A roof that folds into the space where a head was. A side window that lets a body out. A door that springs open in a roll. None of those caused the crash. Each of them decided who walked away from it. The law has a word for that question, and it is not about the driver.
Crashworthiness. Cars crash, and everyone who designs one knows it, so the law asks a car to do more than drive: it has to protect the people inside when the crash comes. The claim is not that the vehicle caused the wreck. It is that the vehicle made the injury worse than it had to be. In a 1979 case over a sedan that rolled once and whose roof caved in at the driver’s corner, leaving a belted driver paralyzed, the Texas Supreme Court called it a crashworthiness case and quoted with approval the rule that a person hurt by a mechanical defect in a vehicle should be protected “even though the defect was not the cause of the collision” (Turner v. General Motors). In the terms of The Third Collision, the first collision is the car against the world. Crashworthiness is about the second: the body against the car, and whether the car kept its promise.
The standards. Unlike the side of a trailer, which no federal rule covers (the point of Guard and Voluntary), a passenger vehicle carries federal crash standards aimed at exactly these failures. The roof: the current test presses a steel plate onto one side of the roof and then the other, and a vehicle with a gross weight rating of 6,000 pounds or less must hold up to three times its own unloaded weight without the plate moving more than about five inches; heavier ones, up to 10,000 pounds, one and a half times (49 CFR 571.216a). The windows: every covered vehicle built since September 1, 2017 must keep a test headform from moving more than about four inches past the plane of the side window, tested 1.5 seconds and again 6 seconds after the protection deploys, long after a frontal crash would be over, because a roll is not (49 CFR 571.226). The government estimated that rule would save 373 lives and prevent 476 serious injuries a year. The doors: the latch and hinge standard exists “to minimize the likelihood of occupants being ejected from a vehicle as a result of impact” (49 CFR 571.206).
What a standard does in court. Meeting a federal standard does not end the question, but in Texas it changes who starts ahead. When a design complied with mandatory federal standards “that were applicable to the product at the time of manufacture” “and that governed the product risk that allegedly caused harm,” the maker gets a rebuttable presumption that it is not liable (Civil Practice and Remedies Code Section 82.008). Two fights follow. The first is which risk the standard actually governed: a roof-strength test says nothing about a door latch, and a window rule says nothing about a roof. The second is the rebuttal the statute itself allows: proof that the federal standard was inadequate to protect the public from unreasonable risks, or that the maker withheld or misrepresented information relevant to the government’s judgment of whether the standard was adequate. Where no mandatory standard governed the risk at all, there is no presumption, which is the other half of the argument Voluntary makes.
What has to be proved. In a design case the burden is the claimant’s: a safer alternative design, one that would have “prevented or significantly reduced the risk” of the injury without substantially impairing the product’s utility and that was economically and technologically feasible when the car left the maker’s control, and proof that the defect was a producing cause of the injury (Section 82.005). In a crashworthiness case the injury is measured against the design, not the crash. The question is what a stronger roof, a curtain that stayed up, or a latch that held would have changed for the person inside.
Both cases at once. Crashworthiness does not replace the case against the driver who caused the wreck. It sits beside it. Texas sends every contributing cause to the jury to divide, “whether by negligent act or omission, by any defective or unreasonably dangerous product,” or by other conduct that violates a legal standard (Section 33.003), which is the arithmetic of Comparative Fault. The driver who ran another car off the road answers for the crash. A maker whose roof folded can answer for what the roof did.
The car is the evidence. Everything in a crashworthiness case is in the metal: how far the roof came down, whether the belt webbing shows it held or spooled out, whether the buckle latched, whether the curtain deployed and stayed up, whether the door latch let go, and what the vehicle’s own recorder logged, which is where Delta-V is read. A car the insurer totals is usually sold for salvage, and a crushed car cannot be measured. The first move is a letter that keeps the vehicle whole, because a lost car can mean a lost case, which is what Spoliation is about. The car accidents Before You Call answers the question the way a family asks it.
Crashworthiness asks the question the crash report never does. Not who caused the wreck, but whether the car did its job once the wreck began.
The law: Turner v. General Motors Corp., 584 S.W.2d 844 (Tex. 1979) (quoting Huff v. White Motor Corp., 565 F.2d 104 (7th Cir. 1977)); Tex. Civ. Prac. & Rem. Code § 82.001, § 82.005, § 82.008, and § 33.003. The standards: 49 CFR 571.216a (roof crush resistance), 49 CFR 571.226 (ejection mitigation), 49 CFR 571.206 (door locks and door retention components); NHTSA, Ejection Mitigation final rule, 76 Fed. Reg. 3212 (Jan. 19, 2011). General information, not legal advice.
