[Rebelgecko]

The movie quote is loosely based on a memo that Ford sent to the NHTSA to lobby against new safety standards. The so-called Pinto Memo has a lot of mythology around it. It wasn't specific to the Ford Pinto, but it was used in some of the Pinto lawsuits to say "this is the kind of cost-benefit analysis that Ford does when designing their fuel systems". The Pinto Memo also didn't compare the cost of safety improvements against potential lawsuits-it compared them against the NHTSA's own figure for the financial value of saving a life.