Carl F. Thelin

CRUSHED

            When I tell people that I am a CxSI, I have to say, “That means CRASH Scene Investigator”. I do forensic work just like the crime scene people and the medical examiners. Sometimes a friend says, “I’ll bet you see lots of bodies”.

I am used to that kind of question. I say, “The police, firefighters and EMT people do. No, a CSI is seldom at the scene while the blood is still wet. I do my work after the dead and injured are gone. I may get to visit someone in a hospital, but usually I might see a living victim during preparation for a lawsuit, if at all.”

                        “Yeah, but you do get to see bloody messes, right?”

                        “Oh sure, sometimes I see the dried mess of blood and other stuff while I crawl around and look in a wrecked car. There is plenty of blood evidence, even weeks later. I wear latex gloves for that reason if I an inside. Heavy leather gloves, too, if there is a lot of windshield glass on the seats.”

                        “You have seen people crushed, too?”

            “Well, no. I might see a vehicle that has been smashed badly into something I call a steel cabbage. When I get there, the firemen and the EMTs have already pulled the worm out of the cabbage, so to speak. That is not a pretty picture, but that is what happens when a car is caught between two trucks that collide.”

I think about that for a while.

            “Oh, yes, there are cars that get crushed up against guardrails or bridge rails. I have even looked into a few cases where a sleepy driver ran his 18-wheeler right into a bridge abutment head on. Yeah, I have seen a few cars run over completely by an eighteen-wheeler. I have seen cases where a truck hit the car on the side and run it over. That car looked like a steel cigar. OK, have you had enough of that?” I ask the friend. He nods. Whew – the curiosity of some people – disgusting.

            “I did have a case I will not forget. An older woman was crushed between her seatbelt and her seat back. I did not see blood anywhere in the car. That was one of my biggest cases but we did not win. It was also one of the longest.”

            A SNOWY DAY IN DETROIT SUBURBS

            I was beginning to have a good reputation testifying as an expert witness in lawsuits that claimed that a front seatback collapsed because of inadequate design. Trial lawyers get many of those cases. Almost all involved a car being hit hard from the rear. Some of them are borderline fraud – the whiplash thing that results in an invisible injury that heals itself after the lawyers wins some money with the help of a chiropractor. I may tell you about that kind of case sometime. Not now.

            I am talking about the rear impacts that involve a hard hit from behind which pushed the car ahead so violently that the driver or passengers slide partly over the top of the car seat backs. Sometimes a person in front slides to the side into the gap between the seatbacks. Serious, incapacitating neck and head injuries result – some very permanent. One time, in a deposition for one case vs. General Motors, their lawyer asked what I would do to make the seats better. A few years later, I saw print advertisements for Buick cars where one of the features was seat backs shaped like a catcher’s mitt to cradle you. That is what I had suggested – as opposed to the slab-like seats and seat backs in the earlier GM cars. Those underlined words are exactly what I said.

            Back to the story about the crushed woman.

            I had the reputation – of being good on cases where the failure of a seat back caused a serious injury, and of being unafraid of General Motors. I got a call from a lawyer who worked for a large law firm doing plaintiff trials in Detroit. Like Daniel in the lion’s den – I thought. That was exciting for me– a case right in the heart of the lion’s den. This was a firm with many resources and this lawyer had plenty of experience and knowledge about working against an auto company.

            I was even more intrigued to learn the scene of the collision was in the same county as the massive General Motors Proving Grounds, where I once worked. Talk about coincidences, one of the responding police officers was an employee of GM. I knew that name. Chip Reuben was moonlighting as a weekend auxiliary police officer. His dispatcher called him to the scene to make measurements and take pictures, because this was his specialty when working at GM.

            THE CRASH

            Four older folks were out early in the morning after a heavy snowfall. The sun was low, so the temperature was still below freezing. They were headed west on freshly plowed Maple Street from of the town called Walled Lake, Michigan. Morgan Roberts was driving the family Buick sedan with Betty beside him. The right front seat was set far back, because this car was normally driven by Mrs. Roberts with her tall husband on the passenger seat. The front seat were part of a package called split bench seats, so that each side could be individual adjusted. This day, her husband was driving because of the guests. Fred Grimaldi, a large man, sat behind Betty. Fred’s wife; Alice, was behind the driver.

