My decision to swap to an electric fan wasn't so much to gain efficiency as it was to gain elbow room under the hood.

Josh is right. I'm sure the fan failure on the Dart was a very loud, very frightening event, Tophat, and it's understandable why you'd react badly to that experience, but this "dreaded death fan" business of yours is unrealistic and inappropriate; you're trying to gin up a lurking menace where there isn't one.

Did your fan fail? Yep, I believe you. Do these fans have a tendency to fail, a track record, a history? Nope! As engine fans go, they're one of the least failure-prone designs. Fact is, when you drive an old car you're at elevated likelihood to experience a very unusual failure sooner or later, one that wouldn't occur to most drivers because it almost never happens. Driveshafts have failed spectacularly when U-joints let go, yet we don't call them "the dreaded death-driveshaft". Connecting rods have blown great big holes in the sides of engine blocks, but we don't tell ghost stories about "the dreaded death-connecting rods". There are Ford engines notorious for spark plug hole threads letting go, then the plug is launched like a missile—hard enough to dent the hood from the inside—and yet we don't hear talk of "the dreaded death-spark plugs".

There were Fords with notoriously failure-prone engine fans in the 1970s. People died, and Ford did what they do best when they screw up like this (stare at the sky, say "tut tut, looks like rain", drag their feet and refuse to cooperate with governmental safety investigations, etc). Those fans were nothing like the ones you're trying to make people afraid of, so please knock it off, thanks.

Fact is, it has always, always, always been good practice to never, ever, ever stand in line with a spinning engine fan, no matter what kind it is. This is on the same list as "never smoke while filling the gas tank or working on the carburetor", "make the last jumper cable connection on the engine block, not the battery", "wear your seatbelt", and other simple, basic, sensible safety precautions.