Originally posted by: tcsenter
Well if you remember about 12 years ago when sales of ATVs such as high performance three wheelers and four wheelers hit an all-time high, and the increase in serious accident rates involving ATVs scaled perfectly with this surge in sales. There was this 'push' to ban or severely restrict ATVs sales, prohibit minors from riding them, mandate advanced rider courses, and sue ATV makers. Same thing with personal water craft.
Anytime you take a specialty vehicle, particularly a high performance vehicle like a Quad Sport, make it both affordable and desirable to the masses, you're invariably going to find a whole lot of idiots buying them who shouldn't because they haven't the first clue how to drive them properly or competently then get themselves killed or paralyzed.
Nobody would think of careening through the snow in their Corvette or BMW 5-Series with a snow blade mounted on the front, nor would they take them off the beaten path. Why it is that people think they can drive a 5,200lb SUV in the same manner one would a Corvette or 5-Series, I'll never know.
Just as there was absolutely nothing 'wrong' with the design of ATV four wheelers, most accidents were attributable to rider-error, there is nothing 'wrong' with SUVs, except that they are not suitable for 'the masses', no more than a GSX-R1000 is suitable for 'the masses', or a Corvette, or a Quad Sport, or a Wave Runner, etc.
However, I'm torn on the issue of whether manufacturers are negligent in their marketing of these specialty vehicles to the masses without also including a superfluous degree of cautionary advisories and warnings at every step of the purchasing process.
I have no problem with big tobacco selling cigarettes, but you have to adequately warn people that your product will eventually kill them. Similarly, SUV makers had a duty to warn people that their product was unsafe if driven in certain manners. But where the lines are between 'adequate' and 'inadequate' are very muddled and difficult to pin down.
I remember a case against a gun manufacturer, where a kid took a .22 rifle and tried to 'spin' the rifle around his finger over his head. The gun discharged and struck his own mother in the head, severely injuring her (if not killing her).
They sued the gun manufacturer, arguing that the gun manufacturer should have anticipated that someone might try to spin the rifle around their finger causing the rifle to discharge, and because the manufacturer didn't expressly warn against spinning the rifle around one's finger in the product's manual, it had a duty to design its product to prevent accidental discharge from spinning the rifle around one's finger.
There must be some reasonable expectation of care on the part of the user, because it is impossible to predict and expressly warn against all possible ways in which idiots can devise to misuse a product. The product manual for a simple hammer would be 300 pages long in order to warn against every possible way in which some idiot might misuse a hammer. The product manual for a complex product like a car would have to be a multi-volume encyclopedia of don'ts.
Not that even a fraction of people actually read the warnings already given in product manuals, anyway.
