A floor jack is built to lift a car, not to hold it up. Those are two different jobs, and the tool is rated for only the first. The device built for the second is the jack stand, a steel tower that takes the weight once the car is in the air. So when a car comes down on the person underneath it, the law does not begin by blaming him. It begins with the tool, and with what was supposed to be holding the weight.
The occasion. Shortly before 9 p.m. on Wednesday, in the 1400 block of West Kings Highway on the West Side of San Antonio, a man in his thirties was doing repairs on a car at a home when, as KSAT reported it from police, “a floor jack that was holding up the car gave out, and crushed him.” News 4 San Antonio put it the same way: a jack collapsed and the car came down on him. Officers pronounced him dead at the scene. Police have not released his name, have not said why the jack gave way, and have not said whether jack stands were in use; the investigation is open. This page names no one and draws no fault. It is here because a tool that fails under a car raises a question most people never ask until it is too late.
What the tool is for. Read the owner’s manual of an ordinary two-and-a-half-ton hydraulic floor jack, the kind sold for a driveway. The safety list says, in these words, “Lifting device only. Immediately after lifting, support the vehicle with appropriate means.” It says “Do not exceed rated capacity.” It says “Use only on hard, level surfaces.” And it says, in the line that matters most, “Never work on, under or around a load supported only by this device.” The appropriate means is named a few pages on: a matched pair of jack stands of the right capacity, their saddles set under the support points the carmaker specifies. The jack lifts. The stands hold. The federal occupational safety standard for jacks says the same thing for the workplace, in the voice of a rule. The jack must have “a rating sufficient to lift and sustain the load,” and “After the load has been raised, it shall be cribbed, blocked, or otherwise secured at once.” At once. Neither the rule nor the manual allows a minute under the car on the jack alone, and Crush explains what the weight does in that minute.
Even the stand can fail. In May 2020 a national tool retailer told its customers, in a recall letter now filed with the federal highway safety agency, that it was recalling its three-ton and six-ton jack stands because, “while under load and with a shift in weight,” the pawl could “disengage from the extension lifting post, allowing the stand to drop suddenly,” a condition that “could cause serious injury for people near or under a lifted vehicle.” In July 2020 it recalled another three-ton stand, 118,000 of them, for a base weld that “may fail allowing the stand to drop suddenly.” That is the lesson underneath the lesson. The jack is the evidence, and so are the stands if there were any, with their item numbers and the receipt, because a stand that was built wrong is a products case against the people who built it, and a stand that was never there is a different case. Keep all of it, the way Spoliation says to keep the car.
The law. Texas does not start with the man under the car. It starts with the tool and asks what it was rated to do, the way Crashworthiness asks what a car must be built to survive. A floor jack is a product, and the company that designed, built or assembled it and placed it “in the stream of commerce” is a manufacturer under the Texas products statute. If the claim is that the design was defective, the statute puts the burden on the injured side to prove two things: “there was a safer alternative design,” and “the defect was a producing cause” of the injury or death. A safer alternative design is one that “would have prevented or significantly reduced the risk” without “substantially impairing the product’s utility,” and that was “economically and technologically feasible” when the jack left the maker’s hands; The Roof and the Tank walks through that test. Why a jack lets go is an engineering question, the seal, the valve, the saddle, the surface it stood on, and it is answered by engineers with the jack in their hands, which is why the jack has to still exist. If stands were there and were skipped, that weighs too. Texas asks the jury to set “the percentage of responsibility” of each claimant, each defendant, each settling person and each responsible third party a defendant designates, the injured person included, “whether by negligent act or omission, by any defective or unreasonably dangerous product,” and bars recovery only when the injured person’s share “is greater than 50 percent”; Comparative Fault explains how that arithmetic runs. One more clock: a products claim must be brought “before the end of 15 years after the date of the sale” of the product by the defendant, which matters for a jack that has lived in a garage for twenty years. And when the car comes down on a worker at a shop, the maker of the jack is the third party the workers’ compensation bar does not reach, the door On the Job describes; when it happens in a driveway, the maker is simply the defendant.
A tool rated to lift is not a tool rated to hold. The whole case can turn on knowing the difference, and on the one piece of steel that was supposed to be under the car.
Dispatch is the Night Docket’s news strand: what happened on Texas roads and in Texas courts, reported from credible outlets and agency releases, with no names and no conclusions about open investigations, then connected to the entries that explain the science and the law. General information, not legal advice.
