Missouri Injury Lawyer Blog

The bad news just keeps coming for Toyota. According to the Washington Post, a federal grand jury has subpoenaed information from Toyota for an investigation into concerns about vehicle safety defects. As a Missouri car wreck attorney, I've been following the investigations into Toyota's runaway acceleration problems. Now the focus has widened to include defects with steering relay rods. Just as with the sticky acceleration pedals, Toyota is facing accusations that it kept quiet about the steering relay rod problems rather than informing consumers. While Toyota undoubtedly doesn't welcome these developments, it's good that these problems are coming to light so that Toyota and other automakers can learn that there are consequences to putting public safety at risk by allowing defective vehicles on the roads.

Several Toyota trucks and SUVs -- certain 1989 to 1998 4Runners, T100 pickups and Toyota pickups -- are implicated in the faulty steering relay rods investigation. The defective steering relay rods, which connect the steering wheel to the wheels, reportedly break and leave the drivers without control of their vehicles, making this a very serious safety problem. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is apparently treating this as a criminal investigation. The investigation is looking into whether Toyota shrugged off complaints of steering relay rods breaking. Toyota had issued recalls first in only Japan, claiming that the problem would affect only Japanese drivers and not Americans because the tight maneuvering required in Japan would stress the steering mechanisms more. However, at least 15 crashes, 3 deaths, and 7 injuries have occurred in connection with the problem in the U.S., according to the NHTSA. Toyota issued a U.S. recall in 2005, but only a small number of the affected vehicles were fixed. In 2007, Michael Levi Stewart, an Idaho teenager, was killed after the steering relay rod snapped in his 1991 Toyota pickup, causing it to veer off the road and roll over.

As a St. Louis car crash lawyer, I hope that the NHTSA's toughening stance on Toyota's numerous recalls will deter other automakers from failing to warn consumers about safety issues in a timely manner. Accidents like Michael Levi Stewart's leave families and communities with tremendous emotional losses, especially when they happen through no fault of the victim's. Automakers do not have a right to withhold information about serious safety problems until they feel that the right time has come to disclose it. All manufacturers are legally required to tell the public about any unavoidable safety problems with their products. Automakers who place their company's financial and public relations concerns ahead of public safety can be held responsible for any harm that their products do. Their failure to warn the public is a form of negligence, or carelessness, and victims should not and do not have to bear the consequences of the company's negligence all on their own.

Continue reading "Toyota Faces Criminal Investigation Into Failure to Warn About Steering Rod Problem" »

Back in April, the Senate passed a bill that included a reauthorization of the Prescription Drug User Fee Act (PDUFA) for five more years, and the House is set to take it up soon. So what is PDUFA and why should you care?

In short, you — and the pharmaceutical companies — have a lot riding on it. PDUFA first was passed in 1992 to help the FDA review drugs more quickly and get them out to patients sooner. It created a "user fee" that a company pays when it submits the large volume of research the FDA must review before approving or rejecting a drug, essentially paying the FDA to speed up its decision making process. The biggest question as Congress debates reauthorizing the law is if FDA should raise the fees and use a larger portion of that funding to look at drugs after they've been approved and gone to market.

Back in 1992, drug companies were screaming that it took far too long to get their drugs to market — particularly because it cut into the time a drug was under patent. Consumers also were lobbying for new drugs to be made available in a more timely fashion. (Of particular concern at the time were AIDS drugs.) Once passed, PDUFA was hugely successful, cutting the time almost in half for many drugs to hit the market. About 50 percent of all new prescription drugs now are available in the U.S. first vs. just eight percent before PDUFA. Pharmaceutical companies’ profits have soared because of it.

However, that speed of approval also is viewed by many as the main downside of the law. Drugs like Vioxx, Ketek and now Avandia are looming large in the new debate. All three of these drugs ran into problems after the FDA approved them. The possibility of heart attacks or liver failure weren't discovered in connection with these drugs until they had been approved and were in use in large numbers. So now many are calling on increasing the fees to cover the costs associated with follow-up on approved drugs. Some have argued that computer programs could mine huge databases like those of Medicare and HMOs to find potential problems with drugs on the market much more effectively than waiting for random doctors' reports — or lawsuits — to trickle in.

PDUFA has been a very effective law, but we must watch closely to see if it is updated to fix some of its shortcomings.

