Carl F. Thelin

RUFUS KING                                   

           

            Well, we lost this case against General Motors. Hell, I don’t know if we could have won it. I’m not even certain that I was right about the exact mechanism that was responsible for the awful injuries to the client, Mr. Rufus King. I think GM succeeded in confusing everybody – the jury, the judge, and the lawyers and experts for the plaintiff. I really don’t think that GM’s lawyers won their case, but I know that we did not have a chance.

            His attorney showed me a video of Mr. Rufus King in convalescent home. I am not certain why the lawyer handling the case for his family thought I needed to see that. The pictures stay in my mind. Here was a good looking man, a successful touring musician, who now seemed to be little more than an infant.

            This was a good case, I thought. Rufus was a completely innocent victim of a design defect in a truck. He was severely injured when he fell out of the passenger door. The door latch did not keep the door closed during a crash that I thought was not very severe.

            On a cold, icy night, the driver, a fellow musician named Giorgio, lost control of a Chevrolet Blazer SUV. This was not the big one based on the Chevrolet C1500 series. This blazer the smaller one based on the Chevrolet S-10 pickup truck. The driver lost control as the truck crested an icy hill. This road had a very wide median. The north and south lanes were separated by something like a continuous rocky wall because these lanes went through a cut-out in a tall peak of a rocky hill. There was black ice there in the gap. The truck slid off the road into (not OVER) a cliff face that rose up on the left side. Then the truck bounced away and began spinning on the snowy shoulder. Mr. King fell out onto the hard ground when the passenger’s door flew open. The ground was not covered with soft snow. It was rocky hard. Rufus is alive today but will require the kind of care that an infant gets. Head injuries do that to adults. Therefore, the question is – why did the door come open?

            Vehicle examination  

            Here is what I saw when I first examined the vehicle. These are notes on my tape recorder made during the inspection.

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Red 4 door Chevrolet S-10 utility vehicle. It is a “Blazer”. It is not the big C1500 Blazer. I can think of three possible reasons for the door coming open.

One is that the fellow opened the door himself before the truck hit the wall. That is not likely considering that he would have been run over by the truck after he fell to the ground. The police report shows that after hitting the rocky wall, the truck was sliding to its right still going in the original direction. The truck was sliding to the left with the right side leading and it was rotating somewhat.

Another reason for the door to come open is that there was enough dynamic deformation of the door, during the collision with the side of the mountain, to cause one of the rods inside the door to pull the latch open. I can not see any of that. Third possibility is that inertia forces of the crash caused the latch to open itself. Some combination of horizontal and vertical inertia forces could do something like that.

            I found when I tried it, that if you locked the door on the inside, neither the inside nor the outside handle works. If you unlock the door, both the inside and the outside handle works. I have assumed and the evidence seems to say that the man was not using his seatbelt. It’s clear that the driver was because his seatbelt buckle had been pulled out quite a ways from the sheath in the floor.

            The head star in the front window is not as big or as deep as I thought it was when I looked at the photos while I was in the office. I can see that the plastic molding on the right A-pillar was broken by the front edge of the door frame being pushed up and forward when the back corner of the door dug in the ground. That distortion was not caused by a hit from Mr. King’s head.

            This is the end of the tape for my visit to inspect the car with GM’s people for Attorney Gateway on case #970050. Monday November 10

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            The evidence was clear. The passenger door came open. GM claimed that Mr. King panicked when he awoke from his nap on the passenger seat, and fumbled around and accidentally operated the door release on the inside of the door. General Motor’s defense seems to be that Mr. King himself inadvertently operated the fore and aft slider that is the interior door lock. Then he inadvertently operated the interior door handle which would release the door only when the lock was “Open”.

            The proposed expert witness, Doctor Harvey, for General Motors was an “independent” crash reconstructionist. Independent, in this case, means he testified in behalf of any auto maker.  He never has testified for anyone suing a manufacturer. Harvey is a PhD doctor, not a medical doctor. He happens to be a real crash scene investigator, whom I could respect. However there really was no disagreement about how the truck performed during the crash. Harvey was not there to talk about door latches.

            The inside door lock mechanism in this vehicle is a slider near the upper front of the door. Harvey said that the hand of Mr. King pushed the unlock button forward during the early part of the collision of the Blazer with the wall, which lasted 200 milliseconds. Then Harvey stated that King’s right hand pulled the release lever out and back from the door as he slide back, releasing the door latch.  Harvey agreed that the door did not swing open until after the truck separated from the wall. Doctor Harvey said that the principal direction of force (PDOF) on Mr. Giorgio (the driver) was approximately 1 o’clock – slightly to his right. However, he also said that the vehicle side slip angle was “in the neighborhood of 50 degrees” and his diagram shows the angle, at impact to be 52 degrees from the path. PDOF 1 o’clock is 30 degrees; PDOF 2 o’clock is 60 degrees.  This collision started with wall contact at the left front corner. That would be PDOF closer to 11 o’clock. The sharp corner impact initiated a rapid swing, pivoting the rear end to the right. Very quickly as the full front and the right corner of the vehicle dug into the wall, the crash forces applied to the occupants became more like a side collision than a frontal collision. As the Blazer continued pressing against the wall with the front end (for 200 milliseconds, he said), the whole vehicle was sliding laterally along the wall. Finally, it bounced away from the wall, sliding almost backward. Then each occupant was thrust back toward the seat backs in the Blazer.    

