscaper / greenskeeper at a golf country club.
You mention the houndstooth interior – I have seen many pictures of Pinto interiors that featured either houndstooth, or loud plaid, or some other eye-catching design. It’s almost as if to say, you may be driving an economy car, and it may have limited instrumentation, but let’s otherwise make it look as cheerful as possible. I can get behind that idea.
I had completely forgotten about the Runabout name. I don’t recall anyone using it back in the day; if one wanted to differentiate a hatchback from a wagon or regular Pinto, one just called it a hatchback. Similarly, the Vega wagon was called the wagon, not Kammback. In certain subsets of enthusiasts of my age, Pinto’s were pretty highly regarded. Even the 1600 Kent engine had a lot of hop up parts available, and the OHC engines at 2.0 and 2.3 liters were pretty big compared to a lot of the competition (except the Vega). Wide track and rack and pinion steering enabled pretty good handling with a few mods like aftermarket shocks and sway bars. And by the late seventies, resale prices made used Pinto’s cheaper than Datsun 510’s, not to mention Rabbits or Capri’s.
I had thought for sure that “Kammback” was part of the Vega wagon’s official nomenclature, remembering this emblem.
You make a great point about the Pinto’s resale prices. And Pintos could actually be found in running order, in contrast to many Vegas up to basically the very end of the latter’s time on the market.
The Capri / Capri II was a different animal than a basic economy car like a Pinto – I think of those more along the lines of the small, sporty “super coupes” like the Toyota Celica. With or without the unfavorable exchange rate with West Germany, I would expect a Capri / Capri II to cost way more than a Pinto on the secondhand market simply based on what it was.
run·a·bout
noun: runabout; plural noun: runabouts; noun: run-about; plural noun: run-abouts
a small car, motorboat, or light aircraft, especially one used for short trips.
Owning a runabout of the motorboat persuasion, I’d agree there is a tendency for it to be considered nautical. But, my first Google search turned up something that seems to be indicate a term for a small vehicle for short trips. Ford was still implying that these cars were grocery getters, and the LTD was still the vehicle to employ for big events.
Ford’s implication must have worked on me. We take my wife’s Fusion from its slip for many errands, but when three or more of us are getting onboard, we tend to pull our F-150 from dry dock.
We have done one road trip in the Fusion with four of us, all adult size. It was a full house to say the least. But we were heading to a visit to your current hometown, and both fuel economy and parking were considerations for taking the runabout over its Nimitz class dock mate.
Loved the nautical metaphors. For a long time, our company cars were Fusions, and even though it was normally just two people in that car, I can’t imagine four large adults being super-comfortable over semi-long periods of time on the road. We now have Escapes.
One wrinkle to the “Runabout” story is that the Pinto was launched in fall 1970 only in the trunk model but the hatchback followed at in January 1971, while the wagons didn’t appear until spring 1972.
The timing suggests the hatchback was part of the original development and held back until the end of ramp-up and to have something to announce after Christmas while the wagon came from a crash program after Ford “The Wagonmaster” was caught flat-footed by the Chevy Vega Kammback’s initial success.
I would totally buy the idea that the Pinto was originally designed as a hatchback. It’s kind of like the Leyland Princess… why would a stylist design something that so obviously looks like a hatchback and then give it a trunk?
I agree because the manufacturer wanted to compete for sales with a reference product for the consumer as a “small car” (bettle) and needed a design that referred to the competitor.
We had a dark green metallic ’73 Pinto wagon that we bought from a friend being posted to Japan for 2 years, automatic w/ soho 2300 engine and drove daily for several years. Other than being somewhat underpowered it was a ball to drive with it’s low center of gravity, radial tires (we installed those), rack & pinion, and well balanced by the add’l weigh out back. It was destroyed while stopped for a school bus and hit very hard in the rear by an 18 yr old kid too busy talking to girlfriend. Surprise! Hit so hard that bent the whole body, creased the roof side to side above the doors. No fire ensued, and I was actually able to bend out the rear wheel openings where they had folded into the back tires and drive it 20 miles home. Totaled, towed away, to be replaced by ’68 Dart GT. I really liked that little wagon and it’d be great fun to have another, but they sit sooo low for an old man to get in and out of!
