Yup, air bags, gas tanks, unintended acceleration, rear engine, ignitions, tires, all are driving the cost of driving up and up. For a company with the cash reserves of Tesla Motors, they are one aggressive Class Action suit away from insolvency today. Why didn't they put on run flats? 2 deaths would be curtains, because I guarantee they considered it.
Science, statistics, reason, and fault are no longer that important in the process. GM has bore the brunt of the cases it seems, but all mfr's get affected. Yeah, it's a pet peeve of mine to assume that folk who work in manufacturing are assumed to be perfect and can see into the future. I wish lawyers I hire were just 1/2 competent, if you held them absolute perfection, none would exist.
There has NEVER been a safe car ever built by today's tort standards. If there were any design changes, or sort component changes, there will be a level of poor outcome, even when the improvement in outcome is larger. But most the money in these cases feeds the law corporations that specialize in large dollar class action suits. Sometimes over 80% of the total dollars involved go to the legal firm.
And it could kill the EV industry. Engineers at EV companies have done fire studies. And they do what is REASONABLE to mitigate the fire potential, but, they do not do what is unreasonable, which means they deliberately went the cheaper route. Everybody does this.
At fatality levels of under 1 per million vehicles, there have been massive class action suits. Most are a few hundred thousand to 1. There are not a lot of EVs yet. When there are 5 million in the US, suddenly there will be big bucks on the table.
