Vehicle crashworthiness is a car, truck or SUV’s ability to protect occupants from injury in an accident. By demanding a high level of crashworthiness, lawyers, auto makers and vehicle owners ensure the safety of drivers and passengers of an automobile in case of an accident. If the structure of the vehicle is not up to today’s safety standards, the driver and passengers can be seriously injured or killed if involved in a collision. Annually, hundreds of people are hurt in automobile accidents where the auto manufacturer has failed to produce a crashworthy vehicle by selling cars with defective or failure-prone components.
Auto manufacturers use computer models and experiments to predict crash failures but, often, crashworthiness is determined retrospectively by analyzing crash outcomes. In the event of an accident, the crashworthiness lawyers at Davis, Bethune and Jones assess post-collision evidence such as deformation patterns in the vehicle structure, injury predicted by human body models, recent auto recalls and defect notices to determine the liability and compensation deserved in the case.
