Category Archives: Car Accident

Massachusetts Senate Approves Texting Ban, Restrictions On Elderly Drivers

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The passage yesterday in the Senate of a bill banning text messaging while driving and imposing visual and other medical tests on drivers over 75 years old is good news inasmuch as it presages a ban on hand-held texts, but the potential ban on hands-free devices and the medical review of seniors raise a lot of questions.
There really is no research data showing that hands-free wireless devices are anymore distracting than your car radio or carrying on a conversation with a passenger in your car.
The idea of having seniors’ doctors pull their license also makes me uncomfortable. A doctor’s duty is primarily to his or her patient, just as a lawyer’s duty is to his or her client. I wouldn’t like the idea of having to rat my clients’ driving out to the RMV (such a law would represent an unprecedented abrogation of attorney-client privilege) and I don’t think doctors should have to do it either. If the evaluating doctor is the driver’s personal physician, it really represents an intrusion into the doctor-patient relationship.
It appears that there are a lot of details to be ironed out about the medical evaluations of senior drivers. What happens if one doctor declares a patient unfit to drive and the driver gets a second opinion pronouncing him capable of driving? Why is the first doctor’s opinion sacrosanct and inviolable? If this is going to work at all, there need to be objective criteria that are employed, rather than doctors’ loosey-goosey opinions. Otherwise, there may be Due Process issues with the proposed law.
If Massachusetts passes the Senate version of the bill, we will be going further, perhaps, than any other state in regulating driving by seniors. According to this chart by the Insurance Institute of Highway Safety, the only jurisdictions that require anything more of seniors than eye tests or special renewal procedures are New Hampshire and Washington, D.C. and the Massachusetts bill would seem to be going even further than those jurisdictions.
This is something all drivers in Massachusetts will be keeping an eye on.

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The Tort Reform Crowd Thinks This Was A Frivolous Lawsuit

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Reading the tort reform blog Pointoflaw.com, I came across a link captioned: “‘Ford failed to warn seating unsafe for obese persons’ suit fails.” Sounds pretty frivolous, right?
I followed the link to Abnormal Use, a corporate defense blog, which has the virtue of being intellectually honest, unlike Pointoflaw. There I got the whole story.
It wasn’t just some overweight person who was suing Ford for failure to warn a chair might collapse under her weight.
The plaintiff in the case was a 300 pound woman driving a Ford Explorer that was rear-ended by another SUV at the (relatively low) speed of 30 mph. The impact of the accident caused her seat to collapse backwards. The accident also left her a paraplegic.
Ford hadn’t tested or designed the seats for anyone above 220 pounds. Now here’s a little graph that I just found through a simple google search that shows about 5-10 percent of men are in the 220 pound range. Yet Ford didn’t bother testing above 220 pounds.
Adult Male Weight.gif
And this poor woman wound up a paraplegic in a 30 mph accident. Sound frivolous now?
Yet, according to the blog post, the trial court entered a directed verdict against her on her failure-to-warn claim and didn’t even let that claim get to the jury.
I assumed that this woman’s failure-to-warn claim was not her only claim and that she also brought breach of warranty claims against Ford. I was hoping that she managed to prevail on one of those other claims. I went to the (unreported) decision on Westlaw. It appears the other claim did make it to jury and that the jury found against her.
I have a great respect for juries and jury verdicts so I’ll leave alone the fact that the jury found against her on a strict liability standard that should’ve been unfavorable to Ford.
But the online reporting about this case illustrates how the media stir up worries about frivolous lawsuits.
This wasn’t an overweight person who sued Ford because the seat collapsed under her weight and she fell on her butt. This was a woman who was rendered a paraplegic, in part, because Ford didn’t test its seats above a weight range within which some ten percent of the adult male population falls. And she wasn’t suing Ford for failing to include a warning label on the chair saying, “If you’re too heavy, this seat may cause injuries.” Her failure-to-warn claim was just one of the legal theories she pursued (her claim for breach of the warranty of merchantability was much stronger).
From a societal perspective, cases like these should really boil down to: Who should bear the cost? As a paraplegic, this woman will require millions of dollars in medical care for the rest of her life. Who should bear the cost of that? We, the taxpayers, or Ford, a company that profits from a car seat that it never bothered to test at 30 mph with a dummy weighing more than 220 pounds? If Ford has to bear the cost do you think that maybe next time they might design a better seat?

