Wabash National is evaluating its options in response to a $462 million verdict against the truck trailer manufacturer by a jury in Missouri state court. The case involves a fatal crash of a car into the back of a truck in 2019 in which two people in the car were killed.
The St. Louis jury reached their verdict – which includes $450 million in punitive damages and $6 million each to the families of the two victims in compensatory damages – after three hours of deliberations following a two-week trial, according to Courtroom View Network (CVN), a civil litigation service.
The verdict could have major implications for the trucking industry, which has resisted regulations to require impact guard equipment to prevent cars from sliding underneath trailers causing fatal accidents.
“We hope the decision the jurors reached sends a clear message to the trucking and trailer industry and will finally force them to build safer trailers,” CVN noted, quoting plaintiff co-counsel Brian Winebright of Cantor Injury Law after the trial.
Lafayette, Indiana-based Wabash National (NYSE: WNC) maintained that the accident occurred nearly two decades after the 2004 trailer involved in the accident was manufactured in compliance with the existing regulatory standards.
“While this was a tragic accident, we respectfully disagree with the jury’s verdict and firmly believe it is not supported by the facts or the law,” said Wabash’s General Counsel Kristin Glazner in a statement. “No rear impact guard or trailer safety technology has ever existed that would have made a difference here.”
The accident occurred when the car crashed into the back of the truck “at a speed the plaintiff attorneys and their expert witnesses said was effectively about 45 miles per hour,” CVN reported, with jurors hearing testimony that a rear impact guard with a newer design would have prevented the car from sliding beneath the truck.
“The plaintiff legal team argued throughout the trial that Wabash never performed effective crash testing on the two-post guard despite using it for nearly 30 years, and that the company chose not to upgrade their rigs to save money despite evidence from other similar accidents that they posed a serious safety risk.
“They also argued that a 1998 federal safety standard for rear impact guards, which featured heavily in Wabash’s defense, did not go far enough and that its limitations were known to manufacturers throughout the trucking industry, some of which had upgraded to more modern four-post designs,” according to CVN.
Wabash commented after the trial that the jury “was prevented from hearing critical evidence in the case, including that the driver’s blood alcohol level was over the legal limit at the time of the accident.”
Wabash also pointed out that “the fact that neither the driver nor his passenger was wearing a seatbelt was also kept from the jury, even though plaintiffs argued both would have survived a 55-mile-per-hour collision had the vehicle not broken through the trailer’s rear impact guard.
“Wabash stands firmly behind the quality and safety of all its products, and this ruling will not prevent the company from continuing to provide its customers with products that contribute to safer roads.”
The jury award may also send a signal to federal regulators to be more proactive in issuing regulations that better protect the public in truck underride crashes, according to crash victim families.
“For over 50 years, NHTSA has failed to require truck trailers to be equipped with underride guards that protect road users from death and injury,” said Marianne Karth, whose daughters were killed in a truck underride crash 11 years ago, in a statement to FreightWaves.
“A St. Louis jury made one of those trailer manufacturers pay a just price both because they continued to sell an inadequate rear impact guard as standard equipment – even though they have a safer option available – and because of the industry’s lobbying and the government’s abandonment of public safety.”
