How Vehicle Recalls and Defects Contribute to Car Accidents
Car owners everywhere know the dread that comes with a postcard from your vehicle’s manufacturer. It includes a brief statement about a recalled component in your vehicle and urges you to go to your local dealership to get it repaired free of cost. Of course, that still means taking time off of work, spending hours sitting in the dealership lobby, and hoping that the repair doesn’t uncover any other issues. Recalls are an important part of vehicle safety, but they often don’t happen until a defect has already caused multiple serious injuries or fatalities.
What happens when a defective auto part causes a crash and leaves you injured? You may have a defective product claim against the vehicle manufacturer. Learn more now by calling Reeves & Mestayer at 228-300-2754.
Common Types of Defects
Any part of a vehicle can be defective or dangerous, but some recalls seem to come up again and again across different brands and types of vehicles. These issues include:
- Wheels prone to cracking or breaking
- Electrical system issues
- Defective accelerators
- Airbags that deploy when they shouldn’t or do not deploy when they should
- Faulty steering components that cause drivers to lose control of the vehicle
- Defective seats
- Unsafe or faulty brakes
Whenever a component can break or come off of the vehicle, activate when it shouldn’t, or not activate when it should, you may have a defective component. When this occurs, it’s only a matter of time until it causes a serious or fatal injury.
How Defective Parts Can Lead to Injury
There are multiple ways that defective auto parts can cause injury to drivers and passengers. First, the component may break and render the vehicle unsafe to drive, causing a collision. For example, defective brakes can fail when you need to stop, causing a crash that otherwise would not have happened.
Second, defective components can make an unrelated crash worse than it should have been. Consider defective airbags. The crash in which they should have deployed was not caused by the airbags, but because the airbags did not deploy when they should have, the victims suffered more serious injuries than they should have.
In both cases, a manufacturer may be liable. They have an obligation to consumers and anyone who may share the road with their vehicles.
A Manufacturer’s Duty to Consumers
Legally, manufacturers have a duty of care to the general public. Before putting products on the market, they are expected to put them through rigorous testing to catch dangerous errors and repair them before letting the product reach consumers. This is expensive and time-consuming. Manufacturers must either wait to begin production until all issues have been found or recall millions of units when a serious issue is discovered.
For that reason, manufacturers have been caught intentionally putting out unsafe or faulty products. Upon discovering flaws, some manufacturers calculate roughly how much they’ll have to pay out in injury claims by extrapolating the number of affected units across all units produced. They weigh that against the amount of money it would cost to recall and repair all affected units. This is obviously immoral, as it puts profits ahead of human life. In these situations, manufacturers are often ordered to pay punitive damages for their callous disregard for consumer safety.
When it comes down to it, manufacturers are obligated to make and sell safe products. Defects will occur since no testing process can catch every single potential defect in a product. However, manufacturers must take reasonable steps to conduct appropriate safety testing and repair defective components. When defects become apparent, manufacturers have an obligation to recall the product and repair it for consumers.
When manufacturers breach their duty of care, consumers have options. A defective product claim can hold the manufacturer or designer accountable for their negligence and provide victims with the compensation they deserve.
Injured by a Defective Auto Part? Call Reeves & Mestayer
Have you been in a crash caused by a defective vehicle part? Don’t wait any longer to find out if you have a viable claim against the manufacturer. Let’s sit down for a free case evaluation and figure out your next steps. Call us at 228-300-2754 or contact us online to schedule your consultation.
