Lahocki v. Contee Sand & Gravel Co., Inc.

• Decision Date: 08 March 1979
• Docket Number: No. 598,598
• Citation: 41 Md.App. 579,398 A.2d 490
• Parties: George E. LAHOCKI et al. v. CONTEE SAND & GRAVEL CO., INC., et al.
• Court: Court of Special Appeals of Maryland

Page 579

41 Md.App. 579

398 A.2d 490

George E. LAHOCKI et al. v. CONTEE SAND & GRAVEL CO., INC., et al.

No. 598 Court of Special Appeals of Maryland.

March 8, 1979.

Certiorari Granted May 24, 1979.

Joseph M. Bryan, Hyattsville and Ronald S. Schimel, Columbia, with whom were Levan & Schimel, Columbia, on the brief, for George and Doris Lahocki.

Edward S. Digges, Jr. and Francis B. Burch, Jr., Baltimore, with whom were Joseph G. Finnerty, Jr., Robert Dale Klein, Baltimore, Otis M. Smith, John P. Raleigh, H. Richard Elmquist, James C. Cubbin, Detroit, Mich. and Piper & Marbury, Baltimore, on the brief, for appellant, General Motors Corp.

Laidler B. Mackall, Washington, D. C., with whom were Loren Kieve, Washington, D. C., William N. Zifchak, Upper Marlboro, Steptoe & Johnson, Washington, D. C. and Sasscer, Clagett, Channing & Bucher, Upper Marlboro, on the brief, for appellee, Contee Sand and Gravel Co., Inc.

Argued before MORTON, MOORE and LOWE, JJ.

LOWE, Judge.

This appeal is from a judgment grounded upon a jury verdict in the Circuit Court for Prince George's County, wherein George E. Lahocki was awarded one million two hundred thousand dollars from General Motors Corporation, and he and his wife an additional three hundred thousand dollars to compensate them for injuries sustained by Mr. Lahocki when he was thrown from a General Motors Corporation van after its top detached in a one car accident. Because of the complexities of the relatively new theory of "strict liability" to which the parties make reference, it may be misleading to say that the most serious concern of the appellant General Motors Corporation is with the sufficiency of the evidence.

A favorite pastime, if not a predilection endemic to most professions, is an overwhelming preoccupation with professional jargon. New and strange languages create an aura of mystique which protects the professions from a layman's understanding. By perpetuating the myth of an apparent mental omniscience ascribed to a select few who speak the language, the underlying secret, that any of the mystique-shrouded professions are based on common sense and experience, is protected.

In protecting our professional selves from being understood, there exists the danger that we will become confused by our own semantics. To avert that danger we pigeonhole our linguistic discoveries as we define them, but our pigeonholes are becoming so overcrowded that they too have begun to run together and we must again improvise. Where the contractual concept of warranty, for instance, required an oft unprovable element (privity) ¹ in order to allocate a more or less inevitable loss upon one of several responsible parties (usually the one with the deeper pocket), we simply removed the divider and categorized the "new" concept as a combined pigeonhole which we call generically "strict liability," presumably to distinguish it from a more lenient counterpart for escaping liability. We will encounter the developing patois of that concept throughout this opinion; but generally speaking, we can begin with a generic rule that has emerged to describe this relatively new offshoot of an old concept.

A seller is now to be held liable for injuries resulting from a defective condition in the manufacture or design of any product which may reasonably be expected to be capable of inflicting substantial harm. See Phipps v. General Motors Corp., 278 Md. 337, 344-345, 363 A.2d 955 (1976). There are two particular categories in which the "strict" liability of the manufacturer departs from normal standards of care, although the tort is essentially a matter of traditional negligence. One of these involves the warnings of dangers in the use of a product; the other involves its design.

The case we address borders upon the latter in that design cases usually turn upon whether a product was reasonably safe for some foreseeable use tangential to that for which the product was designed. In the vocabulary of automobile tort law, these cases are clept "second collision" cases; the alleged duty breached by the manufacturer is a failure to make an automobile "crashworthy." The claimant must show that his injury was "enhanced" through the lack of a proper design sufficient to safeguard him from a foreseeable injury resulting from an automobile accident. One of the most significant changes from traditional tort law is that an automobile accident has become a Per se foreseeable consequence of automobile ownership.

