Word: cars
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...cost. Increasingly, however, the automakers are finding that soft-pedaling safety can cost them quite a bit too. General Motors learned that lesson with its Corvair line, which it dropped last week (see BUSINESS). Recent court decisions in four states against all four major automakers suggest that any car that fails to measure up to reasonable safety standards may prove highly expensive in terms of damages. Each of the cases involved a decision extending the liability of manufacturers...
...Supreme Courts of Texas and California both ruled that a bystander injured by a faulty car may sue and collect damages from the car's manufacturer without having to prove negligence (anyone other than the owner or user is generally known in legal shorthand as a bystander). In most earlier cases only owners or users of a faulty vehicle had been exempted from proving negligence on the part of the manufacturer. But in Texas, two passengers in a car hit by a Ford truck with defective brakes were permitted to sue the manufacturer of the truck under the more...
...Alaska Supreme Court ruled that manufacturers owe more than a simple warranty obligation to the purchaser of a new car. A Plymouth station wagon had been driven only two weeks when its owner was overcome by carbon monoxide and suffered brain damage. Some plugs normally placed in holes in the body were found to be missing, enabling the gas to seep into the car. Chrysler argued that the laws governing its highly publicized five-year warranty should be controlling. Not persuaded, the court added Alaska to a growing list of states that now make manufacturers strictly liable for any defect...
...district court judge in Pennsylvania held that accidents are now so common that manufacturers are liable if their cars prove unreasonably unsafe in a crash. The suit was brought by a woman who was riding in a Buick hardtop that flipped over. The roof collapsed, and the woman contended that it was defective and had added to her injuries. General Motors replied that accidents are not part of the normal and foreseeable use of the car. Judge John Fullam found that defense too narrow. While automakers cannot be required to build a "crashproof" car, he said, "passengers must be provided...
...Roof is undeviating: life is an undeclared war. As Williams has dramatized it, that war is conducted on two fronts. The lacerating confrontations between Blanche DuBois and Stanley Kowalski, between Big Daddy and his son Brick and Maggie the Cat, are blistering barrages of domestic car nage. They are also metaphors for a more profound and transcendent struggle, the war against the gods, the irrational, immutable duel with destiny, disaster and death - all that is meant when one speaks of man's fate. This is the war that no man wins, and that is why it is called tragic...