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New York
CNN Business
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The family of an elderly couple who died when the roof of their F-250 pickup fell off in a rollover accident in 2014 has been awarded a whopping $1.7 billion in punitive damages from Ford.
The jury appeared to endorse the plaintiff’s arguments that Ford knew about the problem years before the fatal crash, acted slowly to correct it and that other deaths resulted from the same design flaw. .
Evidence presented in the case showed that F-250 pickups made in the 17 model years prior to 2017 pose a risk to drivers and passengers in rollover cases, said Jim Butler Jr., the attorney who won the verdict. He said 5.2 million trucks were built with the same defective roof.
Perhaps more troubling is that the best-selling F-150 pickups built before Model Year 2009 have a similar roof design, Butler said. The F-150 has been the best-selling US vehicle of any kind for more than 40 years.
“There are many millions of F-150s on the road with this roof,” Butler told CNN Business Monday. “I don’t know how many. They will not answer that at trial.”
The April 2014 crash in Gwinnett County, Georgia, killed Melvin Hill, 72, and his 62-year-old wife, Voncile Hill. A jury previously awarded the family $24 million in damages. The $1.7 billion in additional damages was awarded by a jury on Friday.
The case originally went to trial in 2018 but the plaintiffs were granted a mistrial after three weeks because Ford introduced evidence that the court ordered the company not to show, Butler said.
The punitive damages were awarded because Ford knew in advance of the 2014 crash that it had a problem with the roof, Butler said. He said Ford engineers had already designed a safer roof, but the automaker did not immediately move to install it on trucks.
“Long before Hills died, Ford was on notice from their own engineers, their own crash tests and dozens of accidents that killed people, and it did nothing,” Butler said.
Ford did not comment on Butler’s claim that the older F-150 and F-250 have similar roofs that are at risk of collapsing. It did say it intended to appeal the large verdict.
“While our sympathies go out to the Hill family, we do not believe the verdict is supported by the evidence, and we plan to appeal,” the company said. “Meanwhile, we will not litigate this matter through the news media.”
For years, the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration has exempted heavy-duty trucks like the F-250 from the same safety standards as passenger cars and trucks. But Butler said there was no difference in this case.
“The NHTSA standard is irrelevant,” he said. “By law this is not a defense.”
And it wasn’t a change in NHTSA standards, but potential pickup buyers doing research on the vehicle’s safety record that finally prompted Ford to put a stronger roof on both the F-150 and F -250, according to Butler.
Butler said the evidence in the case clearly shows that the Hills would have survived the crash if the roof of the cab had not collapsed on them.
“They might as well be in a convertible,” he said.
Butler acknowledged that the $1.7 billion verdict will likely be reduced on appeal, but he hopes it will serve as a wake-up call to both automakers and pickup truck owners.
“The Hill family is grateful to the jury for their verdict, and is glad that this phase of the trial is over, finally,” Butler said. “An award of punitive damages to hopefully warn the people who ride in those millions of trucks sold by Ford is why the Hill family is seeking the verdict.”
If the punitive damages are upheld by the higher courts, the Hill family and their lawyers will get only 25% of the award amount. Under Georgia law, the state gets 75% of the awards granted by the courts. The only way the plaintiffs can get the full amount of punitive damages is if a settlement is reached between the two sides, Butler said.
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