In February, I wrote about the lawsuits that Toyota will increasingly face regarding the unintended acceleration of some of its cars, which has been blamed for 93 deaths. Toyota's handling of recalls related to the unintended acceleration problem have led to some serious public- and government relations problems, since the company appears to have sat on evidence about these problems for three years before doing anything about them. The New York Times recently reported that Toyota has admitted that some of the reported incidents of sudden acceleration really were related to problems with floor mats and sticking accelerator pedals, rather than only due to driver error, as the carmaker had previously claimed. From my perspective as a Missouri car crash attorney, Toyota's admission means that consumers and their advocates should continue to insist on complete answers to questions about whether their vehicles are safe.

Toyota's acknowledgement that the floor mat and sticking pedal problems are real came in the context of its investigation of about 2,000 reports of sudden acceleration. The company did not say how many of these incidents it believes were caused by floor mats or sticking pedals, but its spokesman, Mike Michels, said more of the incidents were related to floor mats than to pedals. Michels said that none of the vehicles with sticking pedals were involved in crashes, and he was unable to say how many crashes were related to the floor mats. Toyota maintains that in almost all crashes related to unintended acceleration, the problem was that the driver mistakenly pressed the accelerator rather than the brake.

Michels said there was no evidence of problems with the electronic throttle control system, despite the research of Southern Illinois University professor David Gilbert that demonstrated such problems. However, Toyota may be avoiding looking closely at its electronic throttle system because it’s afraid of what it might find. A Massachusetts consulting firm, Safety Research and Strategies, is taking a broader view of the unintended acceleration problems. Its president, Sean Kane, said, “You can’t ignore the fact that when they move to an electronic throttle control, you basically see a fourfold increase in complaints.” Toyota's investigation has focused on information gathered by vehicles' onboard data recorders, which are activated by crashes violent enough to cause the airbag to deploy. But Kane pointed out that these recorders rely on “the same sensing system that is unable to detect the failure to begin with,” so they couldn't prove that a car didn't accelerate suddenly on its own. And Toyota itself has argued in court cases that its onboard data recorders should not be used as reliable sources of evidence.

As a southern Illinois auto accident attorney, I find the suggestion that Toyota may be purposely avoiding looking at its electronic throttle control very troubling. Between Professor Gilbert's account of Toyota's possible attempts to quash his research into its electronics, and Toyota's own description of the onboard data recorders as unreliable, it seems clear that those who have been harmed by automobiles with runaway acceleration problems should keep pushing for real answers. They should also discuss with a St. Louis car crash lawyer how they might pursue compensation for any harm they have suffered as a result of Toyota's failure to warn consumers or investigate the cause of defects in their vehicles.

Continue reading "Toyota Admits Validity of Sudden Acceleration Claims Involving Pedals and Floor Mats" »

In 2001, nearly 500 deaths and more than 1 million emergency room visits across the United States came as a result of all-terrain vehicle (ATV) injuries. The estimated nationwide cost for ATV-related accidents is $3.24 billion each year. What’s more, a recent study was released in Utah claiming that spine and head traumas caused by ATV accidents are on the rise.

But even more troubling, ATVs have been shown to cause a high number of spinal injuries in children. New research from a number of universities indicated that 7.4 percent of a group of 4,483 children studied over several years suffered spinal injuries while operating the machines. This reflects a 368 percent increase in spinal injuries compared to similar research conducted in 1997. Alarmingly, the average age of riders injured on ATVs was just 13 years old. Young riders are most vulnerable to injuries on these vehicles; in addition to spinal and head injuries, ATVs also are being blamed as the cause of many amputations and deaths.

Rollovers are the most common form of ATV accidents. ATVs can hit speeds of close to 50 miles per hour. Combine that with the vehicles’ high center of gravity and short wheel base, and you have an inherently unstable, fast-moving machine. While turning, one has to lean into the turn to shift the center of gravity, but smaller riders would have difficulty with this on a machine that can weigh up to a quarter of a ton. That is why young, inexperienced drivers are more than two times as likely to crash their ATVs. In the 1980s, ATV manufacturers did away with their three-wheel design because of instability issues. But there has been no move to modify the current four-wheel models in any significant way.

Sadly, more than half the patients who enter an E.R. for ATV accidents were not wearing helmets, making them much more likely to suffer traumatic brain injuries.

As a southern Illinois auto accident attorney, I was very interested in a recent story in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch about Toyota's alleged attempts to intimidate a Southern Illinois University automotive technology professor and suppress his research into Toyota's runaway acceleration problems. Toyota has donated cars as well as money to SIU, and the company may have used its standing to pressure SIU administrators to stop Professor David Gilbert from publicizing his worrisome findings. Knowing how many people have been hurt and how many more are afraid that their cars might suddenly accelerate, these allegations would be unfortunate, if proven, both for the safety of the driving public and for Toyota’s own financial security.

