A vehicle manufacturer does not promise that its product will keep an occupant out of a collision. What it owes is something narrower and, in litigation, more demanding to prove: a design that does not turn a survivable crash into a fatal or catastrophic one. That duty is the crashworthiness doctrine, and the injuries it reaches are the enhanced injuries, the harm caused not by the first collision but by the second, when the occupant strikes the interior of a vehicle that failed to protect him.
Where the doctrine came from
For a brief period, some courts held that a manufacturer's duty ran only to the product's intended use, and that a collision was not an intended use of a car. The Seventh Circuit took that view in Evans v. General Motors Corp., 359 F.2d 822 (7th Cir. 1966). The position did not last. Two years later the Eighth Circuit rejected it in Larsen v. General Motors Corp., 391 F.2d 495 (8th Cir. 1968), reasoning that collisions are a foreseeable and statistically certain incident of driving, and that a manufacturer therefore owes a duty to design against the reasonably foreseeable hazard of a crash. Larsen became the majority rule, and the second-collision framework it announced is now the baseline for occupant-injury products work. Our product liability coverage follows the doctrine as courts refine it.
What the plaintiff must actually prove
Crashworthiness carries a heavier proof burden than an ordinary defect case, and counsel who underestimate it lose at the causation stage. Three elements do the work:
- A design defect. Under either the risk-utility test or a consumer-expectations analysis, depending on the jurisdiction, the occupant-protection feature was defectively designed. Most crashworthiness jurisdictions also expect proof of a feasible alternative design that would have performed better in the same crash.
- Enhanced injury. The defect produced injuries beyond those the initial collision would have caused on its own. This is the element that separates crashworthiness from a garden-variety products claim, and it requires the plaintiff to describe two injury outcomes: the one that happened, and the counterfactual one that would have occurred in a non-defective vehicle.
- Causation of the difference. The gap between those two outcomes is attributable to the defect rather than to the crash forces themselves.
The recurring defect theories
The failures that drive these cases are familiar to anyone who has worked occupant-injury files: seatback collapse that drops a belted occupant rearward in a rear impact, roof crush in a rollover, airbag non-deployment or unreasonably aggressive deployment, seatbelt and restraint failures, door-latch release that ejects an occupant, and fuel-system design that feeds a post-collision fire. Each has its own reconstruction demands, and each invites the same defense response.
The apportionment fight
The heart of the trial is dividing the harm. If the enhanced injury can be separated from the injury the first collision would have caused anyway, most courts require the plaintiff to prove that division. If it cannot be separated, the analysis shifts. The Restatement (Third) of Torts: Products Liability section 16 addresses this directly, providing that when the plaintiff proves a defect increased the harm but cannot apportion the increased harm from the harm that would have occurred without the defect, the manufacturer is liable for all of it. That burden-shift is the plaintiff's most valuable tool in a case where the biomechanics resist a clean split.
Expect the defense to attack on three fronts: that the occupant's injuries were unavoidable given the crash forces, that no feasible alternative design existed at the time of manufacture, and that the primary-collision fault, often the client's own, should dominate the jury's attention. The first two are engineering fights won or lost on expert quality. The third is a misdirection, because in most crashworthiness jurisdictions the plaintiff's fault in causing the initial collision does not reduce or bar recovery for the separate enhanced injury the manufacturer caused. Keep the jury focused on the second collision.
Proving it
These cases live and die on reconstruction and biomechanics. The occupant-kinematics analysis has to show where the body went and what it struck, the crash reconstruction has to establish the forces and the survivable space that should have remained, and the alternative-design proof has to be more than a sketch: a design that was feasible, available, and tested at the time the vehicle was built. Recall history, other-similar-incident evidence, and the manufacturer's own crash-test data are frequently the difference between a defensible alternative-design theory and a speculative one. Because so many of these files begin as ordinary collision matters, the crossover with our auto accidents and truck and motorcycle coverage is constant, and the enhanced-injury theory is often the second look that changes a case's value.
Practice points
- Preserve the vehicle intact. The failed component is the case, and salvage or repair destroys the alternative-design proof.
- Retain reconstruction and biomechanics experts before committing to an enhanced-injury theory, and make them define the counterfactual outcome early.
- Build the feasible-alternative-design record around what existed at the time of manufacture, not the state of the art today.
- Plan for the apportionment instruction from the first pleading, and preserve the indivisible-injury burden-shift where the biomechanics support it.
The crash may have been the client's fault. The injuries that made it catastrophic may not have been, and that is the case the crashworthiness doctrine exists to reach.