Wayne Dupree
by Sophie O’Hara
This is the most bizarre lawsuit story I’ve heard of in a long time.
A Jeep owner is in legal hot water after his car killed a man during an oil change.
The owner of the car was not there and had nothing to do with the tragic mistake that killed a mechanic, but he’s still being held responsible. more
Wow that’s ridiculous. You have to click through to the NY Post story to see what happened.
It was a stick shift. 2019, so a pretty new vehicle, but stick shift. The 19 year-old employee didn’t know how to operate it, was mostly outside the vehicle when he depressed the clutch with his right foot, then when he removed his foot from the clutch pedal the vehicle lurched forward and pinned the other employee.
This is at a Dodge dealership. Completely the fault of the dealership and the employee, zero fault of the owner.
Shakespeare was right.
Fight the case, win, and get the loser to pay for damages.
A few months ago I took a car to the dealer for service. In order to take it for a test drive, they put a shop plate on the car. (This was in BC where the basic car insurance is required to be purchased from a government corporation and the license plate is a certificate of insurance.) I was told “That way if anything happens while we are driving it, it is on our insurance, not yours.”
The thought that an owner is responsible for what a shop employee does in the shop is beyond me.
Such a detailed description of the incident, yet they leave out one crucial detail. Was it in gear? Obviously the vehicle was in gear and when you release the clutch of course it’s going to “lurch.” Rather, it more accurately “jumped” forward, pinned the goof in front of it, and stalled out while on top of him.
No word if this Jeep had hydraulics. Only a mexican would operate a vehicle from the outside, using hydraulics to make the car bounce. While onlookers twerk to the thumping system.
Car dealers are the bane of society. I was traveling to Colorado to elk hunt and my truck started having trouble climbing up even gentle hills in north Texas. I coasted into Childress, Texas to the local Ford dealer. Those goober-sucking rat bastards told me I needed a new transmission for $3500. As I sat stunned in the break room of the service department deciding what to do, a young mechanic came in and pretended to buy a coke from the vending machine while he whispered to me to leave and go the muffler shop down the road and ask for Jimmy. Then he left. I did what he said and after driving my truck, Jimmy told his employee to go to the local auto part store and pick up an item. Ten minutes later, Jimmy installed a new fuel filter on my truck. That was all I needed. I tipped him $50 and asked him to share it with the mechanic who saved my ass. I hate car dealers.
I hope he can counter sue those bastards!
Unless the car’s name was Christine, they really don’t have a case.
What that young kid did was dumb.
I’ve done dumber. At around the same age.
…back when Ford had these big starter relays on the inside fender I had put in a starter, and I wanted to see if it worked. So after lowering the car to the ground I thought the COOL way to do that was to short 12v to the coil at the solenoid to hear it crank.
Which would have been great had it not been manual transmission.
And in gear.
Which I should have remembered since I DROVE IT IN.
…it didn’t start, couldn’t be started that way, but it DID crank, and the motor was torquey enough to lurch it into the Coats tire machine just in front of it.
I had a wonderful discussion with Loss Prevention, my manager, and the customer after that.
But I learned from it and never did anything like that again.
Young people learning a trade WILL mess up, especially in an environment that empathizes speed. Sometimes badly. It’s GONNA happen.
In this case, someone in front of it paid the price.
But in no way was it the CUSTOMER’S fault.
No jury with a majority of members who actually ever got their OWN car worked on will go for this. You have no control over who drives your car in a shop, and they all KNOW it.
The stupid lawyer should go after Jeep instead.
That push button start system MUST be utilizing a PLC to make the decision to pull in the solenoid, and its saftey conditions are evidently insufficient. It apparently has a switch to tell it what the clutch is doing and uses that for ONE term, but it does NOT collect and/or utilize easily available ancillary data, like “is there a person in the car” which there are switches for, or “Is the brake pedal pressed” which there are switches for, or “is it in gear” which it most likely has a means of detecting.
