WPI 110.02.02 Crashworthiness / Enhanced Damage and Injury—Manufacturing and/Or Design Defect

Use this instruction in cases in which a party has presented sufficient evidence to establish that plaintiff's injury or enhanced injury was proximately caused by a manufacturing or design defect, but was not necessarily caused by the accident itself. This instruction may also be used in situations involving warning issues. See the Comment below.

Use bracketed material as applicable.

In general. In the landmark case of Larsen v. General Motors Corp., 391 F.2d 495 (8th Cir. 1968), the court held that a vehicle manufacturer could be liable for “enhanced” injury caused by the failure of the vehicle to be crashworthy, but only for those injuries caused by that failure.

Larsen, 391 F.2d at 503 (emphasis added).

Washington expressly follows Larsen in imposing crashworthiness duties for design and manufacturing defects. Couch v. Mine Safety Appliances Co., 107 Wn.2d 232, 728 P.2d 585 (1986); Seattle-First Nat'l Bank v. Tabert, 86 Wn.2d 145, 542 P.2d 774 (1975); Baumgardner v. Am. Motors Corp., 83 Wn.2d 751, 522 P.2d 829 (1974). For example, Baumgardner involved claims for personal injuries and wrongful death resulting from an automobile collision in which a defective front seat broke loose and was propelled forward. The plaintiff, not wearing a seatbelt, was injured. The plaintiff's wife, wearing a seatbelt but not a shoulder harness, was killed after being crushed between the seat and the belt. The court distinguished accident causation from injury causation, noting that the plaintiff's claim was for his “enhanced injuries.” Baumgardner, 83 Wn.2d at 758. Similarly, in Couch, when a safety helmet failed, the court specified that the claim was for the harm over and above what would have been sustained without the defect, again drawing the line between injury causation and accident causation. Couch, 107 Wn.2d at 242–43; cf. Phennah v. Whalen, 28 Wn.App. 19, 621 P.2d 1304 (1980).

Component parts. The 1981 Washington Product Liability Act focuses on component parts of the product that caused the injury in its definition of “product”:

RCW 7.72.010(3).

In a crashworthiness case the “relevant product” is generally some subcomponent of the vehicle such as an airbag, restraint, fuel system, roof, or steering column instead of the vehicle itself. Thus, the overall safety record of the vehicle is not relevant to the issue of whether or not the “relevant product” is unsafe. See, e.g., Skeie v. Mercer Trucking Co., 115 Wn.App. 144, 150, 61 P.3d 1207 (2003) (“Although a product may be safe for its intended use, its manufacturer may still be liable for other unsafe uses that are reasonably foreseeable”). In addition, because the emphasis is on the defective component, causation issues relating to allocation of fault and comparative fault are more narrowly focused and confined to conduct relating to the defective components rather than conduct relating to the vehicle as a whole.