Superior Court Clarifies Crashworthiness Doctrine and Provides Key Jury‑Instruction Guidance

In the much-publicized Amagasu case, a jury returned a verdict of nearly a billion dollars to a plaintiff who was paralyzed in a rollover car accident.  On appeal, the Superior Court vacated the award and remanded for a new trial stating that the trial court did not properly charge the jury on crashworthiness principles.

Crashworthiness is a subset of products liability cases in which it is alleged that a vehicle possessed a defect that did not cause an accident, but did not offer sufficient protection to the vehicle’s occupant during the accident. Pennsylvania law recognizes that collisions and other accidents are part of the intended use of a motor vehicle, so manufacturers must design and manufacture a product that is “reasonably crashworthy.” For example, if a plaintiff is involved in a head-on collision and the air bags do not deploy, the lack of air bag deployment did not cause the collision, but possibly increased the severity of the plaintiff’s injuries –  that failure to perform may give rise to a product defect claim.

In Amagasu, the Superior Court re-affirmed the elements of a crashworthiness claim, which was first recognized in Pennsylvania in 1994, but has not frequently been analyzed since the landmark Tincher case re-defined the product liability cause of action. Amagasu explained that crashworthiness cases involved a “more rigorous” and a “heightened burden of proof” compared to ordinary products liability cases as a trade off for expanding the scope of liability to an alleged defect that did not cause the underlying accident. Specifically, in addition to proving a product defect, the plaintiff must prove that, at the time the vehicle was designed, a safer and more practical design existed. A plaintiff’s burden to prove causation is also heavier in a crashworthiness case, as he or she must distinguish between the “enhanced injury” caused by the defect, and the “non-compensable injuries” he or she would have sustained in the accident anyway. The Superior Court emphasized that these crashworthiness elements “impose a burden of proof far and above that of a typical” products liability case.

Amagasu may have a greater impact than simply crashworthiness cases as the billion-dollar verdict was vacated because the trial court did not give proper jury instructions. The trial court had avoided giving instructions that were not included in the Pennsylvania Suggested Standard Civil Jury Instructions, which did not provide a specific instruction on crashworthiness.

The Suggested Standard Jury Instructions are an excellent resource and guide, but they are not an exhaustive statement of every area of the law. If a legal issue is raised by the evidence, the jury must be given an appropriate instruction, even if one is not included in the SSJI.