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McCathern v. Toyota Motor Corp.4/28/1999
9601-00689
Appeal from Circuit Court, Multnomah County. Joseph F. Ceniceros, Judge.
Argued and submitted September 10, 1998.
Affirmed.
Plaintiff Linda McCathern brought this product liability action against Toyota Motor Corporation, Toyota Motor Sales, U.S.A., Inc., and Broadway Toyota (collectively "Toyota") for damages arising from severe permanent injuries she sustained when the 1994 Toyota 4Runner in which she was a passenger rolled over at high speed. At trial, the jury returned a verdict for plaintiff, and Toyota appeals. We conclude that the trial court did not err in denying Toyota's motions for directed verdict and judgment notwithstanding the verdict (JNOV), because plaintiff submitted evidence from which a jury could conclude that the 1994 4Runner failed to meet reasonable consumer expectations, and was, therefore, defective. We further conclude that the trial court did not abuse its discretion in admitting plaintiff's evidence of "other similar incidents" or in denying defendant's motion for a new trial. Accordingly, we affirm.
Because the jury returned a verdict in plaintiff's favor, we view the evidence and all inferences that may reasonably be drawn from the evidence in the light most favorable to plaintiff. Greist v. Phillips, 322 Or 281, 285, 906 P2d 789 (1995). In 1994, plaintiff's cousin, Elizabeth Sanders, leased a 1994 Toyota 4Runner sport utility vehicle. On May 28, 1995, plaintiff and her young daughter and Sanders and her young daughter, were returning to Portland from Idaho in Sanders's 1994 4Runner. At about 9:30 that evening, the 4Runner was traveling at approximately 55 miles per hour on a straight, flat portion of Washington State Highway 395, a two-lane highway with wide, paved shoulders. Sanders was driving, plaintiff was in the front passenger seat, and the two children were in the back seat. Sanders saw oncoming headlights in her lane of travel, and to avoid a collision with the oncoming vehicle, sharply steered her vehicle to the right on to the paved shoulder. To prevent the 4Runner from going off the pavement on the right side of the highway, Sanders countersteered quickly to the left, sending the vehicle across both her lane of travel and the northbound lane. She then countersteered again, back to the right, to avoid leaving the road on the left side. After that third steering input, the 4Runner began to roll. It rolled over twice and then came to rest fully upright in the center of the highway, without ever having left the pavement. In the course of the rollover, the roof over the front passenger seat was crushed. Plaintiff suffered a broken neck and was permanently paralyzed from the neck down. Sanders and the children suffered no permanent physical injuries.
In January 1996, plaintiff brought this action against Toyota, pleading claims of negligence and strict products liability. Plaintiff alleged, inter alia, that the 1994 4Runner was "dangerously defective and unreasonably dangerous in that it was unstable and prone to rollover" as designed and sold.
The case was tried to a jury over three weeks in March and April of 1997. Plaintiff offered detailed and often technical testimony from a variety of expert witnesses, including Thomas Fries, a mechanical engineer specializing in accident reconstruction, Leon Robertson, a statistician specializing in injury statistics, and Simon Tamny, another accident reconstruction expert. Fries presented his analysis of the mechanics of the rollover of Sanders' 4Runner and testified that, in his opinion, the sole cause of the rollover was "the geometry of the vehicle"--there was no evidence of braking, off-pavement travel, or a "rim trip." Robertson p
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