Suspected Vehicle Malfunction Causes car to Crash into Home
A family in Karns, Tennessee got a rude awakening around 1:30 a.m. on Monday morning when a car crashed through their porch and into their home, causing about five thousand dollars worth of damage. Police do not yet know the cause of the wreck, but it is suspected that the primary cause may have been malfunction of the vehicle. If malfunction turns out to be a cause of the accident, the manufacturer of the vehicle, rather than the driver who was driving at the time of the accident, may be liable for the damages.
Tennessee’s Products Liability Act allows a party who is involved in an accident, whether that party is the plaintiff or the defendant, to bring suit against the manufacturer of a product (in this case, the manufacturer of the defective vehicle) to recover damages caused by the negligent manufacture of that product. To be successful in such an action, the person bringing suit against the manufacturer will need to prove that the product was “in a defective condition or unreasonably dangerous at the time it left the control of the manufacturer” under T.C.A. §29-28-105. In making this determination, the statute provides that the state of scientific and technical knowledge available to the manufacturer at the time of the making of the product is determinative rather than the state of such knowledge at the time of the accident. Thus, someone wishing to sue a vehicle manufacturer for negligent manufacture would have to prove that the product was in a defective condition or unreasonably dangerous when it left the hands of the manufacturer based on what the manufacturer should have known at the time the product was made.
The Tennessee Products Liability Act provides several different methods, of which negligence is only one, by which a manufacturer of a defective product can be held liable for damages caused by that product. Products liability suits can be extremely complex and thus will almost always require the expertise of an attorney. However, Tennessee drivers should be aware that they may not be the sole party responsible for accidents such as the one described above.
Source: http://www.wbir.com/news/local/story.aspx?storyid=108466&catid=2