The use of the term "second collision" points up the "enhanced damages" aspect of these cases. It derived from the reasoning that had the manufacturer properly anticipated the danger and provided a reasonable safety design the injury would have been limited to that derived from the original impact. Without the safety device, the victim was involved in a "second collision" following the initial impact, usually within the vehicle itself, from which his injuries were derived or enhanced. It is only for the heightened degree of damage that a defectively designed product's manufacturer may be held liable, I. e., the total injury less that which would have been sustained even with the absent safety feature. In more familiar terms, enhancement is nothing more than the requisite causation element linking the defect to the injury.

The case before us is not quite in the design defect category but neither does it require a separate pigeonhole, devolving as it does from its more generic progenitor, "strict liability." Appellee does not charge General Motors with a failure to foresee the probability of an accident, nor does he fault the design adopted by it to safeguard against a "second collision" if one occurred. To the contrary, he adopts the standard of design and workmanship which General Motors established to protect against such injury. Appellee charges G.M. with the failure to comply with its own established standards. The defect that caused the injury, says appellee, was not in design, but in manufacture.

Under this offshoot of strict liability, which is itself an offshoot or extension of traditional negligence concepts, an injured party has the advantage of both the old and the new. A plaintiff may, if possible, prove some specific act (or omission) of negligent conduct as required under the traditional concept; however, he need not do so, because the relevant inquiry in strict liability actions focuses upon the product itself rather than the conduct of the manufacturer. In many instances, but not always, there is less difficulty in applying a defectiveness test by examining the product vis-a-vis an established standard than there is in trying to prove that the manufacturer's conduct of workmanship was improper. See Phipps, 278 Md. at 344, 363 A.2d 955.

The design here which Lahocki readily admits could have averted his injury, if properly executed, was the top of a van in which he was riding. Such vehicular roofs, said the court in Dyson v. General Motors Corporation, 298 F.Supp. 1064, 1073 (E.D.Pa.1969), should provide an occupant with something more than protection against rain. The something more in this case, appellee believes, was the provision of a restraint to keep his body from being thrown arc-like in the air from the vehicle in which he was a passenger. This uninhibited departure allegedly caused him to land on a hard-top road surface and to break his back the facts

George E. Lahocki was the passenger in a General Motors Corporation (G.M.) van that had been equipped by its owner (Warner) with a make-shift plastic passenger seat affixed to the front floor, and on which Mr. Lahocki was seated. The owner had also equipped the van with pipes racked inside and out, and with interior bins full of plumbing supplies and tools. The van, driven by co-worker George Campbell, was proceeding between 40 and 55 miles per hour on a highway when it struck and "rode" heavy timber barricades placed there by the Contee Sand and Gravel Co., Inc. (Contee), ² a contractor repaving a portion of the road. The van "went up in the air and flipped," damaging 142 feet of barricade before its forward progress ended. It came to rest upside down separated from its roof panel which lay near by. Although the driver was still inside and relatively uninjured, Mr. Lahocki lay on the road some distance from both van and roof panel.

Based upon expert evidence, Mr. Lahocki contended that the roof panel came off because it was inadequately welded according to G.M.'s own standards, and that his broken back was the direct result of having been thrown out of the vehicle through the open roof. He argues that he would not have been so injured if the roof had remained intact. G.M. contends that the roof attachment defect was irrelevant because: 1) it would have come off anyhow, 2) Lahocki was probably injured inside the vehicle and, 3) he might have been ejected through other openings in a roll over accident even with the roof intact.

duty

General Motors Corporation (G.M.), appellant, contends that appellees (Lahockis) failed, as a matter of law, to meet their burden of proving that G.M. breached a duty to them, whether viewed under the traditional category of negligence or the contemporary label of strict liability, both of which are roughly the same, but vary in the manner of proof. Dreisonstok v. Volkswagenwerk, A.G., 489 F.2d 1066 (4th Cir. 1974); Frericks v. General Motors Corp., 274 Md. 288, 301, 336 A.2d 118 (1975). Citing a multitude of cases, G.M. relies upon the recognition of a principle by the Court of Appeals in Volkswagen of America v. Young, 272 Md. 201, 219, 321 A.2d 737 (1974), that the duty ascribed to the manufacturer to produce a crashworthy vehicle is one of reasonable care in order to avoid subjecting a user to an unreasonable risk of injury in a foreseeable collision. There are foreseeability limitations upon that duty at both ends of the spectrum. The manufacturer need not anticipate and guard...