re: this car burns the most (wob)

[Joe Elliott <jee@domain.elided>]

At 2:56 AM +0000 9/17/02, alfa-digest wrote:
> Date: Mon, 16 Sep 2002 16:09:41 -0400
> From: dsedon@domain.elided
> Subject: this car burns the most  (wob)
>
> hi all,
>
> i remember reading in one of the car rags several years ago, that if 
> every car on the road was a pontiac fiero (appropriately named?), 
> you would see a car in flames on the side of the road about every 
> half-mile...  from the fact that i used to see a flaming fiero every 
> month or two, when i used to commute half-way around the dc beltway 
> several years back, i don't doubt these statistics...
>
> doug s., recently replaced fool-line on the 164 luxo-pig, due to gas 
> fume smells... (anyting that can't keep up w/a bentley is a 
> luxo-pig!)

from AutoWeek, Sept. 26, 1994:

"By the middle of 1987, the fire count for 1984 Fieros hit a rate of 
about 20 blazes a month. Fieros were blowing up at a rate of one for 
every 508 cars sold. No other mass-market car had ever come close to 
this rate of fires - at least, as far as the federal safety watchdogs 
knew. If the Fiero fire rate was applied to al the cars on the New 
Jersey Turnpike at rush hour, there would be burning hulks every 
quarter-mile..."

Additionally,

"One of Pontiac's engineers knew almost from the start of production 
that the Fiero had a disquieting tendency to become, quite literally 
a hot rod. On Oct. 6, 1983, less than three months after production 
began at the Pontiac plant, a Pontiac engineer wrote an 'urgent' memo 
to report that two Fieros had suddenly caught fire during test 
drives. The engineer blamed the fires on antifreeze leaking out of 
badly insulated hoses onto hot exhaust pipes. The man in charge of 
the Fiero project, Hulki Aldikacti, saw a Fiero catch fire at GM's 
test track."

And on chronic connecting rod failures,

"A connecting rod that breaks at high speed is like a shrapnel 
grenade detonating inside the motor. In Fieros, chunks of broken 
metal flew with such force that they ripped through the engine block. 
Oil would spill onto the hot exhaust pipes, and often ignite. The 
Iron Duke engines used in early Fieros also suffered from a defect in 
the way their blocks were cast that, in some cases, caused the 
engines to leak oil or lose coolant."
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