Later studies found that pintos were not particularly more likely to explode than other cars of the same form factor from that era. Turns out, plenty of other manufacturers cut costs by placing the fuel tanks in the rear bumper. And either way there's plenty of other things you should be more concerned about in deathtraps from that era, such as the steering column impaling you if the front of your car collides with anything, or the roof caving in if your car is ever upside-down.
What did Ford in was the Pinto Memo. Evil corpo pro-tip: Doing clownishly evil napkin math on the relative costs of lawsuits vs a cheap fix is fine, just don't be so dumb as to write it down where a hungry journalist might find it.
Anyway are teslas better or worse than the pinto or comparable modern cars? Who fucking cares, if people actually cared about car safety they would all be lobbying to ban cars within cities and Tesla "F"SD would be illegal everywhere. Anyway it seems that the Swasticar branding is doing more damage to Tesla's reputation than any amount of ludicrous safety and manufacturing issues ever did.
