Jaime Jackson Law and the law firm of Wolff Ardis successfully teamed up to settle an auto products liability case. Our client was killed when the vehicle in which he was a passenger caught fire following a rear impact.
Our client was the front seat passenger in a car stopped at a red light when another vehicle struck the rear of the vehicle in which our client was traveling. The front end of the striking vehicle submarined under the rear of our client’s vehicle which caused the rear structure to be pushed towards the fuel tank.
Our client’s vehicle was pushed forward and exploded into a fireball. Tragically, our client, a young father of two, died from carbon monoxide poisoning and thermal injuries.
Structural crashworthiness and FMVSS
At its heart, this case was a structural crashworthiness case. While the driver of the striking vehicle caused the crash, it was the vehicle manufacturer’s engineering that caused our client’s death and its design failures that turned a survivable crash into a fatal one.
Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards require that the fuel systems of all vehicles withstand a rear impact at minimum threshold speeds. Most manufacturers test well above those minimum speeds in anticipation of high-speed collisions. Rear-end collisions are among the most common and predictable types of vehicle crashes. According to national traffic safety data, they account for approximately 32% of all vehicle accidents, with an estimated 2.5 million rear-end crashes occurring annually in the United States alone.
Given these statistics, it is not only foreseeable that a vehicle may be involved in a rear-end impact, it is expected as a routine risk of highway and city driving. In addition, high-speed rear-end impacts are a foreseeable subset of these crashes. In a 2022 national telephone survey conducted by the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety, 49% of drivers said they had exceeded the speed limit by 15 mph on a freeway in the past month. Nationwide, numerous states have speed limits at or exceeding 75 mph.
An occupant who survives a crash should not die in a post-collision fire
Moreover, one of the first principles of crashworthiness has long been the premise that an occupant who survives the crash forces should not then be subject to the hazard of a post-collision fuel-fed fire.
Ordinary consumers do not expect to survive a car crash only to get burned and die in a gasoline fire. The autopsy report in this case confirmed that our client did not die on impact and did not suffer any orthopedic injuries. He had no significant blunt force trauma and was found in a seated position, indicating that the vehicle structure preserved the occupant survival space. In other words, the structure worked. But the systems responsible for containing flammable fuel and suppressing fire failed catastrophically.
The Jaime Jackson Law and Wolff Ardis teams were able to resolve this case at mediation, ensuring our client’s wife and young family’s can move onto the next chapter of their lives with security and closure.
If you or a loved one have been seriously injured in a motor vehicle crash, contact Jaime Jackson Law on 717-519-7254 or through our website.
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