Maybe I have a litigious nature or have simply seen too many products liability cases, but I have a feeling that people who are injured because their airbag didn’t inflate in a collision are not going to be appeased by this assertion in the automobile product manual:
The fact that your air bag did not inflate in a collision does not mean something is wrong with the air bag system.
Oh, I beg to differ …
In all seriousness, I was once appointed as a Special Master for discovery in a federal products liability case involving just this issue: a woman lost control of her vehicle and careened into a wall at a sufficient velocity that both she and her child were killed. The airbags in her car did not inflate.
Her estate sued the vehicle manufacturer alleging a defect in the electronic module that controlled the airbags and had an expensive expert who was going to testify to that fact. The judge, however, excluded the expert’s testimony as failing the U.S. Supreme Court’s Daubert standard for scientific validity because he was unable to actually pinpoint specifically what was wrong with the airbag module.
Accordingly, after years of litigation and hundreds of thousands of dollars in litigation expenses, primarily for the expert, the case was dismissed. Very sad case.
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