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Accident victim sues auto maker and dealer for quadriplegia
By Steve Gonzalez - Edwardsville Bureau
April 12, 2006 -
DaimlerChrysler and the Auto Mart of Mt. Vernon were named in a Madison County civil lawsuit filed by a woman who became a quadriplegic after a vehicle rollover accident.
Angel Koch claims that on April 14, 2004, she was a passenger in a 2001 Jeep Cherokee that went out of control and rolled over on the roadway on Walnut Hill Road near Centralia.
She claims the Jeep was defectively designed and manufactured and that the defects caused or contributed to her injuries.
Specifically, Koch claimsthat:
the roof failed to have proper support to prevent it from crushing in a foreseeable impact or roll overs;
the Jeep Cherokee was dynamically unstable and subject to roll over in foreseeable road maneuvers; and
the vehicle did not contain adequate warnings concerning the use of the sport utility vehicle.
Koch also claims the dealer which sold the car had a duty to sell a vehicle whose roof would not crush in a collision such as the Jeep she was a passenger.
She claims Auto Mart of Mt. Vernon was in possession of design, research and development documents and information concerning the 2001 Jeep Cherokee and had or should have knowledge of the defective and unreasonable dangerous design of the vehicle and failed to correct it.
Koch also alleges that the dealership knew of many incidences of Jeep Cherokee's rolling over and as a result the roof crushed and failed to warn her of that knowledge.
"The defendants knew or should have known of the absence of warnings before placing it in the stream of commerce and failed to do so," the complaint alleges.
Koch also claims that DaimlerChrysler impliedly warranted that the Jeep was of merchantable quality.
"The vehicle was not merchantable as it was dynamically unstable and rolled over during foreseeable highway maneuvers," the complaint states.
Koch claims that she was injured and suffered bodily injury resulting in pain and suffering, disability, disfigurement, mental anguish, loss of capacity for the enjoyment of life, expense of hospitalization, medical and nursing care and treatment, loss of earning and the loss of the ability to earn money.
"The injury to Koch is permanent within a reasonable degree of medical probability, and Koch will continue to suffer the losses in the future."
Smashing and crashing their way to a safer car
Michael Taylor, Chronicle Staff Writer
July 23, 2006 - Ruckersville, Va. -- This is the place where newborn cars come to die a violent and premature death. Some are smashed to oblivion in big frontal collisions, others in horrendous side impact crashes. Not to mention the high-speed battering rams that smack into car seats, simulating a fatal rear ender.
It's a sobering sight, rife with all the horrific noise your ears pick up when they hear a nearby accident -- that deep metal-and-glass crunch when one car hits another, or runs into a tree.
The front end of the car and the hood crumple, the car windows break, the trim parts and shards of chrome, rubber and plastic go flying. Then there's a deadly silence. This time, the instant destruction of a $31,000 Subaru B9 Tribeca SUV with only 110 miles is purely intentional, highly educational and, in its own way, thoroughly antiseptic.
It is part of a continuing process at the nation's best known crashers of cars, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, an influential nonprofit group funded by insurance companies and designed to persuade the world's auto manufacturers to make things safer for anyone who gets near a vehicle.
The insurance industry wants to reduce the cost of claims and this "coincides with the public health interests of preventing deaths and injuries on the highway," institute spokesman Russ Rader says.
"The whole idea of what we do here is to motivate the manufacturers to make changes to promote safety," says Adrian Lund, the institute's president. "We want safety to become something people shop for."
The problem is that shoppers wandering around a new car showroom are interested in "cup holders and CD players," Lund says. "There's a tendency to think the car wouldn't be on sale if it wasn't safe."
Industry leaders don't think they need lessons on automobile safety. "Safety sells like nothing before," spokeswoman Gloria Bergquist of the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers says. "Thanks to newspaper reports and the Internet, consumers know about safety features and want more safety features."
To be sure, the federal government requires automakers to adhere to many standards when they design and build cars. But, as Lund points out, "there's still quite a range of differences" between cars, "mostly in side and rear impact."
That is where the testing comes in and then, after the testing, telling everyone the results without making the institute sound like a public scold or a parent trying to get a child to eat oatmeal.