            Maple Street is a road without any cross street for a straight portion about two thirds of a mile long. The road is almost all straight with on gentle bend at about the halfway point. Most of the length was slightly elevated above the surrounding back yard of homes. When you think about it, you can see how easily Morgan Roberts could stop focusing on the road, having three others to talk with, and a long straight road ahead. When Morgan saw, at the last minute, that the shallow left bend was ahead, he touched the brake pedal to slow down. Black ice is invisible, but very effective at negating the brake effect. The Buick slid ahead, off the road, down the shallow embankment and dead centered the grille on a stout tree.

            The Buick was a sturdy 1986 LeSabre. This car had good seatbelts – the best ones GM offered. The lap and shoulder each had a separate retractor, making them easy to put on and comfortable to wear, with low tension. The seat belts did perform well. In the back, Alice had the lap belt on, but Fred, being big, could not easily get it on. The crash was not very severe – if there had been airbags, I doubt they would have deployed.

            Because the Buick slid so slowly through the snow directly to the tree, (steering was useless in that snow) everyone had plenty of time to brace himself or herself. That became a problem. Fred was big. He was heavy. He was strong. Naturally, he put both hands on the top of the front seatback. I told you that he could not get the lap belt on, but I doubt that it made any difference. Fred’s knees were within two inches of the lower part of the front seatback.         As I said, I would not rate the crash as severe, but Fred was at least a 200-pounder. His pressure forward against the front seat was severe. Consider that GM engineers made that part of the seat strong to resist pressure from the front to the back during a hard impact on the rear of the car. The inboard edge of the seatback, as on most US-made cars, has no mechanism to prevent it from being tipped either forward or rearward. The edge of the seat back near the door can be equipped with a latch that will allow it to be tipped forward – if the split back seat is used in a two-door model car.

The seat back in a four door model is expected to stay upright. It did bend forward a little. The inboard edge tipped ahead a lot as the slab twisted when Fred pushed his knees deep into the soft aluminum pan and foam rubber inside the lower part of the seatback. He pushed his knees right into Betty’s kidneys, we believe.

            Morgan, Fred and Alice were unhurt and able to open the doors and get out. Betty did not. She was moaning that she could not breathe. Her chest was squashed between the shoulder belt, with the still-locked retractor, and the unyielding seat back. Jerry Tims, a college-age man, was home studying when he heard the crash. Jerry came out to offer help after he called 911. He and Fred, both big men, pulled hard on the front seatback to bend it back away from Betty, so she was able to breathe. The EMTs in the ambulance took Betty to the excellent trauma center in nearby William Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak. The ER doctors found many internal injuries to her upper and lower torso. The cumulative effect was that she died two days later. There were no facial injuries. Betty did not have a steering wheel in front of her, as it was for Morgan. The crash was mild enough that his head did not hit the steering rim.

            That was a simple analysis, right? Yes. Mark Sloan, the lawyer who called me, and I both knew that if Mrs. Roberts had been in most any imported car, that cost about the same as this Buick, her injuries would have been much less. We knew we could prove it by comparing the front seat of a Volvo to the one in the 1986 Buick LeSabre. Hey, I had just bought a 1986 Camry, so I knew that those Toyota front seats were sturdy, too.  

            GM’S GUY LOOKED AT THE CRASH, TOO

Chip Reuben, the GM crash specialist, was at the crash scene to do his moonlighting work with the police department. Of course, with his background, was no surprise that he could make an excellent record of the details. Chip saw that the Buick had hit the tree with the center of the grille, which allowed a lot of deformation, but which did not engage many stiff components, except for the engine block. Chip measured the diameter of the tree and the depth of the penetration into the front of the Buick. He had the knowledge and experience to estimate the collision speed at about 18 mph – much more precisely than the average police officer would have done.

            THE STRIP-DOWN

            That forensic work was done when Mr. Sloan met me when I flew into Detroit. We went to a storage barn out in the countryside where his firm kept physical evidence from their personal injury and products liability cases. The Romano Law Firm was not involved early enough to preserve the whole Buick. Because of what Mr. Roberts had told them, they had purchased a replica seat from another wrecked 1986 Buick with the same seating equipment at the case vehicle. We took that seat to the law offices and placed it in their (well-finished) basement.