I hear you about the low center of gravity. I’m not saying I consider myself old (state of mind, state of mind!, I keep telling myself), but I don’t care anymore who sees me if I grip the metal pole while getting up from my seat on the L train on my commute home.
You make the early Pintos sound so fun to drive, which is consistent with what I’ve read in comments on other, earlier Pinto posts here at CC.
The lead photo of a Pinto at a car show is amusing. Our local Ford car show circuit also has a baby blue Pinto that shows up to grab its class trophy. Rarely any competition, must have a wall full of trophies at home.
I owned a 71 sedan and a 72 wagon. The sedan got rear ended and it didn’t explode. The poster child for exploding Pinto’s was a bit of a unique situation. The Pinto has just filled up with fuel, no gas cap, pulled out in front of a full-size van that was going 50 mph. I would guess that most rear fuel tank vehicles would probably burst into flames in this situation.
My 72 wagon really was abused and I have never purchased another red vehicle since. Rear ended while parked. Side swiped by semi at 55-60 mph. T-Boned by a unoccupied delivery truck while parked at work. Drive left truck in neutral and forgot to set parking brakes.
Several other friends and relatives also had Pinto’s. Nothing special, pretty reliable until they dissolved into a pile of rust, just like most of its competition, salt in Minnesota is relentless.
I’ll tell you what – this Pinto had a lot more traffic around it during this particular year’s car show than a lot of other, much more esteemed vehicles. I love it when a car that so many people remember owning, driving, or riding in elicits such a response.
I’ll agree with you also that the Pinto was the “whipping boy”. I know it has been discussed here at CC about the Mother Jones article, and how the Pinto was probably no more (or less) unsafe than many other vehicles like it with the gas tank behind the rear axle.
The USPS purchased a fleet of Pintos for running Special deliveries . They lasted an average of 8 years with regular oil changes. I think they got a bad rap.
Goodness, I forgot all about those USPS Pintos. They were purchased late in the Pinto’s run – 1979 or ’80… I remember they all had the square headlights. Our local post office had a few of those.
It was an odd move for the Postal Service because the Pintos weren’t particularly well adapted for mail delivery. I think the mail carriers found it tough to put in and take out the big bins of mail, and plus, they were Left-Hand Drive, so their use was limited.
Like Eric703, I had almost completely forgotten about the USPS Pintos! Thanks for bringing back that memory. I remember them vividly.
Your comment led me to Google “USPS Ford Pinto”, and this brought me to a Chicago Tribune article from 1989 in which it was written that of the 4,994 mail Pintos purchased in 1980, a whopping 86% of them were still in service by ’89. They were praised for being reliable and easy to service, with a low annual cost that was even less expensive than the mail Jeeps.
I wonder if one of them is in a museum somewhere. I was thoroughly impressed to read this about them.
I too remember when Pintos were all over the place, though they seemed already antiquated when my family test drove a new 1977 model, even compared to the leftover ’76 Chevette they bought instead. I have no recollection of ever seeing a Pinto with matching-color hubcaps though, and didn’t know until now they were offered (I thought only fancy cars like Ford Granadas got those, lol). Nearly all Pintos I saw were sparsely equipped, which seems to also be the case for most of the lower-end American cars in the ’70s (I’ve never seen a Valiant Brougham). The styled wheels on the car show Pinto were fairly popular though, though most Pintos had dog dishes.
There were no Pintos in my family, though I had a friend in high school that drove a Pinto wagon, and also knew a girl who refused to date a guy after learning he drove a Pinto (one of about three disqualifications, the others more reasonable).
In the late ’90s I had a girlfriend who lived in Santa Cruz (across the country from me in Maryland, but both of us had busy travel schedules that sometimes intersected) who owned a small power boat, as well as two cars (always one daily driver and one old car she was working on with her brother). I only remember boating with her once though, as it was docked aways from where she lived. Speaking of which, I never understood what was going on at the end of the Peggy Lee song – did she break up with her lover? Why is she saying “goodbye to my little boat above”? Or did it just get too dark to go boating? (the stars were twinkling above by then). Don’t boats have headlights?
