>Intent tends to matter with the law. Ford knew there was a problem, knew they could fix it, and elected not to because "it's a small number of deaths". You can replace things, not people.
Per the link posted by the GP the Pinto did not have any problems relative to other cars of the same type and era. Ford's "intent" (if you can call it that since they didn't know the future at the time) was to say "err, we don't really think there's a problem here so we'll pay out money when this happens but it's not recall worth" and the investigation bore that out which is why they were not found guilty. I don't really want to defend BigCo (or any other large group with diffuse responsibility) but it's 2020 and here I am.
>That retrospective analysis utterly misses the point: for the area they were responsible for, if the company knew they could do better and elected not to, then they got treated exactly as they should have.
Everyone could always do better on any given metric but the question is at what cost and with what tradeoffs. People buy compacts and subcompacts because they are cheap and fuel efficient. You could build a subcompact that just bounces when rear-ended by a freight train but nobody would buy that because it would cost a ton and weigh a ton (several tons actually) defeating the value proposition of a compact car.