Crash Worthiness Overview

Every aspect of a car, from rear bumper to headlights, seats and headrests, steering and suspension, and every other mechanical and electrical system can be designed for optimum safety. Improvements such as automatic seat belts, air bags, anti-lock braking systems, electronic stability control and daytime running lights have increased cars’ safety and visibility. Car manufacturers increasingly design for safety, and promote safety features as selling points. When you’re buying a car, it’s a good idea to check out the safety and crashworthiness ratings of any model, new or used, that you’re planning to buy. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety rates all cars on their safety features and publishes the findings on their website. The Institute also publishes a guide to shopping for a safe car.

For years, good trial lawyers, including lawyers at Casey Gerry, have brought actions against manufacturers of vehicles when seatbelts did not hold, or when poor and unsafe designs within the vehicle made collision injuries far worse than they should have been. This type of litigation is often referred to as crashworthiness litigation. Sometimes in a collision the seatbelt will break causing a person’s body to catapult in a way that results in a serious injury. Had the seatbelt not broken, the injury would have been relatively minor. Sometimes there will be an implosion in the vehicle that causes part of the vehicle to intrude on the passenger space, causing massive injuries to passengers or driver. Statistical research may show that in better designed vehicles such intrusion injuries simply do not occur.

Crashworthiness is a measure of how well a vehicle protects its occupants in a car accident or crash. Since the late 1970s, the federal New Car Assessment Program has compared frontal crashworthiness among new passenger vehicles. This program, which employs 35 mph collisions into a full-width rigid barrier, has been highly successful in providing US consumers with crashworthiness information on vehicles sold in the US. The program has had a major influence on automotive design, as manufacturers have improved their vehicles’ crashworthiness in order to perform better on the New Car Assessment Program

As a result of the New Car Assessment Program and its crashworthiness ratings, today's passenger vehicles are significantly more crashworthy than they used to be. Still, about 40,000 people, drivers and passengers, die in car accidents and crashes on US roads each year. About half of the deaths occur in frontal crashes. There continues to be substantial room for improvement.

Sport Utility Vehicles, SUV’s, are a class of vehicle for which principles of safe design have not been implemented. SUVs’ high center of gravity makes them more likely to roll over during quick maneuvers to avoid an accident at highway speeds. Insurance industry statistics show that in all but the heaviest SUV's, occupants have higher death rates in single-vehicle accidents. The principal factor is vehicle rollover. Casey Gerry auto accident lawyers in San Diego always investigate the safety design of vehicles involved in a car crash or accident, to determine the safety of the vehicle relative to industry best practices, and the functioning of all safety-related components.