“little boat of love” that should be, not “little boat above” – that would make even less sense unless the song was about diving
Great points here! I didn’t even notice that the wheel covers on the Pinto Runabout in the ad were paint-matched! Perhaps the one in the picture was the precursor to the U.S.-market Mercury Bobcat.
These are the hubcaps that I most associate with the Pinto.
(And, yeah! I don’t know about the ending lyrics… I just like the song. Why is she saying goodbye?)
I also liked the hubcaps on the ’79 & ’80 models, which reminded me of the electronic memory game “Simon”.
For this you win the internet today. Tomorrow’s looking good as well.
The old-style Pinto wheel covers seem designed to look like dog dishes, so I probably confused those with the real dog dishes. As for the 79-80 wheel cover, now I can’t unsee the Simon thing. Someone should paint their late Pinto wheel covers in those colors.
I actually ran across a Pinto Runabout recently but you beat me to it so it’ll stay in the memory card for now (too many pictures, not enough time…) But yes, it had the color matched hubcaps just like in the ad and the same sort of two-tone paint, sort of a key lime pie and white in this case.
I always feel like I’ve “cheated” a little bit when I write about a “car show classic”, versus a car in the wild – which yours appears to be. Still, I felt a really nice Pinto was a suitable subject, which is why I wrote it up.
That lime green color appears to be the same as Dave Skinner’s “Soul Survivor” ’74 Mustang II Mach I. Looking forward to your writeup.
Don’t feel bad, mine was in the For Sale / Rebirth section of a Junkyard so not really the wild either. Perhaps a true “Soul Survivor” – well, if it actually sold/sells, that is.
I think it is the same color as Dave’s Mustang, it was a ’74 as well, good eye/memory there!
I got the opportunity to get deep in Pintos in the mid ’80’s, not sure where it came from but road racing Pintos seemed like a good idea. Bob Conrad in Chicago had a shell that I started out with, got a few more bits elsewhere. There was another guy that had 2 wagons & a runabout cheap, loaded up a trailer I had in Chicago with everything. Learned a valuable lesson on the way home, nearly lost it all when the tail (trailer) wags the dog (the truck). Nothing like a 3 hr trip on Rt 30 doing 30 mph at 2 am. The 2300 got a Crane mid range cam with Rhoades lifters (super bleed down type) & a Holley 2V carb. Good idle, bit of a bog then watch out, she was a handful. Along with a cheap rebuild (rings/rods/ main bearings, HV oil pump) and a header, hard slicks, it was a start. A friend took it to go to the drivers school in June, had a job opportunity. Later the engine was donated to y Fairmont, detuned. Ran it for several yrs. Put together a second 2300 for the following yr, but the new job doing 7-12s took away the free time. Later that yr, a guy offered $1000 for all of it. $200 down, he picked it all up with a promise to pay me the rest of the 800 the following week. He promptly filed for bankruptcy the following Monday.
Live & learn….only part left is a LH fender headlamp, new in the box….
Oh, wow. I’m sorry that all happened. I do think the headlamp in the box is a really cool souvenir from that whole experience, though – even if not worth the $800 that person owed you.
The trailer wagging the dog sounds like the stuff of nightmares.
Good ;little cars that took a lot of abuse and kept on running .
CalTrans bought a fleet of them and most were still in VGC when sold off .
I remember seeing broke people driving across America in them ~ glad I wasn’t in the tiny back seat .
-Nate
Broke people driving Pintos was pretty consistent what what I observed past a certain point in the ’80s. A good thing to the credit of these cars was that they were still running well into the ’80s. That’s probably more than could be said for many small domestic cars of that era. The more I learn about Pintos, the more I respect them.
These were sloooowwww with the automatic. At least my mother’s was. So much so that at a red light turning green I could run across the intersection faster than the car. Actually wrote Ford regional HQ about how bad the car ran. Parked it outside the dealer on the public street with “Lemon” written on it. Regional contacted us and told to bring it in. Nonetheless it was gone in a year for a 74 Audi 100LS.
