Crashworthiness Issues in Automotive Products Liability Cases
Crashworthiness Issues in Automotive Products Liability Cases
In order to succeed in a products liability action against the manufacturer or seller of a motor vehicle, a plaintiff has to show that the vehicle as sold contained a defect that created an unreasonable risk of death, personal injury, or property damage when used for its intended purpose and that the defect caused an accident or similar occurrence, such as a vehicle fire, that resulted in the loss for which the plaintiff seeks to recover damages. Automotive products liability cases may involve allegations that a car or truck was defective in some aspect of the way in which it was designed, in the manner in which its parts were manufactured and assembled into a complete vehicle, or due to a failure to warn the purchaser or user of the vehicle of some danger inherent in its use and operation. Cases involving the doctrine of crashworthiness (which is sometimes referred to as enhanced injury or second collision) constitute a subset of those cases in which it is alleged that a design defect in a vehicle was the cause of the injuries complained of.
A plaintiff making a crashworthiness claim essentially asserts that because manufacturers know that cars and trucks will be involved in collisions during the ordinary course of their operation, a manufacturer’s failure to design a vehicle so as to provide as much protection as reasonably possible against injury in the event that a collision should take place is itself a defect in the design of the vehicle for which the manufacturer should be held liable. Crashworthiness allegations can involve the physical configuration of the part of a vehicle with which an occupant comes in contact in the course of a collision and its aftermath, or the failure to equip the vehicle with a safety feature that would arguably have prevented or mitigated the injuries received. A court may require a plaintiff making a crashworthiness claim to demonstrate the feasibility of an alternative design that could have been employed in the vehicle in place of the allegedly defective design element.
The law of products liability in the United States, including automotive products liability law, has evolved for more than half a century out of developments in the separate legal systems of the various states rather than out of a single unified body of federal law. (The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, popularly known as NHTSA, has enacted a body of Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards, or FMVSS, with which every new motor vehicle sold in the United States has to comply, and these regulatory standards may play a part in some automotive products liability cases.) While the principles of products liability law in the different states contain many similarities, the legal standards governing crashworthiness claims in automotive products liability cases will vary from state to state.
