Product Liability Law Blog

With a new administration comes new opportunities for auto safety. There are two areas in which the president’s new appointee to head the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (“NHTSA”) can immediately improve American auto safety. First, he or she can complete the revamping of some of our most antiquated auto safety regulations. For example, we are still operating under a roof strength standard written thirty-five years ago. Imagine the technology improvements over the last thirty-five years – none of these are reflected in this old, inadequate standard. NHTSA has recognized as much and proposed replacing the rule with a requirement for stronger, safer roofs, but that rule has never been finalized.

Similarly, testing rules adopted decades ago make rollover testing optional. With rollovers accounting for over 1/3 of all auto fatalities, it is time to make that testing mandatory.

Finally, in the past couple years, some regulators have tried to insert regulatory language that would ban auto safety lawsuits, despite the fact that congress, and the legislation establishing NHTSA, expressly said that such safety lawsuits would be allowed even for products that meet minimum safety standards where it can be shown that the product is nonetheless defective. The new administration should remove these safety lawsuit “preemption” provisions from new proposed rules.

~Stuart Ollanik~

Posted by Gilbert, Ollanik, & Komyatte, P.C. | Permalink | Email This Post

Posted In: Motor Vehicle Safety

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We have seen a remarkable number of cases in which seat belted occupants are somehow either partially ejected or completely thrown from a vehicle during a rollover despite the fact that they were wearing their seat belts. The evidence points to a startling conclusion: seatbelts are not reliably remaining locked during the course of a rollover.

In some ways this isn’t surprising. The lock mechanisms in most American cars are designed principally for non-rollover accidents. They are often simple designs. One is just a small marble-sized steel ball in a small plastic “dish.” Accident forces cause the ball to move up on to the edge of the dish rather than the bottom, where the ball pushes a small plastic bar into the seat belt retractor teeth, locking it up. During a rollover the ball can roll back into the base of the dish, unlocking the retractor and, if tension is released and then reapplied to the seat belt, causing belt webbing to pay out. This can happen, for instance, when a rolling vehicle lands on its wheels forcing the ball back to the bottom of the dish and releasing belt tension momentarily. The occupant’s body then moves downward or to the side pulling out webbing while the retractor is unlocked and introducing slack.

Fortunately, this does not happen most of the time in rollovers. However, when it does happen the consequences are grave. Nobody should be left without effective restraint during a rollover. In rollover accidents as long as you stay in the car and the car doesn’t crush on you, you stand a very good chance of surviving without serious permanent injury. When you are ejected or partially ejected, such as when a head sticks far outside the window opening, the risk of serious injury and death skyrocket.

Fortunately the fix is simple and cheap. Most European seat belts have a second, backup method for locking the retractor, called the web sensing device. This device, which costs less than fifty cents, locks the belt any time the webbing pulls out rapidly. You can check your car to see if you have one. If you pull the seat belt webbing out very fast, does it lock up even when the car is sitting still? If so, you have a web sensing feature.

Our auto makers are already using this feature in the cars they sell to their European customers. American customers deserve the same protection.

~Stuart Ollanik~

Posted by Gilbert, Ollanik, & Komyatte, P.C. | Permalink | Email This Post

Posted In: Sport Utility Vehicle Rollovers

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I wouldn’t buy a new car without the following three safety features:

1. Electronic Stability Control (“ESC”). These systems sense loss of control systems before it gets out of hand. By sensing any kind of vehicle slippage to the left or right, they use the vehicle’s antilock brake system components and other existing systems to help the driver maintain control of the vehicle. Researchers including the government and major auto manufacturers predict dramatic reductions in the number of accidents in vehicles equipped with ESC, so much so that this is probably the most important safety innovation since seat belts. And there are plenty of these systems available. Manufacturers have been putting the systems on some cars for over a decade, so even used car purchasers can insist on this feature. I would not buy any vehicle without electronic stability control.

2. Side Curtain Airbags that Activate in Rollover. There are two kinds of side bags and both do a good job. Torso bags protect your body, and side curtain airbags protect your head. These head bags can protect you in side impacts, the kind of crash in which the occupant is closest to the striking vehicle. If a rollover sensor is used, side curtains can also protect people in rollovers by keeping them in the car. You are much safer in a rollover if you stay within the confines of a vehicle. As you could imagine, when your head sticks far out the window, your injury/death risk sky rockets.

3. Seat Belt Pretensioners. These systems snug up the seat belts when an accident is sensed, a great and smart safety feature. Pretensioners are found in many cars manufactured since the late 1990s.and some manufactured before that. They are more widely available for, and more important for, the front seats.

If you have kids, other safety features are important including the availability of LATCH systems and tether anchors to ensure the child seats can be held tight to the vehicle, and rear seat adjustable seat belt D-rings to allow belts to be properly adjusted for kids in booster seats or teens and small adults who are too big for booster seats. Look elsewhere on this website and blog for other information on child safety, an issue we will continue to cover because it is a particular passion of ours.

~Stuart Ollanik~

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Posted In: Motor Vehicle Safety

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Friends often ask me whether the car they are thinking of buying is safe. I always refer them to these three terrific sources of car safety information:

1. WWW.SAFERCAR.GOV – This is the government’s website reporting on its safety testing of vehicles. The government doesn’t test every vehicle sold, but it tests many of them, more rigorously than in the tests the car makers are required to pass to sell the car. It rates the vehicles with a star rating system so you can compare safety from one vehicle to another. If you “drill down” deeper into the site, you can also see the raw numbers – the test scores. One caution: the star ratings only compare similarly sized cars. In frontal collisions, for instance, the tests involve crashing the vehicles into non-deformable barriers, which simulates a head-on collision with a car of the same weight. The ratings don’t factor in the fact that a heavy car is going to have an advantage over a lighter car in any such collision.

2. WWW.IIHS.ORG - Like the government, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety crash tests some, but not all, cars in very rigorous testing. The results are reported on this very helpful website. Not only does this site give good comparisons between cars, using its own rating system, it also gives details about its tests and even allows you to watch the videos. Like the government website, the Insurance Institute site can help you identify not only safer models, but safer model years for those models, which is useful if you are shopping for a used car.

3. WWW.CONSUMERREPORTS.ORG – Consumers Union, publisher of Consumer Reports, is a great source of all sorts of information on new and used cars including safety, reliability, features, pricing, even how fun the vehicle is to drive. You can get some basic information online for free, and more information for a small subscription fee. Or, you can go to your local library and look at the annual April car edition for a wealth of information. The April issue is a great starting point for figuring out which car is right for you.

I always check all three sites when looking for a car for my family or helping friends with their car search. The sites don’t tell everything, for instance, some cars are “designed to the test” so that they perform well in safety tests but contain some other safety flaw or defect that undermines car safety. For those issues, watch this website and blog.

~Stuart Ollanik~

Posted by Gilbert, Ollanik, & Komyatte, P.C. | Permalink | Email This Post

Posted In: Motor Vehicle Safety

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