            I took photos as I stripped the seat of the fancy cloth and foam rubber upholstery with a sharp knife to cut through strategic places. With pliers and wire cutters I pulled apart the hog-rings that fastened the fabric and padding to the seatback frame. Then I tackled the seat cushion and the base the same way. When I was done, there was a pile of expensive fabric and soft foam rubber on the floor. The seat was now all metal. It looked sort of like the Terminator monster after the Schwarzenegger body had been removed. The seatback frame gleamed with the soft sheen of aluminum. The base, however, contained steel perimeter framework, springs and the sliding rails that allowed the seat to be positioned fore and aft inside the car. The seatback was connected to the seat fame with two pivots at the bottom of each side edge. On the outboard side the connection was with a motorized pivot that allowed the angle of recline to be changed electrically. The seat bottom itself also had motors, gears and cables to allow the full adjustment to be controlled by fingertip switches, some of which controlled the six-way position of the seat: up, down, back, and forth and tilt front or back. I left the head restraint as it was. It perched above the shiny seatback. We intended to show that the padded rear of the head restraint was a good thing for Fred in the back seat when he slammed ahead and his arms buckled under the force of the impact.

            The whole purpose of the strip and photograph routine was to show that this massive, attractive passenger seat was made like the entire array of General Motors 40-60 split power seat combinations. That mechanism was and is a popular piece of standard or optional equipment in large cars. The essence of the defect in that kind of seat is this: when a crash involving the front end of a car occurs, the passengers and everything else are thrust forward relative to the interior. I learned a lot about that when I first began testing car for safety.

            EARLY LESSONS FROM PIONEER CRASH TESTING

            In 1969 I went to work for the famous auto-safety research staff at Cornell Aeronautical Laboratories Inc., called CAL by most everyone in Buffalo, New York.

Up to that time all safety research was directed toward gathering information about car crashes to provide insurance companies and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) with statistics to use in developing countermeasures. I came to CAL from General Motors and Uniroyal Tire Company. I wanted to work with the famous Bill Milliken, well known for his pioneering work, beginning in 1953, that treated automobile control and stability (handling) as a science. With my background in chassis design and tire research, it was natural I would be assigned projects like that. However, the NHTSA, the major sponsor of auto safety projects had given up on the hope of coming up with regulations of car stability and control that would significantly reduce the number of crashes. Instead, we agreed that more progress could be made in research and development of automobile features to make it more probable that people would survive the crashes. In 1970, as a result of that change of emphasis, CAL tasked me to develop the full scale car crash testing facility for the laboratory so that we could be competitive seeking contracts for that kind of R&D.

            COMPLIANCE TESTING

            Our purpose at first was to crash cars headfirst into a concrete barrier at 30 mph. We placed recording instruments and high speed motion picture cameras all around to monitor the performance of cars without test dummies inside. This was called “Compliance” testing. Initially, the government was checking for compliance to the earliest safety standards:

·                           FMVSS 204 Steering wheel rearward displacement

·                           FMVSS 212 Windshield retention.

·                           FMVSS 301 Fuel systems integrity

            You might not understand the technical language of each Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (FMVSS) numbered above. In plain language, it meant that the (212) windshield should stay in place to help restraint the unbelted occupant; the (204) steering wheel should not come back so far as to harm the driver; and there should not be more than a (301) tiny splash for gasoline under the hood. Soon, the NHTSA added FMVSS 219 – to limit the penetration of the windshield by the rear edge of the hood.

            Those tests were run on empty cars – without a test dummy in any seat. In the early days, the government was just testing hardware.

            RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT CRASH TESTING

            Even before that compliance testing was done, engineers in a sister CAL department ran other crash tests for research. Their project was to compare the performance of different car body structures and occupant restraint systems – seat belts and airbags. CAL used early versions of test dummies with instruments inside for recording forces that might cause injury.

