The latest nuclear verdict hitting the trucking industry is a $160 million award against manufacturer Daimler Truck North America for a rollover that left a driver of a 2023 model Western Star truck a quadriplegic.
A Circuit Court jury in Clarke County, Alabama ruled earlier this week that Daimler was required to pay Leonard Wiley Street $75 million in compensatory damages and the same amount in punitive damages. In addition, his wife Tracy Street was awarded $10 million.
With the informal benchmark for a nuclear verdict generally accepted as $10 million, the case against Daimler well exceeded that cutoff point.
It’s the second nuclear verdict in recent weeks involving the manufacturer of trucking equipment rather than a trucking company itself. Earlier this month, a St. Louis jury hit trailer manufacturer Wabash National with a $462 million payout to the families of two men who died after being involved in a crash with a Wabash trailer.
Clarke County was the site of the June 2022 crash that left Street a quadriplegic. According to the original complaint filed by Street, and based on an interview with Benjamin Baker of the law firm of Beasley Allen, which represented the plaintiff, Street’s truck was driving on U.S. Highway 84 when a pickup truck heading the other way crossed the center line into Street’s lane. Street’s actions to avert a crash led to a rollover, and the force of the truck cab’s roof caving in led to neck injuries that left Street paralyzed.
According to Baker, Street was a driver for Scotch Plywood and would make three trips a day between the company’s operations in Waynesboro, Mississippi, and destinations in Alabama.
The original lawsuit, filed early 2023, was against the driver of the pickup truck and his employer. Baker said that litigation has been settled. But the law firm turned its attention to a bigger target: Daimler Truck North America (OTC: DTGHF), which manufactures Western Star trucks.
‘Significant and large’; Daimler comments
Baker said the verdict was “significant and very large, and I think that’s reflective of the fact that he’s a quadriplegic. It’s a life-altering injury.”
In a prepared statement released to FreightWaves, a Daimler North America spokesman said the company “(stands) by the safety of our products and our safety testing (including cab crush) meets and exceeds all industry standards in place in the U.S. and worldwide. We have strong grounds for appeal and will vigorously pursue our appeal.”
Cab roof and seat construction raised as an issue
Baker said in the interview with FreightWaves and in documents filed with the Alabama court that the two issues his firm raised against Daimler Truck North America were the construction of the cab, in particular the strength of its roof, and the movement of the suspension seat in the cab.
In a court filing after testimony had been completed, Street’s attorneys quoted one of the witnesses who measured the cab after the accident. That witness, Paul Lewis Jr., described as “an expert in the fields of biomechanics and injury causation,” testified that “the subject cab had catastrophic loss of occupant survival space due to the roof crash based upon measurements taken at his inspections of the subject vehicle.”
Research done years ago, Baker said, had found that rollovers were producing “statistics of significant injuries and deaths. One reason was that on a rollover, the roof would be crushed “down almost to the dashboard,” he said. The second was that in a suspension seat, which is designed to move as trucks drive over uneven surfaces, “when they got inverted was pushing the driver into the roof that was collapsing in.”
Baker said the lawsuit faulted Daimler for not adopting more modern technology to strengthen the roof.
“During the rollover event the driver’s seat which Mr. Street was occupying is not locked or fixed, meaning it moves up, so as the vehicle begins to invert the seat is going to move up to the full extent,” Street’s attorneys said in a post-testimony filing. “As the seat goes up, Mr. Street follows it, moving him closer to the roof.” Lewis’ testimony is then quoted: “He’s just basically sitting there waiting on it to come and smack him in the head and to ultimately break his neck.”
One of the arguments from Street’s attorneys was that Daimler Truck North America should have adopted a product called RollTek, which Baker said was “specifically designed to address this suspension seat travel issue during rollovers.”
As Baker described it, RollTek, when it “senses” a rollover, tightens the seat belt, “which means it’ll take the slack out of the seat belt to pull the driver tighter to the seat, and then it will actually take the seat and lower it to its lowest position and hold it there, so that you create that 9 or 9 1/2 inches of headspace above you, so that if the roof crushes in, you’ve been moved down as far away from it as you can, instead of being pushed up to it.”
Baker said RollTek is an option on Western Star trucks but not a standard feature. “We took the position that if you recognize a serious hazard, like they have in all their studies about rollovers, and the suspension seat pushing you toward the roof is a danger, if you have a fix, you need to make it standard.”
In a separate post-testimony filing, Daimler Truck North America said one of Street’s witnesses arguing in favor of the RollTek seat “failed to perform the testing necessary to prove [the seat] would have mitigated [Street’s] injuries in the accident.”
The Daimler filing also took aim at the expert witness on the issue of the structural integrity of the cab roof.
The witness, Brian Herbst, suggested an alternative that he had designed himself. But Daimler said Herbst “admittedly did not subject his prototype to any testing representing the subject crash.”
Baker said he expects an appeal will be filed. The next step in the appeals process in Alabama is straight to the Alabama Supreme Court.
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