Roof Crush
A new study relates that strength of a car's roof to its ability to prevent serious injury in a rollover crash.
A new report from the University of Alabama has studied Ford's own internal crash test data and concluded that the strength of a vehicle's roof is absolutely critical in preventing death or serious injury in the event of a rollover incident. Read More.
Ford has resisted this common sense conclusion for decades in its defense of hundreds of crashworthiness lawsuits. In these suits, Ford argues that serious injury and death are not a function of roof strength, but instead these injuries a function of violent rollovers. Implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, championing the position that rollovers are so violent no roof can help, no matter how strong.
I'm hopeful independent analysis such as the above study will continue to resist this overly literal and self-interested interpretation of rollover accidents. No one disputes that a rollover can generate strong g-forces inside the cabin. But vans rollover and SUVs rollover... period. Strong roofs keep heads, necks, and other vital body parts inside and safe from the those deadly gs. Just ask the many NASCAR drivers who rollover their cars at speeds in excess of 150mph and walk away from these crashes with little more than a scratch.
No reason, other than profit and price, that you can't have the same.
But this brings up another point. The argument Ford has been using for so long is flawed on another, more legalistic level. The inquiry Ford is making preeminent when they argue this way is: could the occupant survive this very deadly crash?
That's a very narrow way of looking of products liability. Classically, the inquiry is opposed to the above. That is to say, the focus of the issue is not whether or not there's any way to prevent the damage, but rather whether the risk of the harm justifies the cost of amelioration.
Put another way, in classic legal tort theory we presuppose that you can build a crashworthy vehicle. And in almost all cases this is true. Only the most violent, least likely, esoteric collision situations are "un"engineerable. If that isn't true folks, we are in some trouble cause it means our engineers have hit the wall of innovation.
After we presuppose crashworthiness, we then ask: is the cost of making the vehicle crashworthy in balance with the potential harm should it remain uncrashworthy.
With around 5,000 SUV deaths alone per year, I would argue we haven't quite hit the cost threshold just yet. And more importantly, I think most people faced with the question framed in this broad context would come to the same conclusion.
