Defective Safety Belts, Defective Airbags, Defective Child Restraints, Defective Crash Rollover Designs, and Unsafe Roof Collapse Design Are Automobile Crashworthiness Issues That Can Cause A Deadly Accident or Serious Injury Accident by Texas Defective Truck, Van, SUV, and Car Accident Lawyer Jason S. Coomer
Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards set
minimum performance requirements for vehicle parts that
protect drivers and passengers from death or serious injury in
the event of a crash (air bags, safety belts, child restraints,
energy absorbing steering columns, motorcycle helmets). These
vehicle performance requirements, defective automobile
crashworthiness lawsuits, manufacturer safety policies, and the
investigation efforts of the
The National
Highway Traffic Safety Administration are important to
identify unsafe vehicles with defective airbags, defective seat
belts, defective child restraints, defective roof design,
defective designs that cause vehicle fires, and defective
designs that cause vehicle rollovers.
Defective
automobile product liability lawsuits include defective
accelerator lawsuits, defective floor mat lawsuits, defective
air bag lawsuits, defective seat belt lawsuits, defective brake
lawsuits, defective tire tread lawsuits, defective roof safety
design lawsuits, and defective rollover design lawsuits. A
subset of the defective automobile accident lawsuits are
catastrophic injury and fatal crashworthiness accident
lawsuits. These lawsuits include defective vehicles with
defective airbags, defective seatbelts, defective rollover
design, defective roof design, defective steering column design,
defective child restrain design, and other other defective
safety designs that kill or increase the injuries suffered by
people in the defective vehicle.
Defective Automobile Accident Lawsuit
Crashworthiness cases involve claims that a design defect caused
or enhanced the injuries of a vehicle’s occupants during an
automobile crash. To identify a crashworthiness claim, one must
examine the interplay among the circumstances of the accident,
the performance of the vehicle during the accident, and the
injuries suffered. Such defects may cause a minor injury
automobile collision to become a fatal automobile collision or
cause enhanced injuries by failing to provide suitable
protection from injury or death in foreseeable automobile
accidents. Crashworthiness lawsuits have taken many forms, both
in Texas litigation and throughout state and federal courts.
Under United States Federal the
Crashworthiness Doctrine was developed in the Eighth Circuit’s
opinion in Larsen v. General Motors Corp. that
later helped establish that a manufacturer should be held liable
for failure to provide protection to vehicle occupants in the
event of an automobile collision. The decision of the United
States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit in Larsen v.
General Motors Corporation, 391 F.2d 495 (8th Cir. 1968), is
credited with saving many lives and enunciating the legal
doctrine that "[w]hile automobiles are not made for the purpose
of colliding with each other, a frequent and inevitable
contingency of normal automobile use will result in collisions
and injury-producing impacts. No rational basis exists for
limiting recovery to situations where the defect in design or
manufacture was the causative factor of the accident, as the
accident and the resulting injury, usually caused by the
so-called “second collision” of the passenger with the interior
part of the automobile, all are foreseeable. Where the injuries
or enhanced injuries are due to the manufacturer’s failure to
use reasonable care to avoid subjecting the user of its products
to an unreasonable risk of injury, general negligence principles
should be applicable. The sole function of an automobile is not
just to provide a means of transportation, it is to provide a
means of safe transportation or as safe as is reasonably
possible under the present state of the art. Id. at 502".
In Texas, the Crashworthiness Doctrine and
the crashworthiness issue was initially established in Turner
v. General Motors Corp., 514 S.W.2d 497 (Tex.Civ.App.—Houston
[14th Dist.] 1974, writ ref'd n.r.e.). The case dealt with
lawsuit in which a motorist sued General Motors and the dealer
for injuries suffered when the automobile's roof collapsed in a
rollover. The Texas court weighed in on the side of the injured
motorist and Larsen holding that “an automobile manufacturer may
be held strictly liable for a defective design which produces
injuries, but not the accident.” Id. at 504. In reaching that
conclusion, the Texas court rejected General Motors’s arguments
that courts lacked the expertise to deal with complex issues of
safety design and that allowing such suits would wreak havoc on
the manufacturers’ ability to do business. Id. at 506. In
General Motors Corp. v. Turner, Texas Supreme Court squarely
rejected this any type of balancing test for crashworthiness
cases, noting that the crashworthiness doctrine was merely a
logical extension of long-articulated principles of Texas
products liability law and that cases asserting the doctrine
were to be charged as any design defect case. More
specifically, the court stated that "there is no valid
distinction in strict liability between a conscious design
defect causing an accident and a conscious design defect causing
an injury. By the same token, there is no rational basis for a
difference in the manner of submission of the issues to be
determined by the fact finder. We have not required a balancing
of enumerated factors in jury submission by our previous
writings, and, as stated earlier, we disapprove the ruling of
the Court of Civil Appeals that such is required in a
crashworthiness case." Turner v. General Motors Corp., 584
S.W.2d 844, 848 (Tex. 1979).
Texas courts have made it clear that under
Texas law and the crashworthiness doctrine “a manufacturer and
retailer may be held strictly liable in tort for a defectively
designed automobile that enhances the injuries of the plaintiff
but does not cause the accident.” Further, the defendant is
liable only for “enhancement damages,” namely, that portion of
the damage or injury caused by the defective design over and
above the damage or injury that probably would have occurred as
a result of the impact or collision absent the defective
design. In Shipp v. General Motors Corp., 750 F.2d 418 (5th
Cir. 1985), a roof crush case, the Fifth Circuit found no Texas
law explicitly answering the question of how the enhanced
damages would have to be determined, but in its examination of
Texas cases the court was convinced that the plaintiff need not
carry such a burden: “We are persuaded that Texas courts would
conclude that it would be illogically harsh to force a plaintiff
to segregate causation in crashworthiness cases, where ‘the
collision, the defect, and the injury are interdependent and . .
. viewed as a combined event.’” Shipp, 750 S.W.2d at 426
(quoting Turner, 584 S.W.2d at 848). According to Shipp, forcing
the plaintiff “to identify in her proof the precise damages she
would have sustained had the product been properly designed,
would shift from proof of a producing cause of injury to sole
producing cause” and would constitute a retreat from the Texas
rule “that a defect need only be a ‘producing cause’ of injury
and that there may be more than one such cause.” Id. at 425.
Thus, according to Shipp, the producing cause issue is not
modified in a crashworthiness case; as in any defect case, the
plaintiff must prove that the alleged defect was a producing
cause of the injuries suffered.
For more information on this issue, please go to the following web page: There
Are Numerous Defective Automobile Product Liability Issues That Can
Cause an Automobile Accident to Become a Deadly Accident Accident or a
Catastrophic Injury Lawsuit As Such the United States, Texas, and
Several Other States Have Product Liability Laws Concerning Defective
Crashworthiness Product Liability Lawsuits and Have Developed The
Crashworthiness Doctrine