In January, Gilbert discovered that he could cause runaway acceleration in a Toyota Avalon by manipulating its electronics. When he did so, the car's computer did not switch over to a fail-safe mode that would allow the brake to override the gas, as it should have. Gilbert went to Toyota with his findings, but after hearing what he had to say, they never got back to him. Gilbert felt he couldn’t stay silent, the article said, so he took his findings to the government and media. In response, Toyota sent some attorneys to meet with Gilbert and university officials about his testimony before Congress, a meeting that Gilbert said "was meant to maybe intimidate me." Toyota also assembled its own group of experts to refute Gilbert's findings, saying that the conditions under which he produced the runaway acceleration could never happen on an actual road. SIU's then-chancellor Sam Goldman also received an email from a man who said he was an SIU alumnus and a Toyota Motor Sales employee, complaining that Gilbert should be fired for making what he called false accusations about Toyota, and reminding him of his and Toyota's financial and in-kind contributions to the university. University officials apparently did their best to assuage Toyota and maintain the relationship.

In my view as a St. Louis car crash lawyer, it would be much better for the company to work with someone who could discover solutions to the runaway acceleration problem than to try to cover it up. If the allegations are proven, Toyota's alleged treatment of Gilbert and his work could actually hurt the company’s public relations and its financial bottom line. Evidence that Toyota passed up an opportunity to work on a potential fix for a serious problem could make the company look bad in all the lawsuits it's already facing over runaway acceleration. Not only is there evidence that Toyota had received over 2,000 complaints over the last decade and knew about the pedal problem three years ago, but Gilbert's story suggests that Toyota was more interested in denying any problem than fixing it. Unfortunately for Toyota, its customers may have a strong basis for a legal claim that it failed to warn drivers about the problem in a timely manner, in addition to a possible claim about a design defect. And if the automaker is found liable, it could be forced to pay its customers billions of dollars because of the seriousness of the claims and the huge number of affected vehicles.

Continue reading "Professor Alleges Toyota Tried to Quash His Research Into Runaway Acceleration" »

As I wrote last week, summer unfortunately brings what seems like a constantly increasing number of ATV accidents. One accident mentioned in the Springfield News-Leader caught my eye because the person hurt was riding a Polaris ATV. As a Missouri all-terrain vehicle crash lawyer, I've kept track of Polaris ATVs because they have been involved in countless recalls over the years, thanks to their potentially deadly defects.

In this case, the person hurt by a Polaris ATV wasn't even out having a good time on it. On the morning of July 4, Shad D. West, 36, of Greenfield, Missouri, was loading his 2004 Polaris ATV onto another vehicle or a trailer when it flipped over backward and landed on him. The Missouri State Highway Patrol report doesn't give much detail, but presumably West was trying to drive the ATV up a ramp into the other vehicle, in the usual manner for transporting an ATV. Sadly, West was seriously injured by the ATV rollover and had to be airlifted to Cox South Hospital in Springfield. I hope that West recovers quickly and fully, and I am sorry that this happened to him.

As a St. Louis ATV defect lawyer, I've worked with many clients who have been injured by defective ATVs. As I've discussed in this blog before, many ATVs' designs are inherently unstable, making them prone to flipping over on top of their riders and crushing them. But the unstable design isn't the only problem plaguing ATVs and their riders. Thousands of Polaris ATVs have been recalled over the years because of fire hazards and defective parts that could lead to drivers losing control of their vehicles. Most recently, at the end of 2009, about 8500 were recalled because the steering mechanism could come apart and cause the rider to lose control, posing a risk of injury or death to riders. The US Consumer Product Safety Commission had issued similar recall notices for out-of-control Polaris ATVs in 2007, 2004, 2001 and 2000. Thousands more were recalled due to dangerous fire hazards from various causes in 2009, 2008, 2007, 2005, 2004, and 2003.

This history of defects in Polaris ATVs is worrisome. It is particularly concerning that recalls keep happening year after year, meaning that defective ATVs keep getting manufactured despite repeated reports of problems with previous models. This puts consumers at risk of serious injury or even death. Who pays the price for these defects? The adults and children who suffer brain injuries, spinal cord injuries and amputations. Not only do they experience severe pain, they also incur thousands of dollars in medical bills, lose out on wages they or their caretakers could have earned at work, and potentially even lose their lives. This doesn't seem like a fair price to pay for what the victims had originally thought was going to be a fun outing in the outdoors.

Continue reading "Recall-Prone Polaris ATV Implicated in Another Injury-Causing Accident" »