Peter regularly writes and talks about product liability and automotive crashworthiness issues.  This page will be updated regularly. 

GM Side Mounted Fuel Tanks: Thirty Plus Years of Fires and Mayhem

By Peter O’Neil and Arthur Johnson

It was December 7-- a day that will live in infamy.  But the year was 1971.

That day General Motors ran the first side impact crash test on its then new pickup design.  The prototype truck was the first of nearly ten million that GM would build and sell with vulnerable side mounted fuel tanks mounted outside the frame rails and just beneath the passenger and driver seats.

The test was not a high speed crash.  Engineers rolled a flat moving barrier into the side of the truck at just 15 miles per hour.  But in a foreshadowing of thousands of gasoline fires that have occurred in the 34 years since that test, the gas tank on the pickup split open and leaked fuel. 

It should have been enough to send GM back to the drawing boards, where engineers had already drawn rough sketches of a smaller tank mounted safely between sturdy steel frame rails.  But instead, the company went into production and eventually built nearly ten million rolling firebombs.

Again and again the trucks leaked fuel in GM’s secret tests.  Three of the first four side impact tests leaked (the fourth had a fuel tank shield) and dozens more trucks leaked in tests done over the next decade. 

But the real tragedies occurred on our highways, where hundreds of men, women and children have been burned in raging gasoline fires because of a recklessly dangerous design that  the government once thought GM should recall.  But the recall was stopped, and millions of the trucks remain on the road today, many in dilapidated condition, endangering those who drive them, and every other person on the road.

A Fender Bender Becomes a Life Altering Fire

There have been hundreds of deaths and thousands of life altering burn injuries.  Two of the latest injuries occurred in Oregon, after crashes that should have been inconsequential.  Both of these cases were handled jointly by the authors, one in 2004 and one in 2005.

One of the burned people was a woman who had been riding as a passenger in her daughter’s 2002 Volvo station wagon in a quiet residential section of Portland.  A pickup missed a stop sign and rolled into the Volvo’s path. 

The collision was little more than a fender bender.  The Volvo’s airbags didn’t even fire.  There was minimal front end damage.  No one should have been hurt. 

But the pickup was a 1977 Chevrolet, with its twin fuel tanks located outside the frame rails and just under the skin of the pickup.

As the Volvo struck the side of the truck, it dug into the left-hand fuel tank.    Gasoline spewed from the ruptured tank drenching the front of the Volvo with fuel.  When the vehicles came to rest, more gasoline poured from holes in the fuel tank. 

The passenger of the Volvo smelled the gas and knew she was in danger.  She tried to step over the growing puddle but slipped, drenching herself.  Then, with a “whoomp,” the gasoline ignited—probably from the exposed filaments of the Volvo’s broken headlights. 

The woman found herself on fire.  She rolled on the ground to smother the flames and pulled off her burning pants. 

Later she looked down in confusion.  She thought for a second that her pants were still on—but it was her skin, blackened by fire, falling from her legs.A Year Later, Another Fire

A year later an 18 year old man from Tillamook, Oregon was driving to work on Highway 101.  He worked the night shift, and had spent the day at the beach.  He began to fall asleep and drifted a foot or two off the road.  At the sound of gravel from his wheels, he woke to see a bridge railing ahead.  He steered back to the left, but the right side of the truck sideswiped the guardrail. 

The impact itself was not enough to cause any injury to the young driver—but the bridge guardrail tore the vulnerable, side-mounted fuel tank off the truck.  As a gasoline fire erupted on every side of the pickup, the young man struggled to release his seatbelt and escape from the cab.

He was so badly burned that his co-worker, who stopped at the scene, couldn’t recognize him until he spoke.  An Unacceptable Location—and More than $500 Million in SettlementsFrom 1973 until 1987, General Motors Corporation sold more than nine million trucks and pickups with a glaring safety defect: twin fuel tanks mounted in a vulnerable position outside the sturdy steel frame rail and just beneath the thin outer skin of the truck.  The tanks wound up there because the suspension system originally planned for the truck wouldn’t allow tanks to be put between the frame rails.  GM’s own crash tests repeatedly showed the tanks would rupture in a side impact.  Over the course of 15 years GM engineers designed dozens of potential fixes and shields, and proposed several times to move the tanks to a safer location between the frame rails, but it was never done.  The truck was incredibly popular and profitable-- a goose that lay many golden eggs for GM—and GM management did not want to kill it.  As a result, there have been hundreds of fiery collisions, hundreds of deaths caused by fire, and thousands of burn injuries-- a record of mayhem that makes the Ford Pinto seem relatively benign.  In 1994 the federal government called the trucks defective and recommended a voluntary recall of the trucks but then settled with GM for $50 million.  The trucks were never recalled. In 1992 a jury in Georgia returned a verdict of $105 million in compensatory and punitive damages for a young man who burned to death in one of the trucks.  The verdict was later reversed and the case settled.  But during the trial, a former GM engineer spilled the truth about 22 car-to-truck crash tests that GM had run in the 1980s, most of which resulted in gaping fuel tank holes.A Northwest ConnectionA number of collisions resulting in lawsuits have occurred here in the Northwest.  Seattle attorney Paul Whelan handled a number of major cases in Washington State, Oregon and California, and was instrumental in revealing many of the dark secrets of the design.  He and co-author O’Neil discovered a host of shields and fixes that were designed by GM engineers but never put on the market, and uncovered a “Show & Tell” of crash tested trucks displayed for the benefit of company executives.  Attorney Lawrence Baron of Portland, Oregon convinced a conservative Oregon State Legislature to rescind its eight year statute of repose for the side-saddle tank design in order to permit his client Anne Kirkwood bring her case against GM.  Baron and Whelan settled that case in early 1997.  Without that legislative change neither the Volvo passenger nor the 18 year old from Tillamook could have brought claims against GM for their terrible injuries.

