Liability: Responsible at Any Speed?

Whipping along an Indiana highway at about 115 m.p.h., Michael Bigham’s 1960 Chevrolet Impala smashed into the rear of a car going 55. Since Bigham was clearly liable for the accident, his insurance company settled with the injured driver and passengers in the other car. But one passenger was not satisfied. Contending that the manufacturer “should have foreseen that the auto mobile would, in fact, be driven at excessive and unlawful speed to the risk of the public,” Philip Michael Schemel sued General Motors on the un usual ground of negligence in building a vehicle that would go so fast.

Schemel, who was completely paralyzed from the neck down for a month and whose left leg and arm are still partially paralyzed, had two things going for him: intense public concern with auto safety, and the tendency of more and more courts in the U.S. to hold manufacturers to tougher standards of liability when their products cause injury. Indeed, one member of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, Judge Roger Kiley, agreed that “automobiles are intended to be used in an environment in which a traffic death occurs every eleven minutes and an injury every 19 seconds, and in which there are reckless, irresponsible drivers like Bigham. In my opinion, General Motors is chargeable with the duty of reasonably foreseeing the probable dangers” of building a car capable of high speeds.

Kiley’s two colleagues definitely thought otherwise; they were unwilling to extend the product-liability trend far enough to sustain Schemel’s claim. Their ruling held that the manufacturer’s “duty is to avoid hidden defects and latent or concealed dangers. He is not bound to anticipate and guard against grossly careless misuse of his product.”