            When they began crash testing cars with anthropomorphic dummies we found out a lot of surprising things. Some required the revision of safety standards. The NHTSA wanted the test car equipped with a family of dummies: father and mother in front and childlike dummies on the back seat. We also were required to replace the gasoline with a fluid that had the same viscosity but was not flammable. Crash dummies do not break easily, but they would burn. We were also required to have the car’s engine running at the time of the crash. NHTSA wanted to know how much electricity would be available to initiate the inflator used in the early airbags. The battery in most cars was mounted up front close to the radiator where it was vulnerable to being smashed early during the crash. So, the test protocol became even weirder. CAL people placed a small can of gasoline in a secure place inside the car with sufficient fuel pressure to keep the engine running for a few minutes after it was launched toward the crash barrier. We discovered that none of that was critical, after all. There was enough electrical power from the car battery and alternator to start the airbag inflation before the engine stopped and the battery exploded.

            THERE WAS SOME REAL DANGER AT FIRST

            There was another surprise - crushing a lead acid battery causes a lot of grief. The internal short circuit causes a big brilliant flash of an electrical explosion under the hood. Worse, from our standpoint, – the entire space under hood was sprayed with battery acid – mostly invisible to us while wet. Finally we convinced the NHTSA to allow us to drain the battery and fill it with plain water. Then our car airbags would be ignited with the sealed motorcycle battery placed in the trunk.

            Now CAL was ready to begin research crash testing to help the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration learn how to make cars safer during a crash.

            CRASH TEST DUMMIES

            A crash dummy labeled Anthropomorphic is one modeled to measure injury-causing values. Other dummies are anthropometric. Those are scaled and weighted to resemble men, women and children of various sizes. The anthropomorphic dummy is also anthropometric and is stuffed with electronic devices to measure forces on the dummy during a crash. The government was not yet ready to apply standards that limited injuries until research was ready with some numbers to represent an injury. I will not tell you about the long haul of research by biomechanical engineers and medical people to develop those numbers.

            RESEARCH CRASH TESTING  

            At CAL, researchers were using their powerful and reliable crash test facility to do experiments to find better ways of protecting the occupants of the front seats. Unlike the existing FMVSS Compliance requirements, these tests were designed to measure the effect on anthropomorphic dummies. All the Safety Standards then in effect were designed to measure and limit hardware performance in terms of forces and motions on the cars themselves.

            While we did not have legally enforceable limits on injury force to test dummies, we could measure and compare the benefits of proposed occupant protection systems. In that circumstance, the crash did not have to be realistic to satisfy the opinion of any critic. It was meant to be an easily reproducible 30 mph crash head first into a massive flat faced barrier. The argument that the early “injury” measurements were not realistic also failed because the purpose was to make comparison – not to set standards.

            A HOLE IN THE ROOF REVEALED ALL

            When CAL ran a crash test procedures, it was much like the countdown to a launch at Cape Canaveral. High speed motion cameras were placed at a dozen or more locations. Some were attached to the outside of the car doors to peer at the dummies. We discovered that the expanding airbag enveloped the head of the dummy, concealing the exact motion. There was a camera located on a tower suspended high above and in front of the crash barrier. It gave us a top view of the crash. Why not cut some strategically located holes in the roof so we can see the top of the dummy’s head?  Great, now we had a better idea of how far ahead the dummy went into the air bag.

            Now we could see how stupid it was for NHTSA to require the back seat to be filled with a female dummy and two child dummies. The smaller dummies were “dumb” ones without instruments inside to measure forces. It made sense to have Vince and Mary on the front seats because adult-size made the crash forces a comparably stringent test of the driver and passenger restraint systems. Their big bodies contained room for the electronic instruments.

            THE KIDS ARE MESSING UP THE TEST!

            The hole in the roof revealed a serious problem with two Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards applied to the front seats. In the early days of the FMVSS, the dummies in the back had no shoulder belts to use. During the crash their upper bodies and arms slammed into the back of the front seat, adding to the inertial forces pushing the seat and the seatback ahead. Whoops. OK, ditch the family idea. There were no measurements taken to justify them anyway. Later we discovered that even in runs without the back seat dummies, we still saw the seats slide forward. Then we saw that the seat back slapped the back of the adult dummies with their own inertial forces. So the researchers at CAL got permission to weld the car seat tracks solid, and to reinforce the seatbacks to hold them in place. We were having problems with every kind of seats: a one piece bench seat, an individual bucket seat and split-back bench seats. Later, we learned that the car makers were doing that for their tests, too. Ah ha – they saw the problems as well as we did.

