Smith v. Ford Motor Co.
| Citation | 59 Ohio App.2d 41,392 N.E.2d 1287 |
| Parties | , 13 O.O.3d 118 SMITH, Appellant, v. FORD MOTOR COMPANY et al., Appellees. 1 |
| Decision Date | 19 April 1978 |
| Court | United States Court of Appeals (Ohio) |
Syllabus by the Court
Where, in an action against a manufacturer for the negligent construction of a motor vehicle, a plaintiff fails to prove the existence of a defect in the vehicle at the time it left the defendant's control, the trial court may properly grant a directed verdict for such defendant.
Drew & Ward and Kenneth Heuck, Jr., Cincinnati, for appellant.
Rendigs, Fry, Kiely & Dennis and Ralph F. Mitchell, Cincinnati, for appellee Ford Motor Co.
Lindhorst & Dreidame and William M. Cussen, Cincinnati, for appellee Haag Ford Sales, Inc.
Benjamin, Faulkner & Tepe, Cincinnati, for appellee J. B. E. Olson Corp.
McCaslin, Imbus & McCaslin, Cincinnati, for appellee T. R. W., Inc., Ross Gear Division.
Plaintiff-appellant brought this action to recover damages for personal injuries suffered by the plaintiff in October 1968 when the delivery truck which he was driving suddenly left the roadway and plunged down a steep embankment near Lawrenceburg, Indiana. The plaintiff alleged in his complaint that the accident had been caused by a failure of the truck's steering mechanism resulting from its faulty manufacture and assembly by the several named defendants, 2 and that the defendants were liable to respond in damages therefor under theories of strict liability, negligence and express warranty.
The evidence adduced by the plaintiff at trial reflects that in January 1967 the plaintiff placed his order for a "1967 Ford P-350 truck" with the defendant, Haag Ford Sales, Inc. (Haag). Upon its receipt of the order from Haag, and using its own employees and production facilities, the defendant-appellee Ford Motor Company (Ford) assembled the chassis of the plaintiff's truck, affixing the steering assembly thereto as a part of its assembly procedure. Ford then shipped the assembled chassis to the defendant-appellee J. B. E. Olson Corporation (Olson), a manufacturing concern which fabricated aluminum truck bodies of the type specially ordered for the truck by the plaintiff herein. Olson assembled the custom aluminum body to the truck chassis, connecting the uppermost part of the steering column to the instrument panel in the truck's cab. Upon the completion of its work, Olson delivered the finished truck directly to Haag, who was billed separately by Ford and Olson for, respectively, the chassis and body of the plaintiff's truck. The record is silent as to the exact character of the legal relationships existing, on the one hand, between Ford and Haag, and, on the other, between Ford and Olson during the period in which these and the following events transpired, there having been offered no meaningful evidence to demonstrate that either Haag, in soliciting and filling orders for the sale of Ford's products, or Olson, in assembling its custom van body to the truck chassis, was acting as an agent or subcontractor of Ford.
In the months immediately after Haag's delivery of the truck to the plaintiff in April 1967, the plaintiff returned the truck to Haag for a variety of repairs, complaining of, Inter alia, "tight" or "binding" steering. Haag's mechanics disassembled the steering mechanism and determined that several parts therein, including the steering shaft, required replacement. Accordingly, in September 1967, Haag replaced the worn parts with new bearings and a new steering shaft supplied to it by Ford, using the same nuts, bolts and holes to secure the placement of the steering assembly as were used in the original manufacture of the vehicle. All such repair work performed on the steering assembly by Haag was covered under the terms of the "New Vehicle Warranty" given for the truck by Ford, and, in accordance with instructions issued thereto by Ford, Haag returned the used steering parts to Ford's Warranty Disposition Center in Detroit, Michigan.
Thirteen months later, the plaintiff was injured in the accident which is the subject of this action. A post-accident inspection of the truck revealed that the steering shaft which earlier had been replaced by Haag was broken off completely at its base.
