Personal Injury Law

Enterprise Rent A Car Deletes Safety Feature

By George Fusner

The Kansas City Star reported today that Enterprise Rent A Car ordered cars from General Motors without a proven safety feature. This saved them a reported $11.5 million. The thrust of the story is that they then resold the used cars but advertised them with the side curtain air bag safety feature. To "make it right" they are now buying them back at a $750 premium.

That not what is outrageous about this story. What is outrageous is the deliberate defeat of a safety device. I wrote yesterday about the 50 year birthday of the three point seat belt. How many lives were saved and serious injuries avoided by this device?

What are side curtain airbags and what do they do? Edmunds has a good article on the subject. A couple of quotes:

When you're shopping a family car, you probably use the frontal crash test ratings to help determine whether a vehicle will protect your family. It's actually side-impact collisions that pose the greatest risk of injury to occupants. This is because the "crush zone" — the space between the outer edge of the vehicle and the passenger compartment — is so much smaller on the side than on the front or rear of a vehicle. In response, most automakers have been outfitting their vehicles with side airbags designed to protect passengers' heads and chests.

Side airbags can protect the head, the chest or both, depending on their design. Safercar.gov is a good place to start your research, as it provides a complete list of automakers that offer side airbags along with details on the various types.

Airbags that protect the head only use a curtain or tubular design. Volvo was the first to offer head-protecting curtains, starting in the 1999 Volvo S80. Both designs typically deploy from the roofline in a downward motion, covering the majority of the windows, sometimes all of them. They offer head protection only to occupants who are tall enough that their heads would impact the window in a crash. Further, they only protect occupants seated in the outboard positions adjacent to where the airbag deploys.

I can rest assure you that if a person is injured as a result of the removal of this device a jury could very well award punitive damages. Why?

Punitive damages in Tennessee are awarded when a person suffers actual damage first. The purpose of punitive damages is not to further compensate the victim, but rather punish the wrongdoer and deter others from committing similar wrongs. The punitive damages are awarded when the wrongdoer has acted either intentionally, recklessly, maliciously, or fraudulently. This action by Enterprise fits that definition to the T.

These cases would be very similar to a company removing guards on machines to speed production and then a worker loses an arm or hand. There is no explanation but greed. I have rented from Enterprise before. Not now, there is no telling what else they have short cutted for profit.

Full post as published by Nashville Personal Injury Lawyer on August 18, 2009 (boomark / email).