            STOP THIS STUPID TESTING

            This was an early lesson for me, personally. I learned something about the inadequacy of the majority of the early FMVSS. They were based on laboratory tests of the component themselves, not on any realistic dynamic test. Later, when I became the Automobile Safety Engineer at Consumers Union, I campaigned relentlessly to replace lab tests with meaningful crash test specifications. And, now that I am investigation serious motor vehicle collisions and testifying about the cause of harm to the occupants, I continue to benefit from the lessons of the testing in the 1970s. In the Roberts’ case the weakness of the seats was despite the fact that they were designed to comply with the following FMVSS:

Standard No. 207: Seating Systems. This standard established requirements for seats, their attachment assemblies, and their installation to minimize the possibility of their failure by forces acting on them as a result of vehicle impact.

Standard No. 202: Head Restraints. This standard specified requirements for head restraints to reduce the frequency and severity of neck injury in rear-end and other collisions.

            That is what the FMVSS scope-and-purpose statements said, but actually those two had little effect in causing car companies to make better equipment. Those tests were simple but inadequate. The car seat to be tested was mounted on a solid test fixture base – not on a sheet metal as in a car floor. The lab’s machinery applied slowly increasing forces to various points of the seat, the seatback and the head restraint. It seemed to me that, if the seat did not collapse into a pile of junk, it passed the test. That test is sort of like carefully placing something heavy on a table. Letting it fall in the table would be a better test of strength.

NCAP TO THE RESCUE

            These so-called FMVSS compliance tests meant very little for auto safety until 1979 when the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration began an experimental program of publishing crash test results. The cars and trucks used contained adult dummies and were crashed at 35 mph. The severity of crash effects is proportional to the square of the impact speed. These crashes were 36 percent more rigorous than the compliance test, which every vehicle was required to pass – or it could not be sold in the US. The New Car Assessment Program (NCAP) began to reveal to the public how many cars had the seat back slap the back of the driver and passenger. The worst performers were almost always the domestic cars.

            Think about that. There were no realistic safety standards to meet. The majority of cars had only lap-shoulder belts with air bags. Until there were dummies equipped to measure chest and abdominal compression force, no one could say how much injury resulted from seatback slap. Surely it would be better if seats did not slide forward, and the backs did not flop forward.

            Without any change of FMVSS regulations, the car makers got the message. As the years went by, I saw fewer cars, vans or pickup trucks with floppy seat backs. Today, finally, the seats are so steady that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration now is able, again, to place child dummies in the back seat in order to get dynamic crash test data on child car restraints. (FMVSS 213) Now, if a child seat did fail, the kid would get some benefit from the padded back of the front seat. If, as in the old days, that seatback collapsed, the kid might fly over it toward the windshield.

            With all that as a background, we though we were ready to take on General Motors in a trial with such a wide ranging issue.

            There is good news in all of this. It meant I was equipped to tackle the Roberts case.

            WE DID DYNAMIC TESTING

            For the Sloan case, I went to automobile salvage yards to purchase two right front seats from 1986 model Volvos, Toyota Camrys and large Buicks. I stripped one of each model seat to display the structure and the attachment of the back to the base in the same manner as I did in the law-firm basement. These were put aside to use as exhibits in the courtroom.

            I left the other three seats completely upholstered. We planned to use them in a test to demonstrate that the Buick seatback had less resistance to bending than the two others, despite that the imported seats were not so bulky in appearance. We wanted to demonstrate the hidden defect in the design of most individual seatbacks in American cars. Yes, General Motors, Ford and Chrysler cars were exactly alike in this manner. The folding seatback in a two-door car is certain to have this defect. Seats in many four-door vehicles also contained it if they were equipped with adjustable-recline seatbacks. These seats, called individual seats or split-back bench seats have the same weakness. They have a restraint only on the outboard side to limit the rearward or forward tipping of the seat back. The attachment of the seatback to the seat frame on the inboard side is always a simple pinned hinge joint. It has no resistance to being move ahead or back. The restraint for the outer edge will be one of several types:

1) A pinned joint with a latch and pawl to prevent tipping the seat back forward. This is the minimum requirement for entry into the back seat of a two door model car. The FMVSS requires that the seat back must be locked in place unless a knob or lever is used to release the pawl.

2) A pinned joint with a pawl and sector arrangement to permit manual adjustment of the angle of recline. The manual adjustment usually involves a lever on the outboard edge of the seat cushion or the seat back.

3) A pinned joint with a motorized mechanism that permits the push-button adjustment of the angle of recline.

4) An L-shaped bracket with no provision for adjustment of the seat back recline angle relative to the seat cushion. In the cheaper, base model four door cars, this chunk of steel replaces the hardware described above.

            Our plan was to convince a jury that the Buick seat was so poorly designed that it was the product that allowed the injury to Mrs. Roberts. We could show them by comparing the crash performance of the Buick, Volvo and Toyota seats in circumstances like that in this case.

            FINDING A LAB TO DO OUR WORK

            Testing laboratories working with automobiles tend to be sympathetic to the auto industry – the hand that feeds them. Only a few crash research places would consider doing any work for the plaintiff lawyer industry. Even the ones associated with large universities are reluctant to risk their reputation of being friendly to the wrong people such as PI and PL lawyers.

            Our job was to find some researchers who worked primarily with the United States and other governments. In a sense, they are already “on the other side”. Finding a lab like that was fairly easy. But, not many actually have access to a system to simulate crashes with real hardware. Crashing complete cars would not do because of all the other structural variables that can affect the crashworthiness performance of the cars themselves.

            The way to avoid that problem is to test just the seat hardware in an environment very much like the inside of a car that is crashed into a barrier, or into a stout tree, as was our case. We found a group of engineers and technicians who could approximate the time history of the forces applied to a car during the first tenth of a second of a crash. Yes – a tenth of a second. High speed motion pictures and force recordings show that the whole crash is really finished in 100 to 120 thousandths of a second. The rest of the time is when the wreck settles down. What you see in movies and television is extremely unrealistic. I made sound recordings near the crash barrier at CAL. It always sounded like a shot gun blast.

            The testing firm had access to a lab used for research on military aircraft. The device used to simulate an airplane crash is the same as for auto crashes. It also can be used develop protection from the forces on airmen who are ejected from an aircraft. We call it the accelerator sled. That thing has a sled-like platform that rides on a pair of low-friction rails. Our seats, or even a whole car, could be bolted to the top of the sled. Generically, these things are called Hi-G sleds. The sliding part is parked in front of a huge piston that will push the sled away – sliding down the rails. The system uses a combination of compressed air and hydraulic oil to make the piston push very hard and very briefly on the sled. The acceleration of the sled, backwards, away from the front of the “car”, is the reverse of the deceleration felt by the vehicle during a crash. This works pretty well. We all know that it is only a simulation of a real crash. But, if you just want to test and compare many individual things like car seats, child seats or even seat belts, it is good enough, and very economical. So, that is what we are going to do.

            THE RESULTS

            We asked the people at the lab to go out to local junkyards to get a car body from a 1986 Buick. They cut out enough of the passenger side to put on the sled for our simulation. They had the instrument panel, the floor and the mounting for the front and rear seats, as well as the B-pillar on which to mount the D-ring for the shoulder belt. The “car” would not be damaged, so it could be used with all three competitive seats, we hoped. General Motors made a big stink about how we modified the Buick to attach the Toyota and Volvo seats to the Buick floor. Come on – we’re not stupid. We reinforced the floor enough to benefit all three seats.

            Next, we had to see how well the crash would be modeled on a genuine crash of a big Buick dead center onto a tree of about 12 inches in diameter. Obviously, we could not make the crash simulation exactly like the complex dynamics of a real car body crumpling like that. But, hey, we said, this is a test of comparison – all three seats get the same simulation. Another division of the contract lab had experience in reconstructing real automobile crashes. They provided the data upon which we would model the crash force on the sled. The military dummies were anthropomorphic dummies. We did not use their measurements. Our need was solely to show how the seatback and seat belt were able to trap the torso of Mrs. Roberts.

            A fifth percentile female crash dummy was placed on the front seat and belted with a GM type lap and shoulder belt. “Fifth Percentile” means that only five percent of all women would be smaller than the dummy. That is a small dummy used by the air force to simulate small female flight personnel – really tiny, like Mrs. Roberts. We put a big guy on the back seat – a 95^th percentile fellow, like Mr. Grimaldi. This dummy had only a lap belt available in the Buick. We used masking tape to hold the big dummy’s hands on the top of the front seatback – one palm on either side of the head restraint. His arms were straight but we knew they would fold easily in real life.

