The Transportation Department’s report exonerating Toyota of hiding electrical flaws in its throttle mechanisms won’t end the sudden-acceleration lawsuits against it but will make class actions much harder to pursue, a product-liability expert said.
Individuals can still push a case in front of a jury to decide why their car surged inexplicably out of control, said Aaron Twerski of Brooklyn Law School. But maintaining a lawsuit on behalf of millions of consumers, most of whom have never had a problem with their cars, has become much tougher.
“It’s going to be much harder on the class-action side,” said Twerski, a co-author of the products-liability section of the American Law Institute’s most recent Restatement of Torts. Plaintiff lawyers had argued there was some kind of electronic gremlin hiding in the throttle mechanisms of Toyota vehicles that diminished their safety and value, “and now you have a report from very reputable agency saying that it wasn’t there.”
The report, conducted with the help of NASA and released by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, is here. Plaintiff lawyers seem to have anticipated its findings and switched their strategy recently to focus not on unintended acceleration but the lack of a brake-override device to prevent it from happening for whatever cause. The report, however, says the brakes on Toyotas are powerful enough to stop a car even with wide-open throttle, or at least slow it to a safe speed. The one sure cause of unintended acceleration, of course, is drivers stomping on the gas pedal instead of the brake, a not unknown phenomenon.
The argument that despite the NASA report some other defect caused a crash might fly in front of the right jury in an individual case, Twerski said, but not necessarily for a class action.
“I can see it an individual personal injury case,” he said. “My accelerator pedal stuck, I don’t have any idea why the heck it did but it did. That’s something a jury can decide.”
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