            I agreed with that reconstruction. The inertia force of the truck yawing to the left would press Mr. King tightly against the inside of the door before the collision. Mr. King would pivot on his shoulder and be facing the door when the larger crash forces developed. Even without the belt, he would pivot on his right shoulder and slide forward. If he was using the seat belt, the shoulder belt of the passenger was routed over the right shoulder. His left shoulder would still be free to rotate forward and to the right,

            That would put him in an awkward position to operate the door handle with either hand. If anything, he would be trying to press away from the door by pushing, not pulling, in my opinion. The driver’s head would go directly toward the head star location that we saw in the photos of the windshield. Then the truck slid away from the cliff face and the rear end swung to the right so that the truck was briefly sliding sideways, almost backwards. This would cause the vehicle to lean to the right while continuing to plow shallow furrows in the frozen dirt of the road shoulder. The rightward lean caused the corner of the open passenger door to dig in to the ground. The truck continued a counterclockwise spin while moving northward along the shoulder. King was on the ground near the center of the spin, like a kid near the center of a merry-go-round. He was not thrown out violently; he simply fell out backward through the open door way backward and was deposited on the ground in my opinion. There was no indication that King slid or rolled himself along the ground. The back of his head hit the frozen ground hard enough to cause irreversible brain damage.

            Our claim

            The passenger door could have unlocked itself. I once had the responsibility of conducting crash tests for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. When we did that, we were told to lock one door and leave the other locked (or two and two, if there were four doors). That was done to see if the door locks are self actuated during the 30 mph frontal crash. The NHTSA thought self-locking would not be a good idea because it would delay escape or rescue if the occupants were incapacitated

            In the Blazer, the front door locks “buttons” are sliders that move forward to unlock the door. There are no springs to resist this, only weak detents. Thus we know that the early frontal crash forces would themselves cause the door to become unlocked. So, that is a good thing, according to NHTSA.

            This is important for us. Why? When the door is locked, the inside and outside door handles are physically disconnected from the operating lever of the door latch. However, if the door is unlocked, then the mass of the inner and outer handle mechanisms will be able to exert inertial force on the latch itself. If the inertia forces are oriented right, they could unlatch the door.

            My argument was that the door latch itself contains the defectively designed components that do not have universal mass balance. In this case, universal means that the mass balance of the each piece should be considered in thee planes: forward, laterally and vertically – known as the X, Y and Z directions. When that is done correctly no crash forces can cause inadvertent opening of the door.

            I studied this door latch like others I have seen. Even before I had any concern about car doors opening themselves, I had a friend while I was at Consumers Union, publisher of Consumer Reports magazine, who was. This fellow had been a test engineer at an auto maker when he discovered the concept of inertial self-unlocking and opening car doors. He later went into the safety advocating business like I did and then slid into assisting plaintiff cases against car makers like I did also. From him I learned how to do the calculations to determine if the lock and latch hardware parts were balanced. My friend introduced me to this when he asked me to set up a computer program to do the calculations for him quickly. Later, we worked on a door-opening case where the vehicle had rolled over four or five times down the side of a country road. Thus vehicle didn’t roll like a log either – it bounced.

            The door lock and latch can become disengaged when subjected to real world vertical shock forces such as the one in this case. That means it is unreasonably dangerous for the purpose of keeping the door closed. In my opinion, GM had concerns about the cost of using balanced levers: added weight, added cost, and added volume inside the narrow door. However, they can afford the cost and weight of the "Blazer" emblem on the outside of the door which must be more than the correct hardware inside. There is room inside the door ahead-of and below the existing latch. Only the thickness of the latch within the width of the door, t the back edge, is a genuine concern. Isn't safety a greater concern?

            This Blazer latch must contain unbalanced components that are sensitive to shock from three directions. X, Y, and Z. We needed to show that. I can demonstrate the sensitivity to crash forces by calculation. I did not have enough data from GM to calculate the values in X, Y and Z that would trigger the opening.                

            Surely, it would be beneficial for door latches on all doors not be prone to inadvertent opening from shock forces in any direction, even hatch doors and sliding doors. In the early days of the safety movement, work was done to prevent rollovers, or to improve survivability during one. All statistics made it plain that ejection from a vehicle was much more likely to cause severe or fatal injuries. Thus, Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard number 206 requires that the doors should stay closed.  .

            It was not to be

            The cards were stacked against our side of the case. My friend was not available to get involved. Nobody I knew of could perfect the complicated shaking tests of an exemplar door to demonstrate that shaking it in some combination of directions would release the latch.

            But, I was certain that General motors had the necessary data to do the calculations. They had to have that analysis done to assure the NHTSA that their vehicles did comply with the door-stay-shut requirements of FMVSS 206. I did not ask for them to produce the calculations – just give me the raw data so I can do them.

            GM stalled and stalled and … The judge seemed to be unable to believe us that GM should have the numbers and that the calculations would prove our case.

            As I said in another story, “Crushed”, auto companies have plenty of inertia so that they are able to stall until the other side runs out of money or patience. It worked this time. I thought that it was a slam-dunk case – if we had shown our case they way it was done in earlier cases.

Poor Mr. King. He probably is still in a "home" somewhere; and is still a burden for his family to support.