It was a very far cry from my brother’s first year 2300CC Pinto with 4 speed.
Wow. So, with the automatic, it was a slow car that also had a reputation for deadly fires when hit from behind. Not a confidence-inspiring combination for any driver. I used to extol the virtues of my manual-shift cars all the time – more responsive, fun-to-drive, miles-per-gallon, etc. The downside: not everyone can operate one in the event you need someone else to drive.
The info on the Pinto’s width was news to me, but makes perfect sense… these cars had very pronounced “fuselage” styling, which in my view is probably not the best approach for a small car—all that width did not translate to usable interior space. I say this in part because the one time I ever drove a Pinto, I recall my head hitting the SIDE window of the car (I’m 6′ 4″), the tumblehome was just that extreme. The whole experience was quite claustrophobic, and felt very different from what I was used to in the Datsun 510 I had at the time.
The ’75 AMC Pacer was a full 77″ inches wide, just seven inches wider than the Pinto, and seems to have also had a lot of tumblehome. I wonder how the Pacer driving experience in terms of roominess for taller drivers compared with that of the Pinto. You make a great point that the width of the Pinto didn’t necessarily translate to a roomy feel, especially for those on the taller side.
Very interesting. In my mind the Pacer feels like a much larger car… and of course 77″ is just two or three inches narrower than the full-size land yachts of the day. But agreed that it also appears to have a very extreme tumblehome—well I guess you could say that about any fishbowl. 🙂
Grandmother had a Pinto, or so I’m told. Word is, she backed into my parent’s (parked, unoccupied) VW Beetle and totaled it, the Pinto was completely undamaged.
Park bench bumpers for the win?
Upon my asking him, my dad said the VW was damaged so badly that my he sold it for parts (to my uncle who had one for his daughter’s college car and bought another car, so I’m guessing “totaled” is an apt description.
I could totally see this as a bit in a comedy movie.
For some reason, we never had a Pinto in our fleet when I was a transporter for Hertz in ’77 and ’78…not sure why; we had lots of Fairmonts in ’78, but we similarly lacked Mavericks in ’77.
First Pinto I rode in was in summer of ’72. My Mother thought it was a good idea to take a typing class (which turned out to be a good idea though I think she thought we’d be using typewriters for our papers in college, still a few years away). The class was at our “rival” High School, I say “rival” in that our town about 35 mi away from Washington DC was growing very quickly, such that the schools were having to be expanded and rebuilt. We lived close to town, and that put me in the school that they originally intended to replace with another one…my High School was built in the 50’s and didn’t have air conditioning (got school called off due to excessive heat once, even before summer). The “rival” school (where I took the typing class years before) was built in the 60’s and had air conditioning….but after they built the replacement high school for the older one I went to, the “rival” school assumed occupancy instead, and they set to building another replacement high school for the older one by combining with another nearby town. Never got to go to it; my Dad got transferred quite often, all my siblings except my youngest sister never spent their senior year in the same high school that they spent the earlier 3…we all graduated from schools we only spent our senior years in (didn’t foster much loyalty, though coincidently my oldest sister ended up buying a house in the same town that had the school we graduated from (a consolidated high school that had students living in 5 different towns that were of course nearby). Anyhow, my sister had a friend whose mother I guess also thought a typing class was a good idea, and one time we ended up getting a ride from that friend’s older sister…who had a Pinto (didn’t mean for this to be such a long story for a short event but got carried away I guess).