The Pre-1973 In-Cab Tanks

Prior to 1973, GM and its competitors, Ford and Chrysler, put pickup fuel tanks inside the passenger compartment behind the drivers seat.  In 1973 and 1974 all three major manufacturers moved the tanks outside the cab.  Ford and Dodge put the tanks between the frame rails. Only GM chose a location outside the frame rail. 

Chrysler engineers briefly considered a side-saddle design for their trucks but rejected the idea as “unacceptable” because “any side impact would automatically encroach on this area and  the probability of tank leakage would be extremely high.”  Ford’s advertising for its 1973 pickup treated the Chevrolet design with contempt:

“Ford has mounted the tank between the steel frame rails for protection.  But Chevrolet has mounted their fuel tank on the outside of the right frame rail where it is protected by the body sheet metal and a plastic shield.”

 A Violation of GM’S Own Standards

The side-saddle design violated GM’s own fuel system standards, which required “elimination of puncture producing surroundings” and “sufficient crush space” to avoid a rupture in a 30 mph moving barrier test.  The side saddle design put a tank within inches of a striking car, a location that was even more dangerous because of sharp metal structures and very little crush space.  Three of Four Initial Side Impact Tests Fail

Despite the obviously vulnerable fuel tank location, GM ran only four side impact tests before it began selling the side-mounted tank pickup trucks in September 1972.  Three of those four initial side impact tests failed and leaked fuel.  

Just four days after the last pre-market test, GM engineers began working on a production side impact steel shield for the tank and a variety of body reinforcements but those improvements were never made because a Chevrolet manager said they would present the “wrong image” to the customer.  In other words, it would have told the customer what GM already knew-- that there was something terribly wrong with the side-tank design.

A History of Fires and Injuries

Starting in 1974 the first of several hundred lawsuits were filed against GM alleging that the side mounted tanks were defective.  GM began analyzing the rapidly accumulating crash data.  In 1974 GM engineers the compared fires and fuel leakage in the new 1973 trucks with the side-mounted tanks and the older trucks with in-cab tanks and found that “the 1973 trucks had more fuel leaks from the fuel tank than did the pre-1973 pick-ups.”  Cost-Benefit

About a year later a different GM engineer performed a similar “Value Analysis” relating to fuel fed fire fatalities.  GM engineer Edward Ivey stated that “fatalities related to accidents with fuel fed fires are costing General Motors $2.40 per automobile” and said “for G.M. it would be worth approximately $2.20 per new model auto to prevent a fuel fed fire in all accidents.” 

Evidently a fix that cost more than $2.20, wasn’t worth it.

Years later Edward Ivey was called to testify about his memo.  He consistently testified that he wrote it on his own; that no one asked him to do it; that he never showed it to anyone; that he simply put it in his drawer and left it there.

But internal GM documents produced in Florida after a long court fight contradicted Ivey’s testimony over the years.  According to one document, Ivey told a GM lawyer that he wrote the report for GM management and circulated it to a number of key fuel system design engineers. 

The lawyer’s notes end:

“Obviously, Ivey is not an individual whom we would ever, in any conceivable situation, want to be identified to the Plaintiffs in a PCFFF case and the documents he generated are undoubtedly some of the potentially most harmful and most damaging were they ever to be produced.”   

Crash Testing Resumes- and a Show & Tell for Management

In July 1981, after nearly a decade in production, Chevrolet began a massive crash test program on the pickups, hitting them in the side with cars at 30 and 50 mph.  Before the program was abandoned 22 tests had been run—most  with disastrous results.  A GM engineer who later saw the pickups described holes in the C/K fuel tanks “the size of melons.”  

In February 1982 the first eight or nine crash-tested trucks were taken to the Chevrolet Engineering Center (CEC) auditorium for an event that GM documents describe as a “Show  &  Tell  (management inspection).”  A former GM engineer said “it was obviously, ‘We’re going to drag these brutalized trucks right in front of management to help them make their decision.’”

Three months after the CEC “Show & Tell” GM finally approved development of an “all new” C/K pickup with between-the-rail fuel tanks.  The new design was subjected to the same 50 mph car-to-truck crash tests as the old side-saddle design.  Instead of opening like a melon, the tanks passed the tests without leakage.  GM’s internal documents describe the new location as “much less vulnerable than today’s tanks.”Millions to Settle, Billions in Profits-- But No RecallGM has spent millions defending the trucks, and settling cases.  In May 2003 the Federal Court in Montana unsealed documents showing that by the year 2000 GM had settled 331 individual claims for a total of $495 million in settlements.  

However, that number pales in comparison to the estimated profits for the truck.  In 1977 GM sold more than a million of the so-called C/K trucks and pickups, and a document from the same year puts profit at $1,350 per truck.  Simple arithmetic shows that in that one year GM earned more than a billion dollars in profits that year—more than twice what it would pay for all settlements up through the year 2000. 


The Story Continues

GM has steadfastly refused to recall the trucks and either provide a fix or take them off the road.  With hundreds of thousands of these trucks on the road it is a statistical certainty that more innocent people will be severely burned in minor fender benders.  The litigation continues.  GM stoutly defends each and every case, until forced, through the civil justice system, to compensate its victims.  

Peter O’Neil is principal at Peter O’Neil, Attorney at Law in Seattle, Washington.  Art Johnson is a partner at Johnson Clifton Larson & Schaller in Eugene, Oregon.  Together, they are investigating a third case involving the same pickup design, this one with two badly burned victims.