Following a five-week trial, a jury rendered a unanimous decision in favor of Mercedes-Benz in a product liability lawsuit alleging that a design defect in Plaintiffs’ 2015 Mercedes-Benz GL450 SUV caused a fire in the vehicle after Plaintiffs were struck at highway speed by a wrong-way drunk driver. Plaintiffs also claimed that the second-row seat release mechanism was defective. The accident ultimately resulted in the deaths of two of the family members and catastrophic injuries to a third. Mercedes-Benz and their counsel expressed their sincere sympathy to the Moore family regarding the tragic consequences of the accident.
The crash occurred on May 25, 2019 outside of Ann Arbor, Michigan at 2 in the morning. The Moore family was traveling on eastbound M14 when their vehicle was struck by a wrong-way drunk driver at highway speed. At the time of the initial crash, the vehicles impacted one another at a closing speed of approximately 144 MPH. Following the initial impact, the GL450 experienced three additional impacts after which, the vehicle ultimately caught on fire.
At trial, Plaintiffs claimed that the 2015 GL450 was defectively designed because Mercedes placed the ABS control unit in a location that was likely to be damaged in an offset frontal crash, and that brake fluid from the ABS control unit caused the fire. Plaintiffs also claimed that the second-row seat release mechanism prevented the third-row occupant from escaping the vehicle post-crash. Mercedes-Benz presented evidence at trial that the ABS control unit location had been used by Mercedes since it introduced ABS for the very first time in 1978, that it was a commonly used location across various Mercedes platforms, as well as in millions of other manufacturers’ vehicles. Despite this common design, this was the first and only such incident involving claims of brake fluid release from the ABS control unit. Mercedes also established that the sole cause of the accident and the ensuing fire was the severity of a series of collisions caused by the wrong-way drunk driver. Mercedes additionally demonstrated that the second-row seat release mechanism was at or above the state of the art. After five weeks of evidence, it took the eight jury members only two hours to soundly reject both defect claims and refuse to award any damages.
Mercedes-Benz was represented by Alexander P. Imberg, Stephen M. Fazio, and Jaimie Buchbinder of Squire Patton Boggs (US) LLP. The Squire team jointly tried this case with Thomas P. Branigan, Nick Even, and Matin Fallahi of Bowman and Brooke LLP.
The case is Moore et al. v. Mercedes-Benz Group AG, case number 22-002559-NI in the Circuit Court of Wayne County, Michigan.