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Tag Archives: accident lawsuit

Seat back failures during car crash can cause serious injuries

Research data shows that during a car accident, the back of the driver’s seat can break, causing severe injuries. The worrisome thing noted by experts is that this is true even of cars that meet the most current National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) guidelines. The concern involves not just the driver’s seat but also the seat back of the front passenger, according to specialists. They note that the problem is not limited to any one car manufacturer and is a well-known dangerous condition that has been ignored for way too long. The car seat failure often occurs during a rear-end accident where the vehicle is hit from behind. The force of the crash is transferred into the seat back which then buckles and cracks under the pressure. The person sitting in the seat is then violently thrown and injured, even when wearing a seatbelt. Common injuries can include spinal injury, paralysis and internal bleeding from lacerated organs. Activists familiar with the problem explain that passengers in the rear seat of the vehicle, often little children, are also prone to suffer severe injuries and wounds due to the defect. Children have been known to suffer facial injuries, head injury and even death after being struck by pieces of the seat. Cases have been documented of the headrest breaking off and striking the back seat passenger as well.

Car safety advocates have expressed outrage over the fact that the federal government and car makers haven’t properly fixed the hazard. They insist that the federal regulations must be changed to force factories to reinforce the seats so that they don’t collapse or snap during a high force impact of a motor vehicle collision. Some have pointed out that not doing so may be considered negligence and expose the negligent parties to accident lawsuits. You can read more about the weak federal safety standards and deadly problem here.

Illustrative Photo (Altered to obscure license plate): Joe Shlabotnik [License]

General Motors braces for more faulty ignition switch lawsuits

A dangerous product recall for defective parts in many General Motor (GM) vehicles has been in place for nearly a year. The car recalls have expanded since then, encompassing many car models manufactured as early as 2003 and as recently as 2011. Records show that well more than 300 wrongful deaths and more than 2,700 car accident injuries have been blamed on the defective car parts causing a crash. An administrator has been instructed to sort through the claims and lawsuits, in an effort to compensate the victims. At least 50 of those car crash death cases and 75 of the personal injury cases have been determined as eligible for compensation by the company. However, a deadline has been set for injury victims or the family of someone killed in a car collision to file a claim against the car company. GM has reportedly braced for a possible increase in the number of last minute claims and accident lawsuits against them in the coming days. Some of the injured people have sought the assistance of personal injury lawyer experts in order to make sure that they recover the money that they deserve. Analysts believe that the company has been trying to settle the lawsuit cases quickly, before the results are published from investigations into how much and when the car manufacturer knew about the dangerous situation regarding the flawed ignition switches. Accusations have circled for some time that the company were negligent by ignoring the known problem for many years, leading to many additional motor vehicle crashes. For further details about the ignition switch recall program, please see this article.

Illustrative photo by Ballista on en.wikipedia [CC BY 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons