In this article, we examine a number of court rulings precluding or curtailing experts from testifying in automobile products liability cases. The courts examined the experts’ opinions and the foundations for them and held either that the methodologies were unreliable or the opinions were untrustworthy because of too large an analytical gap between the conclusion and the underlying foundation. Two appellate rulings, one recent, deal with expert reliability issues in so-called sudden acceleration cases, a hot litigation topic now afflicting Toyota. Though these decisions involve Ford Motor Company, they nevertheless seem to be informative on how good science may be lacking in the Toyota syndrome. Following some comments on the acceleration storm, we survey these and other rulings on experts in automotive cases.
The legal tsunami that struck Toyota in recent months is largely lawyer-driven. The class actions, individual lawsuits, congressional hearings, agency inquiries, and media reporting of these episodes were instigated by a number of first-person accounts, some sensational, that vehicles in motion suddenly accelerated beyond the driver’s ability to control the surge. But it is lawyers’ strident characterizations of the phenomenon as a fraudulent defect that punctuate the lawyers’ race to the courthouse. What kind of science underlies these accusations?
