Vehicular Rollover Accidents

Rollover crashes account for roughly 10,000 fatalities nationwide, about a third of all automobile accident deaths.  Some rollovers are the result of an “intervening cause”, such as striking an object, an uneven road surface, leaving the road and other causes that causes the vehicle to rollover.

However, some rollover accidents are the result of a defective design in the vehicle.  In the 1990s there was a series of famous cases involving the Ford Explorer and other SUVs.  These cases proved that the design of some vehicles was defective, making them prone to rollover in situations where they should not have.  A classic case of this is when a vehicle makes an emergency evasive maneuver and rolls over despite not hitting an object or leaving the road.

Another important line of cases involves 15 passenger vans.  Ford and other manufacturers took large cargo vans that were never intended to carry passengers and put rows of benches in them.  Thousands of these vans travel the road today and sadly are popular with churches and schools.  Because these vans have high tension suspension designed to handle large loads, they become top-heavy when carrying people.  The weight of the van’s cargo is primarily two feet off of the floor where the people are sitting resulting in a rollover waiting to happen.

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