In a crashworthiness cases, the plaintiff has the burden of proving that the manufacturer breached its duty in a manner that proximately caused the plaintiff’s injuries. The first case to hold that a manufacturer has a duty use reasonable care to design a vehicle to avoid subjecting the user to an unreasonable risk of injury in the event of a collision did so in recognition of the manufacturer’s ability to foresee the statistical inevitability of collisions. Accepting this inevitability, the some courts have declared that the intended use of motor vehicles and motorcycles includes surviving collisions which has been accepted in the majority of jurisdictions. The policy behind this conclusion is that the manufacturer’s duty to use reasonable care in the design and manufacture of a product to minimize injuries to its users and not to subject its users to an unreasonable risk of injury in the event of a collision or impact should be recognized by the courts…. Legal acceptance or imposition of this duty would go far in protecting the user from unreasonable risks. The normal risk of driving must be accepted by the user but there is no need to further penalize the user by subjecting him to unreasonable risk of injury due to negligence in design. However, the courts do not require a manufacturer to construct an accident-proof vehicle; rather, it held that general negligence principles apply to impose liability when unreasonable risk of injury is created by the manufacturer’s design. The issue is whether or not the design creates unreasonable danger can be determined using general negligence principles “which involve a balancing of the likelihood of harm, and the gravity of harm if it happens against the burden of the precautions which would be effective to avoid the harm.” Any design defect not causing the accident would not subject the manufacturer to liability for the entire damage, but the manufacturer should be liable for that portion of the damage or injury caused by the defective design over and above the damage or injury that probably would have occurred as a result of the impact or collision absent the defective design.