Toyota Recall II: Is Sudden Uncontrolled Acceleration Something To Be Worried About?

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The pro-business blog Point of Law insists, citing to an article in Popular Mechanics, that the dangers posed by Toyota’s acceleration system are overblown. Meanwhile, Department of Transportation head Ray LaHood is telling Toyota owners to stop driving (at least until political concerns cause him to backtrack).
Who do you trust?
Someone should tell Popular Mechanics that forty-one percent of reports of sudden uncontrolled acceleration are about Toyotas. Meanwhile Toyota held about 16 percent of US market share in 2009. Sounds statistically significant to me.

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Toyota Acceleration Problem Poses Dangers For Massachusetts Drivers

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Earlier this week, a third wrongful death lawsuit was filed against Toyota relating to acceleration problems that have caused Toyota vehicles to accelerate suddenly and uncontrollably.
This third lawsuit was filed by lawyers for Trina Renee Harris, a 34-year old mother of two, who was killed when her 2009 Toyota Corolla slammed into a cement divider on a toll road. There were no skid marks or other evidence of an attempt to brake.
Harris’ apparent inability to stop the car is consistent with reports of other recent Toyota crashes. In August, an off-duty California state trooper and three of his family were killed after the Lexus they were driving accelerated to 120 m.p.h. In a telephone call to 911 that the family made while trapped in the speeding Lexus, the family explained to 911 dispatch that the car was accelerating without their being able to control it.
Another Toyota driver, Bulent Ezal, had his Camry suddenly accelerate in a restaurant parking lot and plunge 70 feet off a cliff, landing in the ocean. Ezal’s wife was killed in this accident.
Thankfully, not all of the accidents have been fatal. One driver, Joseph Hauter, survived a crash that occurred when his 2008 Toyota Camry suddenly accelerated at a gas station. Investigators are looking into several other non-fatal accidents in multiple states.
Thus far, there have not been any reports of Massachusetts Toyota drivers being involved in sudden acceleration crashes. However, Massachusetts drivers need to take precautions because Toyota cars seem especially prone to this problem. As the Consumerist blog reports, 41 percent of sudden acceleration complaints that were made in 2008 were for Toyota and Lexus models.
Lawyers for the car accident victims in these cases believe that the problem lies in an electronic throttle system that was installed in many Toyota models. The electronic throttle system does not have any mechanical link between the accelerator pedal and the engine. In addition, there is no override system for the electronic throttle, so that pressing the brake when the throttle is stuck will not cause the accelerator to shut off.
Toyota has instituted a nationwide recall to attempt to address the problem. The vehicles affected by the recall include:

  • 2009-2010 RAV4
  • 2009-2010 Corolla
  • 2007-2010 Camry
  • 2009-2010 Matrix
  • 2005-2010 Avalon
  • 2010 Highlander
  • 2007-2010 Tundra
  • 2008-2010 Sequoia

Lexus models were not included in this recall, although, as noted above, Lexuses have been the subject of complaints and at least one wrongful death suit. If you own a Toyota model listed in the recall, or one not listed that you are concerned about, you can call Toyota’s customer service department at 1-800-331-4331.

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Report: Laws Banning Cell Phone Use While Driving Doesn’t Lower Accident Rates

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Orin Kerr, at the libertarian legal blog The Volokh Conspiracy, points to a new study claiming that laws prohibiting cell phone use while driving have not succeeded in reducing car crashes.
Kerr seems to suggest that, in light of the study’s data, such laws should be repealed.
It seems to me that the data, if true, are consistent with a number of conclusions, other than the conclusion that it’s perfectly safe to talk on your phone while driving. First, if these laws are ineffective, it may be because of underenforcement by the police. Having a law on the books is one thing, but in order to get people to change their behavior, the law has to be enforced. Maybe the police aren’t enforcing the law, or they are underenforcing the law. For example, Massachusetts police generally don’t stop cars to issue citations for violations of the state seat belt law; such citations are tacked on as add-ons, if a car is stopped for another reason, such as speeding.
Second, talking on a cell phone while driving might be such a ubiquitous phenomenon that, even in areas where police are enforcing the law, they are not making a dent in the number of people actually talking on their phones.
These competing explanations seem much more plausible to me than the conclusion that talking on a cell phone while driving is perfectly safe. Kerr’s conclusion simply flies in the face of the research showing talking on your cell phone while driving is very dangerous and makes drivers much more likely to be involved in a car crash.

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