The plaintiff presented the testimony of three expert witnesses, all of whom stated that the fracture of the steering shaft was the result of metal fatigue, caused by a misalignment of the steering shaft between the chassis and body of the truck which subjected the shaft to extreme and intolerable tensile pressures. The plaintiff's experts uniformly agreed that the steering shaft was not misaligned when the truck chassis was shipped to Olson by Ford, but became so when Olson, while affixing the body of the truck fabricated by it to the truck chassis, improperly secured the top of the steering column to the instrument panel in the truck cab, deflecting the steering shaft contained therein from its intended path of alignment.
At the close of the plaintiff's case, both Ford and Olson filed motions for directed verdicts with the trial court, which granted the motion of Ford and denied that of Olson. Olson thereafter proceeded to present expert testimony on its own behalf directly controverting the various conclusions urged by the plaintiff's expert witnesses. At the close of all evidence, the cause was submitted to the jury, which returned a verdict in Olson's favor. Judgment having been accordingly entered for both Ford and Olson, the plaintiff timely filed this appeal, presenting six assignments of error for review.
Passing for a moment the complex and troublesome issues presented in the appellant's first assignment of error, we first consider the merits of the second and third assignments, wherein the plaintiff asserts that the trial court erred in granting the directed verdict in Ford's favor on the issues of Ford's negligence in failing to warn the plaintiff of the defective condition of the steering assembly following its inspection of the original steering shaft removed from the truck and returned to Ford by Haag, and in improperly affixing the steering assembly to the truck chassis. As to the first of these, the record is devoid of any evidence to suggest that an inspection of the returned steering assembly parts would have alerted Ford to the existence of a defect in the alignment of the truck's steering column. The exact nature of the defects in the subject parts requiring their replacement by Haag was not fully explored by the plaintiff below, the parts themselves were not produced as evidence at trial, and the plaintiff's various expert witnesses offered no testimony from which the triers of fact could conclude or infer that a reasonable examination of the returned parts by Ford would have revealed to Ford that the steering column of the plaintiff's truck was dangerously misaligned. Indeed, the only evidence offered with respect to the subject parts was that they were in fact removed from the plaintiff's truck by Haag, and were thereafter returned to Ford.
The plaintiff's second claim that Ford negligently misaligned the steering assembly while mounting it on the truck chassis is equally without support in the record. The plaintiff presented no competent evidence to demonstrate that, as he now suggests, the steering gear box was affixed to a deformed chassis channel beam by Ford, producing the misalignment of the steering column complained of herein. Indeed, all of the plaintiff's own expert witnesses testified that the alleged misalignment occurred when the steering column was improperly attached to the body of the truck by Olson, and uniformly and unequivocally rejected the notion that the steering assemble could have been misaligned by Ford in its assembly of the truck chassis. Given these circumstances, we agree with the trial court that Ford could not reasonably have been found by the jury to have been negligent in either of the respects asserted by the plaintiff. It follows, then, that the trial court properly granted the directed verdict in Ford's favor on the issues of Ford's negligence in causing the injuries complained of by the plaintiff, and that the plaintiff's second and third assignments of error are, accordingly, overruled.
The plaintiff's fourth assignment of error complains of the trial court's action in granting Ford's motion for a directed verdict as to that part of the plaintiff's complaint setting forth a claim for damages based upon Ford's alleged breach of its express warranty of the plaintiff's truck. The record, however, reflects that the terms of the warranty issued for the truck by Ford expressly limited its effective life to the truck's first two years or 24,000 miles of operation, whichever occurred first. The record also reflects, and the plaintiff readily admits, that the subject truck had been driven in excess of 36,000 miles at the time of the accident. Thus, the express warranty relied on by the plaintiff herein had, by its very terms, expired long before the plaintiff's claimed cause of action thereunder arose. The plaintiff has presented, and we are aware of, no convincing authority to support his contention that the failure of Haag to correct the alleged condition of misalignment at the time it made the warranted repairs to the truck's steering assembly in some manner tolled indefinitely the running of the express warranty of the truck by Ford. The assignment of error is without merit, and is accordingly overruled.
Our determination that the trial court properly withdrew from the jury's consideration the issues of Ford's liability to the plaintiff under the proposed theories of negligence and express warranty leaves for our consideration the more vexatious question, raised in the plaintiff's first assignment of error, of the propriety of the trial court's similar disposition of that part of the complaint asserting Ford's liability to the...
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