Carl F. Thelin

“Your guy dove into an empty swimming pool wearing a car.”

I am a long time CxSI – a Crash Scene Investigator. That means I am an engineer who examines the two aspects of an automobile crash. If a lawsuit is going to be attempted, I may be the one qualified to write a technical report and later, testify in court. Expert +witnesses for the plaintiff and defendant with try to persuade the jury that their answers to the following questions are the most accurate, understandable and credible.

First question: Whether the scene is as head-on, a tail-ender, a side impact, or even an off-the-road rollover, why did the crash occur? Almost always that is because one or both drivers did something dumb. That has some impact on the question about fault – who pays.

Second question: Why were the injuries worse than they would have been if another make/model vehicle was involved? For instance, what if the front seat back flopped ahead and added crushing forces to the person wearing a lap/shoulder belt in front? There are many elements of the car design to consider. If I convince the jury that the design of the car contained elements that are clearly defective compared to the current state of the art, the car manufacturer pays for the consequences. That usually results in much bigger pay-offs than the answer to question number one. The size of the award to the plaintiff will become huge if we establish that the car’s management knew of the defect but continued to put the car on the market. Punitive Damages are the jury’s way of making sure the loser will not forget to do a better job next time.

It doesn’t always work out that way. We lose many cases because the auto companies have very good, and have well-paid lawyers and experts. And sometimes, personal injury lawyers bring cases for my review that really won’t fly.

Sometimes I have to give my lawyer client the  bad news, "From a technical standpoint, you don't have a strong case because ...". The , “You should prefer to hear this from me, because if you go ahead, you'll hear it from the other side -- after you have spent a lot of money and time on a lawsuit you won’t win.” The point I’m making with that colorful remark (in the title above) is this: if your client was in a car or truck that went off the road and fell a considerable distance onto its roof, the people inside will be hurt badly even if they are using the seatbelts, and even if the roof were so well made that it did not crush at all. For instance if the vehicle falls off an expressway overpass or bounces high during a violent rollover, and lands hard on its top, the roof comes to an abrupt stop when it lands on the ground. Then the occupant continues HIS downward travel and his head also comes to an abrupt stop. His neck takes the loading of decelerating the rest of his body.

We were offered a case where a pickup truck approaching a freeway overpass was forced into the median by a car that came wildly up the on-ramp and zoomed into the two travel lanes. The pickup was launched where the median ended at the gap between the pair of freeway bridges above the highway below. The truck fell and flipped so that it landed on the pavement of the cross road -- splat -- the roof was flattened! The occupants were unrestrained so they suffered fatal injuries.

But, I told the attorney,

“What if the truck had its roof reinforced like those of the NASCAR racing pickups?

Using the seatbelt will help to restrain the lower torso in a situation like this. But the head and neck are still exposed to serious injury from direct contact with the roof of the car or truck. Why? Because of the elasticity of the seatbelt and the human body. Sit totally upright in your car and note how little room there is between the top of your head and the roof. Now imagine that the car was inverted and you were swinging upside down, compressing your thighs and pulling tight on the lap belt with all your weight. The few inches of normal clearance will be gone.”

Yes, we could claim the vehicle is defective if the roof collapsed under relatively mild stress, or if the car's seats come loose and adds to the neck-crushing force. But consider this: General Motors spend a lot of time and money on a demonstration, with a series of sixteen rollover tests from 30 mph with otherwise identical 1983 Chevrolet Malibu cars. Half had the roofs reinforced like that of a NASCAR racer. Half of all the cars had tightly (a) restrained dummies; the others had unrestrained dummies. These tests show that, even in the best circumstances, there is danger of the occupant's head swinging from side to side like the clapper of a bell within the overturned car when it flips over and lands on its roof. The car not only stops falling, but it decelerates sharply along the longitudinal path. These test data were published in two papers at conferences of the Society of Automotive Engineers (b). Films of these tests have been shown at the SAE meetings and in the courtroom. You will be strongly persuaded that it is not healthy to be in ANY car during a violent multi-turn rollover. Yet you will find instances where one person in the car was badly injured, and another was not. As they say, "It all depends."

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NOTES

(a) Tightly restrained means that the dummies had one-piece combination lap-shoulder belts with tilt-lock latch plates. These systems maintain the tightness of the lap belt even if the upper torso swings out from behind the shoulder belt, allowing it to go slack.

(b) SAE 851734: Rollover Crash Tests -- The Influence of Roof Strength on Injury Mechanics, Twenty-Ninth Stapp Car Crash Conference Proceedings, October 1985 by Kenneth F Orlowski and R Thomas Bundorf (GMC) and Edward A Moffat (Biomech, Inc.)

SAE 902314: Rollover and Drop Tests -- The Influence of Roof Strength on Injury Mechanics Using Belted Dummies, Thirty-Fourth Stapp Car Crash Conference Proceedings, November 1990 by G.S. Bahling, R.T. Bundorf, and G.S. Kaspsyl (GMC), E.A. Moffat (Consultant), K.F. Orlowski (Consultant) and J.E. Stocke (GMC)