You CAN sue the manufacturer of the vehicle
By: Darrell Castle
If you or a loved one have been injured or killed in a rollover accident, I’d like to talk about it. Call (901) 327-1212 to schedule a free consultation with an experienced personal injury attorney, or fill out one of the contact forms on this page.
Video Transcript
If you’re killed or seriously injured in a vehicle rollover accident, can you sue the manufacturer of the vehicle?
Hi, I’m Darrell Castle and I’m an attorney licensed to practice law in the state of Tennessee and the answer to that question is most definitely, yes you can. But it needs to meet certain qualifications.
Usually these rollover accidents that cause death or serious injury are SUVs – sports utility vehicles. These vehicles have been found time and again in different accidents to have a high center of gravity – higher than the safety rules allow. That causes the vehicle, or allows the vehicle, to rollover.
Then you have the concern of what happens when it rolls over. It doesn’t meet basic safety standards sometimes. The roof collapses, which can result in devastating injuries. The window pillar – the thing that holds the roof to the body of the car and is supposed to hold its weight in a rollover accident sometimes doesn’t. All of these things have to be proven in order to recover for your injuries, or your death, or someone else’s death like your passenger.
These have to be proven to be a designed defect. In other words, the company put it out on the highways in a defective condition. It has to be more than just an accident – you have to be able to prove it was designed that way defectively.
These things have happened in many accidents. One way you can prove your case is to get information from other accidents that have happened to typically the same vehicle in the same way and often times you can recover information that the company knew this was a designed defect, yet they turned the car loose anyway.
But, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, about 10,000 deaths occur in rollover accidents on the American highways each year and more than 60% of those are SUVs, so you’re much more likely to be killed in an SUV rollover.
So those are all things to consider – if you go after the manufacturer of one of your vehicles for a rollover accident, it needs to be for a serious injury like death, brain injury, spinal cord injury, severed limbs, paralysis and things of that level of seriousness because it is very expensive, difficult and complicated, but if you have an injury of that level, then you have to do it, folks.