Government-mandated crash testing is done by the federal government's National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which sends cars to their deaths at a handful of privately contracted test sites around the nation and releases its results on the government Web site safercar.gov. But even NHTSA's Rae Tyson concedes that the insurance institute "does a more effective job of publicizing the results" of its tests.
The institute has become famous over the past decade for slow-motion crash videos that appear on national news shows every time there's a noteworthy test. The videos are taken at the institute's Vehicle Research Center. The 135-acre concrete complex is located amid verdant rolling fields and sturdy trees that would destroy your car if you managed to run into one, a fact well-understood at the center's test facilities. The institute buys from local dealers so they get the same cars as the average consumer.
Some cars fare worse than others, far worse in some cases. But not many are clearly one way or another.
Giving black-and-white marks to specific cars "is not that simple," Rader says. "There are some examples of vehicles that were really bad and then improved." The 1997-2003 Ford F-150 pickup truck rated Poor (the worst rating) in its head-on crash test. "That's an example of a really bad performer,'' Rader says, "one of the worst we've tested. Ford redesigned it, so from 2004 on, it's rated good (the best)."
Another Ford, the Taurus passenger car, stands out as a car that has had consistently good ratings.
"It's been good ever since the beginning," Rader says.
The institute doesn't crash hugely expensive cars, such as Ferraris, Rolls-Royces and the like, confining itself to a range of popular consumer models. These are the cars people all over the United State buy, and, if the numbers are any indication, potential buyers are fascinated with seeing how the cars do in a controlled crash test.
"When we release a video," Lund says, "between 50 and 70 million people see it. With SUVs and pickups, it's over 100 million. On the Web site (www.iihs.org), we max out on those days."
The Web site is where the institute publishes its ratings of how the crushed cars performed -- the rankings are good, acceptable, marginal and poor. A vehicle rated good, Rader says, means "the driver could walk away (from the collision) without any serious injury. In a poor-rated vehicle, there's a high likelihood of very serious injury or of death."
Ratings tell the tale and, Rader adds, the tests "have pushed the manufacturers, embarrassing them essentially into making their vehicles better. No one wants to be featured on (NBC's) "Dateline" or on the nightly news as having a vehicle that performs badly in crash tests."
The institute readily credits the federal government and congressional mandates with regulating auto industry safety, introducing progressively tougher requirements. The industry, by and large, provides the means such as developing air bags, a device pioneered by Mercedes-Benz 20 years ago.
The institute, on the other hand, Rader says, is the constant goad to industry to go beyond "what government forces them to do. Side (air) bags are not required by any government rule, but in a very short period of time every vehicle will have side air bags. They can't do well in (our) tests without them."
Lund says that the institute compares its findings to federal government data on deadly crashes. "We look for fatal accidents involving the vehicles we rated." He said that it is usually "2 to 1" that the fatal accident happened in a vehicle that was rated poor by the institute. That, he said, means that there is a 50 percent reduction in fatal accidents in cars rated good over cars rated poor.
A tour of the institute's vast display hall, is like walking through the most organized wrecking yard in the world. The floor is absolutely clean and totaled cars, trucks and SUVs -- destroyed over several years -- have parts of their anatomies painted bright yellow to highlight what the tests showed.
The key factor in the testing is not so much the tried-and-true safety embellishments -- seat belts, harnesses, air bags and the like -- but more the vehicle's total structure, how its body and frame survived these intentional crashes.
For example, in one row, there were three vans -- a 1997 Pontiac Trans Sport, a 1998 Toyota Sienna and a 2005 Chevrolet Uplander. For each test, institute engineers put a dummy in the driver's seat and belted it in. It's an expensive dummy -- each costs about $200,000, most of which goes to the dummy's computer-monitored wiring. A 40 mph crash into an offset frontal barrier caused the Pontiac's roof, firewall (the wall between the engine bay and the passenger compartment) and bottom frame rail to buckle. The whole passenger compartment suffered from "intrusion," which means the dummy is severely injured. With the Toyota, the passenger compartment stayed intact, kind of like a bubble that was not pricked.