The other time was summer of 1975. I’d gotten my permanent driver’s license the year before; didn’t have a car (yet) and was staying with my Grandparents a few weeks due to spending a week at a nearby college (kind of a get acquainted with the school but also to see if my intended major was a fit for me…didn’t end up going to that college when it came time to go full time, but the major worked out as undergraduate/graduate). Grandparents lived in another state, not too far (couple hundred miles) from where we lived (never actually lived in the same area as my Grandparents, did live in the same State once but at opposite end such that at that time we actually lived farther away from them than when we moved to a nearby state). My Grandmother came from a big family, and one of her brothers had a small cottage on the Susquehanna river not far away, and it being summer they invited us up for the day to visit. I hung around one of her brother’s youngest kids, who turned out was a few years younger than I, such that he didn’t drive yet. For some reason I can’t remember, someone wanted us to go to a nearby farm to get unpasteurized milk and some eggs; they knew I had a license so I was elected to drive with the kid in his mother’s Pinto to go pick up the dairy/eggs (in retrospect, probably because the adults had been drinking though at the time, it went right over my head, didn’t think it through). His Mother’s Pinto was an automatic, which was good for me at the time because though I haven’t owned an automatic car in over 40 years, at that time I didn’t know how having learned to drive on an automatic. The son directed me how to get to the farm, we picked up the stuff, and went back. A couple days later my parents came up with the camper, we were going to a family reunion, and a few weeks later preparing for yet another move, this time back up to Vermont (we’d left in ’69 but they retasked the plant my Dad worked at such that his job was back at the original plant he’d worked for before the transfer).
Anyhow, 1 ride and 1 drive in a Pinto. Never owned one, at the time my Dad was still in his Ford phase though for our large car (station wagon) as he was on the 2nd of 2 large sized (a Ranch Wagon, which replaced the prior Country Squire). His 2nd car was most often an import of some type, until many years later when my Mom got an ’88 Tempo and they “switched” meaning she primarily drove the smallest car while he primarily drove the large one. After that, all domestics for him, though, several Mercury, several GM (primarily Chevrolet…the last of which still in the family, though it passed to my Mom after he died, and then to my sister once my Mom stopped driving last year.
I bought an original low mileage 1973 Ford Pinto 1600 stick-shift for my 100 mile round trip work commute. This is when gas prices jumped up around 2012. It turned out to be a very reliable car and fun to drive. Because you sat so low it felt like you were going 100 mph at 70 mph. The rack and pinion steering along with an added front sway bar made it a freeway ramp delight. (It didn’t have a sway bar from the factory, probably to cut costs) It was so easy to work on and the parts were cheap and available. Heck, you could adjust the valves in 20 minutes! I installed the gas tank safety kit and proceeded to drive until around 150,000 trouble-free miles. I only sold it due to rust started to take hold. The drivetrain was still original, even the clutch.
Perhaps the average car connoisseur already knows this, but here in Brazil, ford marketed the pinto with the maverick name between 73 and 79 only sedans, in modest family versions, in 4 doors and aesthetically sporty (because in the first years there was no mechanical difference) , despite having a “luxury” and “ldo” finish, it was never with the excellence offered in the matrix market. Some curiosities; 1- in Brazil a quick market research showed that presenting the new car with an old name would be better than offering it with the name of the most modern version (although both the finish and the motorization arrived years later), because here the name “pinto” would be quite pejorative (in the local culture it is the pimp name of the male member). 2- also because of the customs locals, ford removed the horns from the emblem over the “V”, because in the local market the name would not have the same cultural load that refers to samuel maverick for saxon consumers, but the horns for the Brazilian refer but to the betrayed husband. Ford’s care with the image helped transform a product created to be popular, serving the average public, into a true local auto legend. 3- of other curiosities of the brazilian chick, I think the most interesting is that despite being conceived in the main market to be the economical and versatile car for daily use, facing the oil crisis and the beetle, in Brazil ford knew it would be impossible the mission to defeat the VW, already entrusted the task to the little brother “corcel” (actually an old renault project that ford took over), and when choosing engines so outdated the consumer would have to be as concerned with autonomy as the manufacturer , and thus the product was relegated to the small market niche of more affluent consumers, and giving the car a reputation as a drinker, before closing sales, it had a version with a new more efficient Georgia OHC engine, but the damage of the old 6-cylinders in line had already it was done. There are other curiosities and controversies involving the car that became a legend in tropical lands, including the question whether ford really wanted to call it a pinto for me is debatable (there is unanimity among the “mavequeiros”), because the car arrived so late and in another reality, which for me is actually the replacement for the falcon from the united states landed in Brazil, and calling it a pinto would be the way to not be so evident the delay, but that is another story. Thanks and congratulations to the owners.