            This test crew did not have access to the abundant inventory of cameras I had when I was at Cornell Aeronautical Laboratories in Buffalo. These people used a combination of high speed film cameras and medium speed video recorders so we would later see what was going on during the collision. A nice thing about sleds is the ease of attaching cameras onboard. The other video equipment is not so rugged that is could be placed on the sled (now days it is).

            WE RAN THE TESTS

            Before we saw the high speed film and video, we saw there was already plenty of good data on hand. Seat track interlocking channels under the seat base allow for adjustment. They we peeling apart at the back end - mostly on the outboard side, as expected. Second, the inboard side of the Buick seatback was deformed forward much more than the outboard edge. Looking down at it, you could see it curled a bit toward the outside. There was plenty of visible evidence that the big guy’s knees did dig into the back of the front seat.

            As we knew, the other seat backs were visibly much better. Comparison of the seat tracks was impossible because of the changes we had to make in the floor mounting. However, the Toyota seatback bent less than the Buick, and it was bent uniformly left and right. The Volvo seat was marginally better yet.

            And the pressure of the deformed Buick seatback against the dummy representing Mrs. Roberts was just what we expected. The lap and shoulder belts remained very tight across the abdomen and chest on the dummy.

            NOW WE ARE ALL SET FOR A ROUSING TRIAL

            You might think that the General Motors defense team would have folded after seeing our sled test evidence. During pre-trial discovery we said that we would bring all the seats into the courtroom with the films. The jury would see the massively upholstered Buick seat with the slim imported seats, and compare them with the naked skeletons. They would hear about the autopsy reports describing the location of the strap-like bruises on the woman who died from the internal injuries.

            Well, no, it was not going to be that easy. GM ran tests, too. They have much more money and more elaborate test facilities. GM did not try to do a comparison tests to refute the idea that the imported seats were sturdier. It seemed that they assumed that the seats would deform as we said they did

            General Motors ran a full body buck which is an empty shell of a complete Buick car body, not a half shell like we used. They ran a very realistic crash simulation. Their attack was against the victim. Their interpretation of the injuries was to claim that they showed it was Mrs. Roberts who caused the injuries to be so severe as to kill her. They were going to tell the jury that the woman had positioned the shoulder belt under her right arm so that it would ride lower on her torso – for riding comfort. That, they said, would put the pressure lower on her vulnerable abdomen, and also cause the higher belt loading that made the bruises.

            OK. Now we were preparing for a real fight in the courtroom. We were confident that no witness would say that they saw that Mrs. Roberts had the belt in her armpit when they were attempting to free her from the wreck. Our side was not worried that GM would gain much by claiming that our sled test simulation of the crash was incorrect, either too harsh or not as harsh as it ought to be. I was pretty sure we could convince the jury that this was a comparison test, not a reconstruction of actual events. 

            MORE STALLING

            I did not mention earlier that this case, like many of those involving a giant defendant like an auto company, will take a long time. Years, in fact, not days like it seems in movies. One of the advantages that the big companies have against most plaintiffs is the ability to delay them forever. General Motors has (well – had) billions of dollars to play with. Even a big-firm lawyer like Mr. Sloan does not. So, GM could snow his firm with paper work. I know they do that, because the GM legal staff did that to others when I worked for them. GM could also demand and schedule depositions of many potential witnesses. That worked to run up the bill for the plaintiff lawyer and eat up his productive time, too.

            And it worked! Ten years after the death of his wife, Mr. Roberts threw in the towel. He had come up from his retirement home in the Florida a dozen times to be present for some legal activity. Usually it seems pointless to be there without any resolution. The trial had not been put on the docket yet. He just gave up. He said he couldn’t take any more of this travel.

            What could lawyer Sloan do? He is not prosecuting a criminal trial where he could continue without a living victim. Having great evidence is useless without a plaintiff. Now, that is sad. A great crusading lawyer with a good case and a sympathetic client ought to do well.

            As I said, “I fight dragons for a living – sometimes I win.”