Products Liability Law Reporter

A New York appellate court held that summary judgment for the defense was warranted in a case alleging Ford Motor Co. was liable for defective design of a passenger van.

Here, Ford Motor Co. was sued after a crash resulting from a tire blowout on a Ford passenger van. The plaintiffs alleged defective design, failure to warn, and breach of warranty and sought punitive damages. The trial court dismissed all of the claims except those for defective design and failure to warn.

The appellate court held that the plaintiffs’ design defect claim should have been dismissed because the plaintiffs had failed to rebut the defendant’s prima facie showing that the Ford van was not negligently designed. Citing case law, the court found that an expert cannot raise an issue of fact to defeat a summary judgment motion by offering an opinion consisting of bare and conclusory allegations of defects or industry-wide knowledge. Here, the court said, the plaintiffs asserted that the van was unsafe and subject to rollovers but failed to offer any data or testing to support those claims. The court rejected the plaintiffs’ argument that their claims are supported by NHTSA reports, concluding that such reports constitute hearsay and relied on testing of generic passenger vans.

The court also found that the plaintiffs’ failure-to-warn claim was subject to dismissal. The plaintiffs failed to show that a defect led to their alleged injuries, the court said. Therefore, there can be no claim that Ford had failed to warn.

Citation: Richards v. Ford Motor Co., 2021 WL 4734061 (N.Y. App. Div. Oct. 12, 2021).