Many lawyers when faced with a client, who has been injured in an auto crash, will begin their case investigation by considering the potential liability of party or parties involved in the accident. This is the usual starting point of investigating a vehicular collision.

But aside from asking who caused the accident, an auto crash lawyer must also verify who was responsible for the client’s injuries. The answers to these are not always the same.

In many occasions, the party who caused the auto accident cannot be held for sole liability because there was another party who was also accountable for the injuries the victim/s sustained.

A person’s injuries may not result from the auto crash itself, but rather from the faulty design or manufacture of the vehicle that he was riding. Such defects may have caused more injuries than what he/she could have obtained given the circumstance that his/her vehicle has no defects.

Under these circumstances, the parties responsible for the design and manufacture of the vehicle shall be held liable for all or some of the person’s injuries, no matter if they are not responsible for the accident itself. This is commonly referred to as enhanced injury cases.

Enhanced injury liability or the doctrine of crashworthiness, imposes liability on the car manufacturer, not for causing the accident, but for worsening the injuries caused by the alleged defects. It extends the scope of liability to a vehicle manufacturer which, in constructing and designing a product, has caused more injuries to the passengers apart from what they could have only sustained.

The crashworthiness doctrine gives the victim a right to recover for enhanced injury damages. He/she must be able to prove that those injuries were due to the fault of the manufacturer. If the enhanced injuries cannot be proven, then the manufacturer has no liability under the crashworthiness doctrine.

If you shall ask, what is crashworthiness? It is a term which refers to how well vehicles withstand different types of crashes. From an engineering perspective, it is the ability of the vehicle to prevent passengers in sustaining injuries in the event of an accident. It is the technical foundation for enhanced injury theory or the legal doctrine of crashworthiness.

An enhanced injury case can be based on an underlying assumption of negligence, strict liability, and other premise that could be pursued in a product liability action. To prevail in a strict liability claim against the manufacturer of a substandard or defective vehicle, the plaintiff must establish that:

• the vehicle was in a defective condition making it unreasonably dangerous to drive or operate
• the defective condition of the vehicle enhanced the injuries the plaintiff suffered
• the vehicle was being used in a foreseeable manner at the time the injuries were suffered
• the vehicle was defective when it left the possession and control of the manufacturer

Crashworthiness litigation entail an intensive investigation which will involve evaluation of the accident scene, vehicles involved in a crash, medical and police reports, and information from other sources such as motor vehicle engineering analysis and vehicle compliance tests.