Ford ignored its engineers’ advice that the Explorer sport-utility vehicle needed design revisions to prevent rollover accidents and fatal injuries, according to internal company documents and employee depositions cited by Bloomberg News.
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The report said company records show that, in 1993, Ford engineers James Cheng and Jessy Li advised the company to reinforce Explorer roof supports to prevent collapses in rollovers.
Ford didn’t make changes because the US government didn’t require any, Ford engineering supervisor Christopher Brewer said in a 2003 deposition cited by Bloomberg News.
The news agency added that, in 1999, Ford engineers in Venezuela warned that Explorers were rolling over and had caused at least nine deaths because of flaws in the suspension.
Three years earlier, Ford engineers had said in writing that the deficiency could be solved by moving the shock absorbers toward the wheels but Ford didn’t make the change, Bloomberg News said.
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By GlobalDataAttorneys suing Ford reportedly are using these and other documents obtained by Bloomberg News in as many as 500 lawsuits claiming defects in Explorers.
The news agency said more than two dozen trials claiming defects in Explorers are set for this year, the first one starting on Monday, at a time when higher petrol prices and changing tastes are cutting into Explorer sales.
Theodore Boutrous, Ford’s appellate attorney, told Bloomberg News that Ford didn’t do anything wrong in not following the advice of some of its engineers.
“It didn’t mean Ford wasn’t acting in good faith,” Boutrous, a partner at Los Angeles-based Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP, reportedly said, adding: “When talking about safety in the science of engineering, one of the key issues is debate.”
Bloomberg News noted that these lawsuits are part of the aftershock of the investigations in 2000-2001 into rollovers related to Bridgestone Corp.’s Firestone-brand tyre blowouts.
The suits are fuelled partly by thousands of pages of internal documents the company revealed after the recalls of defective Firestone tyres, the report added.
While there are claims against other automakers involving rollovers, the public release of these internal documents in court files leaves Ford vulnerable, Robert Rabin, a law professor at Stanford Law School, told Bloomberg News.
“It’s the combination of the revelation of documents, the common importance of these documents to new cases and the networking of lawyers who try these cases,” Rabin reportedly said.