Since these are foreseeable, programmable condition inputs that were not utilized, resulting in injury and death, seens like you could make a pretty good case against the engineer who programned it AND the company who hired him.
And NO jury likes car companies.
Slam dunk win.
Especially if you put the widow on the stand and show her pictures of her husband’s demise in front of the jury.
That’s where the money is anyway, the “deep pockets”.
Seems like a lawyer would figure that out, instead of wasting time suing people with no money that the jury will empathize with instead…
Horrorman18
MAY 9, 2022 AT 12:58 PM
“Unless the car’s name was Christine, they really don’t have a case.”
…I DO wonder where the liability lies if a 4 year old gets pasted by your unmanned Tesla in Smart Summon Mode. You aren’t in it. You aren’t driving it in any sense of the word. It’s YOUR car, but you didn’t design it.
Wonder who pays?
https://youtu.be/nlCQG2rg4sw
Remember when Rush used to talk about all those SUVs that killed people? Here we go again!
Now imagine the ramifications of convicting owners of any hardware involved in a death… think Alec Baldwin!
Looking for an insurance company that will settle
“The attorney also said the dealership cannot be sued because of a legal standard preventing an employee from suing their boss for negligence…”
that’s BS
you know those ‘privacy pockets’ they sell for cell phones? Big business has privacy pockets for their wallets. Ask pfizer about them.
I’m just grateful the Loyal Citizens(TM) of Michigan didn’t do anything uppity, during Whittler’s COVID Crisis(TM)! Just imagine what would happen if this happened in an American nation!?
Happened in high school before I was there.
In auto shop some kid thought it would be a neat trick to start a guy’s car while the owner was working under the hood, killed him real dead.
The injured worker most likely only has a workers compensation claim against the employer.
That does not give the injured party a right of action against the car owner.
One reason why I don’t stand in front of a vehicle when someone else is starting it.
Bullshit.
Won’t stick. (decent lawyer needed)
There is the record of training for the 19 year old & something called due care & diligence.
Hambone,
I luv ya but…
I would have given that kid at least $300.
$200 for a steak dinner.
$100 for a very nice bottle.
Cheers.
^^^ “The injured worker most likely only has …”
he ain’t gots nothin’
he ded
when I was starting an old Land Rover once with a crank, it started running, and in gear. Thankfully, it was in 1st gear low range, and I just stepped out of the way. I hadn’t checked. Learned a good lesson that day.
I know two people who were left holding the jumper cables in their hands when the car they were jumping started in reverse. One had a bad neutral safety switch and the other had the neutral safety switch bypassed. Both were lucky it was in reverse!
This is insane. Where does this end?
They asked him to leave his car there for service, and he did. He was not even there. He did not design the car, he did not manufacture the car, he did not force the employees to do what they did.
Any judge with a brain would throw this lawsuit out.
@ Kcir
Sir, I am humbled by your generosity and grovel at your feet. I surely am not worthy to be in your presence. In my defense though, this happened over thirty years ago and $50 was nothing to sneeze at back then considering I was paying child support for four sons. Please, have pity upon this poor wretched soul. P.S. For many years afterward, I brought Jimmy a goodly supply of deer sausage every time I passed through Childress, Texas. He finally moved to New Mexico.
As the owner of more than one Jeep I have been following this story as close as I can.
Apparently, according to follow-up articles I have read, Michigan has a stupid law on the books that places responsibility on a vehicle owner when said vehicle is involved in an incident causing damage or injury – even if the owner is not present – because Michigan assumes the owner trusts whoever they hand their keys to.
However, in this case, the owner handed his keys to the he service manager, who then handed them to someone who had no business working at a dealership, no less getting behind the wheel of any car. Now that owner is on the hook for $15 million in wrongful death.
commie d-sucker robe-dindus made it possible to sue a gun maker because a dindu used a gun while misbehaving, this is just the next step