Defective Crashworthiness in a Truck, Car, SUV, or Van Can Cause Death or a Catastrophic Injuries by Texas Defective Automobile Deadly Accident Lawyer

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.

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

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