Quote:
Originally Posted by GMC4wheels71
All I've heard is the second hand stories about a friend of a friend's cousin twice removed who knew someone in another county that had one that blew up.
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That's confusing?
- Guess you didn't read post #6 above, the post that has 67-72 member junkyardjohn's story?
- Or post #7 by the OP, twotallswan, who stated "my dad had a friend that died back in the seventies due to an in cab tank during an accident"?
GM put the tank in the cab because it was the least expensive place for them to put it from a cost of installation on the assembly line perspective.
Long bed, short bed, step-side, fleetside, 2 wheel drive, 4 wheel drive it didn't matter, all the tanks were in the cab... it was easy and made them more money due to minimized labor to install.
There was very little concern for "safety" when designing cars before the mid 1960's, let alone trucks.
In 1967 the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) introduced the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard (FMVSS) No. 301, “Fuel System Integrity” [NHTSA Part 571.301] to reduce deaths and injuries occurring from fires. Initially the standard only applied to passenger cars, however, in 1977 light trucks were also included. GM no doubt saw this standard lurking on the horizon and redesigned the fuel tanks outside the passenger compartment. As far as GM's Safety vs. profit record they actually did a study on this subject in 1973:
At the heart of GM's resistance to improving the safety of its fuel systems was a cost benefit analysis done by Edward Ivey which concluded that it was not cost effective for GM to spend more than $2.20 per vehicle to prevent a fire death.
While this was certainly done in response to the side mounted tanks that were used on the "new" 1973 models, it shows that safety wasn't job one at GM, profit was.