RALPH HOAR
IN MEMORIAM

Raging Hoar Moans
Playing With Fire

Fire is among our most primitive fears. Whether fire follows a crash or comes unexpectedly at night from a parked vehicle, it touches something deep in our psyche. Its potential for devastating destruction and painful, disfiguring injuries are why we, as a culture, spend so much time and attention on its prevention and control. All of this makes Ford's willingness to literally play with fire all the more perplexing.

Ford's design and production of more than its share of perambulating fire bombs, might be overlooked if it didn't have such a strong lineage. Even people too young to have ever seen a Pinto, know the car as a vehicular icon for car fires.

The ascendancy, if not the enthronement, of auto maker management-by-MBA, rather than engineers, accelerated in the late 1950's. The rise of Robert McNamara and his cadre of bean counters at Ford marked the change there. Cutting costs may be an essential management tool. However, when the evidence becomes so strong that the tool is over used, it's time to curtail its use. The sacrifice of "robust design" on the MBAs' altar to efficiency may be the first victim of "thrifting." Unfortunately, it is seldom the last.

OPTSF140

9/27/99