Strong Justice For Serious Disease

Design defects and products liability claims in PA

On Behalf of | Jan 27, 2016 | Firm News

There are many ways that products that were originally created for the public good to become dangerous to a Pittsburgh residents health and safety. This is the basis of product liability claims — that a manufacturing, design or a failure to warn defect a product injured or killed its user. Let’s look at one aspect of products liability that affects Pittsburgh residents: design defects.

Scarily enough, there are numerous ways that design defects could occur in a product that could harm a person. Design defects are classified as such because due to a design decision in the product, it became inherently dangerous to the user. For example, many years ago a car company designed a vehicle with the gas tank in the rear of the vehicle. Why is this dangerous?

Many and drivers and passengers found out the hard way that the gas tank was too close to the rear of the vehicle when involved in otherwise minor rear-end style accidents. When the cars were rear-ended, the gas tank caused many of these vehicle to explode. This design choice could have otherwise been avoided by relocating the gas tank to another, less dangerous, area of the vehicle. Based on this, the injured and their families received a large settlement based on a design defect of the vehicle.

Obviously, the amount of danger depends on the product and it’s probability to cause harm to the user. There are endless ways that a product designed for the common good to become dangerous to a user. Proving this take a certain skill-set. Investigating the dangerous item in question is a great place for Pittsburgh residents to start in order to prove a design defect.

Source: injury.findlaw.com, “Defects in Design,” Accessed Jan. 25, 2016

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