And that’s because they’re tough cases to win, since most states’ laws require plaintiffs to prove the airbag system was defective, rather than making car companies prove it wasn’t.
Often, accident victims or surviving relatives must pay thousands of dollars for experts to run diagnostics on a wrecked vehicle — if the evidence hasn’t already been sent to the salvage yard. Then they must convince a judge or jury that a working airbag would have changed the outcome.
“You or your lawyer can expect to pay $80,000 to $150,000 out of pocket — maybe $200,000 — just to get to trial,” said lawyer George McNally of Reno, Nev.
Consider the case of Hoyt and Hilda Forbes v. General Motors, which has languished seven years and counting.
Before a jury could decide in 2003, a county judge threw out the lawsuit on grounds that the couple, who hadn’t hired experts, failed to prove their Oldsmobile’s airbags failed in a 1997 crash on a 55-mph highway. Hilda Forbes, 70, sustained a serious head injury.
General Motors cited the criterion stated in the owner’s manual and contended that the impact wasn’t “hard enough” to fire the bags.
The Mississippi Supreme Court overturned the county judge’s decision. But last spring the same county judge dismissed the lawsuit again, on a different point of law.
“I’m 80 years old, and it looks like they’re just going to wait for me to die” before the lawsuit — now heading back up the appeals ladder — is resolved, said Hoyt Forbes. “But when I believe in something, I fight for it.”
For his wife the fight is over. A retired bank executive who taught driver-safety courses before she was injured, Hilda Forbes died two years ago from health complications that her husband alleges were related to the wreck.
Certainly, some frivolous cases make their way through the courts, and juries or judges fault the drivers, not the airbag systems.
That was not the case with Douglas Prier, a police officer in Maize, Kan.
In September 2003, Prier responded to a call that the Kansas Highway Patrol was chasing a car heading the wrong way on a divided highway.
Prier wheeled his Ford Crown Victoria — a model popular among many law enforcement agencies — onto the westbound lane in hopes of stopping the disoriented driver.
Instead, the two cars collided. The frontal impact shrunk the length of the patrol car by five feet.
Still, its airbags didn’t deploy.
Prier spent a month in an induced coma while his broken body healed. He suffered a fractured femur and sternum, seven broken ribs, a collapsed pair of lungs and a brain bleeding in two places. Medical bills totaled nearly $500,000.
In all his years at the wheel of a police cruiser, Prier, 38, “never thought about my airbags not going off,” he said. “I’ve got friends who’ve seen airbags go off and leave rug burns on their face.
“Then when I saw how badly this car was wrecked, it amazed me. We don’t know what went wrong. But how good do airbags have to be to know they should fire in a crash like that?”
Prier sued Ford and several other companies that had supplied parts for the airbag system.
The defendants settled for an undisclosed sum after an airbag expert hired by Prier’s lawyer researched warranty replacements of the airbag system’s black box, which decides whether to fire the airbags. The expert determined that “1.5 out of 100 similar vehicles are at risk for a defective airbag system,” according to court records.
“That’s an alarming return rate for a safety feature,” said Prier’s attorney, Marc A. Powell, citing the expert’s findings.
In court records, Ford denied responsibility for Prier’s injuries and said the company met all regulatory standards. Ford spokesman Daniel Jarvis pointed out that such settlements are not an admission of any wrongdoing.
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