With the 2005 Uplander, General Motors has improved the van's structure so much that, like the Toyota, the dummy came through to live another day.
For now, institute officials say, the manufacturers are all earning good ratings in the front tests, so routinely that frontal testing is being cut back to focus more on side- impact collisions. At one display, a Volkswagen Jetta and Mitsubishi Lancer were pummeled from the side by a battering ram. The Jetta's center pillar on the side of the car remained intact, but the Lancer's broke.
In one corner, there was a cruel exhibit of what happened when a Ford Explorer SUV T-bones a Ford Focus -- the hood of the SUV smashed into the Focus driver's head. Clearly, it was a case of Big versus Small -- and Small lost.
"When people think safety, they often think about air bags and seat belts, and those are important things," Rader said. "But size and weight are also important factors because they are advantages in keeping you safe." He did point out, however, that SUVs' advantages in size and weight are "offset by the fact that they roll over more."
Next door, in the pretest room, two engineers, Tyler Ayres and Glenn Martin, hovered over the dummy in the driver's seat of the about-to-die Subaru, carefully painting up the dummy's face with clown makeup. Shortly before 11:30 a.m., the Subaru -- rigged with monitors and clamped to a propulsion cable -- began its "dead man walking" journey down a 600-foot-long tunnel and burst into the main test room at 40 mph. The left front portion of the car slammed into a steel barrier anchored by a 320,000-pound concrete block.
Within seconds, about a dozen red-shirted engineers swarmed over the wreck, flinging open the hatchback and wheeling up a portable computer station that they quickly plugged in to learn the results. One man swept up the broken glass and trim pieces.
The Subaru was a goner, totaled, ready for the Pick-Your-Part yard. One more sacrifice for safety.
Elsewhere in the rarefied world of auto safety experts, the institute generally gets high marks. At the Center for Auto Safety, the Ralph Nader nonprofit spin-off that has been monitoring the industry for nearly 40 years, Director Clarence Ditlow says: "They do good tests and they're respected. The automakers pay attention." Ditlow says his organization has urged Lund's group "to do pedestrian (versus car) testing and roof-crush testing, which could lead to stronger roofs."
Back on the crash test floor, with a few wisps of Subaru clutter still visible here and there, the mood of the crowd surrounding the mortally wounded Tribeca was cheery.
"The (passenger) compartment was well contained," Lund said, pointing out that the dummy clearly survived the crash and the roof and frame lines were still intact and had not buckled. "The structural redesign we were trying to achieve in vehicles has happened."
Joe Nolan, a senior vice president of the crash test facility, wandered over after checking results with some of Subaru's engineers from Japan.
He said you can usually tell the tests went well when "the Japanese guys are smiling."
And one of them, Subaru crash engineer Hirokazu Chosho, said the test car had the "same result as in Japan. I'm very happy. The compartment is very strong."
This was one crash, at least, that did not have a tragic ending.
Crash test
Perhaps the quickest way to see the top results of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety's crash test is to check the "Top Safety Picks" table at the institute's Web site, www.iihs.org. These are the 2006 Top Safety Picks for cars and minivans. The vehicles are rated (from best to worst ratings) Good, Acceptable, Marginal and Poor, in terms of crashworthiness. Gold pick means the car got "good front, side and rear" ratings. Silver means good front and side ratings and "an acceptable rating for rear crash."
Large
Ford Five Hundred (with optional side air bags), gold
Mercury Montego (with optional side air bags), gold
Audi A6, silver
Midsize
Saab 9-3, gold
Subaru Legacy, gold
Audi A3, silver
Audi A4, silver
BMW 3 series, 4-door models, silver
Chevrolet Malibu (with optional side air bags), silver
Lexus IS, silver
Volkswagen Jetta, silver
Volkswagen Rabbit, 4-door models, silver
Volkswagen Passat, silver
Minivans
Hyundai Entourage, 2007 models, gold
Kia Sedona, gold
Small
Honda Civic, 4-door models, gold
Saab 9-2x, gold
Subaru Impreza, except WRX models, gold
All are 2006 models, except as noted.
Source: Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (www.iihs.org).
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