Nicolodi v. Harley-Davidson Motor Co., Inc., HARLEY-DAVIDSON
| Decision Date | 25 April 1979 |
| Docket Number | No. 78-1089,HARLEY-DAVIDSON,78-1089 |
| Parties | Bonita Louise NICOLODI, Appellant, v.MOTOR COMPANY, INC., Appellee. |
| Court | Florida District Court of Appeals |
John W. Frost, II, and Charles W. Dodson, of Holland & Knight, Bartow, for appellant.
Lynn H. Groseclose and Kingswood Sprott, Jr., of Sprott & Groseclose, Lakeland, for appellee.
Two questions are presented in this case. The first is whether the crashworthiness doctrine adopted and applied to an automobile manufacturer in Ford Motor Company v. Evancho, 327 So.2d 201 (Fla.1976) applies as well to the manufacturer of a motorcycle. The second question is whether recovery in a crashworthiness case may be based on strict liability or breach of implied warranty 1 as well as on negligence. We answer both questions in the affirmative.
Appellee is the manufacturer of a motorcycle on which appellant was riding as a passenger when it collided with a truck. Appellant suffered serious injuries and lost one leg. In this suit appellant seeks to hold appellee liable for failure to provide any safety device on its motorcycle to protect passengers' legs during collisions. Her complaint contains three counts against appellee, one for negligence, one for breach of warranty, and one on grounds of strict liability.
On appellee's motion to dismiss all three counts, the trial judge entered a final order of dismissal in which he ruled that "under the present state of Florida law a motorcycle is not within the conceptual ambit of the crashworthiness doctrine announced in Ford v. Evancho.'' We hold that the trial judge was in error, and reverse.
The expression "crashworthiness doctrine" is used to describe the holding in the landmark case of Larsen v. General Motors Corporation, 391 F.2d 495 (8th Cir. 1968), which was followed by the Florida Supreme Court in Ford Motor Company v. Evancho, supra. In each of these cases recovery was sought for injuries received in an automobile accident resulting from an alleged defect in design which was not a causative factor of the initial accident but increased or brought about injury to the plaintiff in the course of the collision. In Larsen the alleged defect was in the design of the steering assembly, which caused a rearward displacement of the steering shaft on left frontal impact which was much greater than it should have been. In Ford v. Evancho Motor Company the alleged defect was in the design of the front seat track-and-rail mechanism, which failed to lock the front seat, causing the right side of the front seat to be thrown forward when a back seat passenger was thrown against it in a collision.
In each of these cases the automobile manufacturer argued that its duty of reasonable care in the design and construction of an automobile is met when the automobile is safe for its intended use and that "intended use" does not include involvement in an accident. The courts rejected that argument by applying basic principles of negligence. They reasoned that a manufacturer's duty of reasonable care extends to those results which are reasonably foreseeable and involvement in an accident is a reasonably foreseeable use of an automobile; therefore, an automobile manufacturer's duty of reasonable care in the design and manufacture of an automobile must take into consideration the injury-producing effects of an impact. The court in the Larsen Case said:
This duty of reasonable care in design rests on common law negligence that a manufacturer of an article should use reasonable care in the design and manufacture of its product to eliminate any unreasonable risk of foreseeable injury.
The duty of reasonable care in design should be viewed in light of the risk. While all risk cannot be eliminated nor can a crashproof vehicle be designed under the present state of the art, there are many commonsense factors in design, which are or should be well known to the manufacturer that will minimize or lessen the injurious effects of a collision. The standard of reasonable care is applied in many other negligence situations and should be applied here.
The Larsen court specifically rejected the notion that it was placing automobile manufacturers in a special class, saying "(w)e think the duty of the use of reasonable care in design to protect against foreseeable injury to the user of a product and perhaps others injured as an incident of that use should be and is equally applicable to all manufacturers with the customary limitations now applied to protect the manufacturer in case of unintended and unforeseeable use."
In arguing that the crashworthiness doctrine should not apply to the manufacturer of a motorcycle, appellee proposes a restrictive interpretation of the holdings in Larsen and Evancho. First, appellee says that the courts in those cases placed a duty on the manufacturer of an automobile to provide a means of safe transportation and it is ludicrous to propose that a motorcycle could be made safe. As stated by appellee, "a motorcycle is a motorcycle is a motorcycle, and, because it is what it is, it is inherently not safe to crash in." In other words, appellee asserts that a motorcycle cannot be made crashworthy and the crashworthiness doctrine cannot logically, or in commonsense, be extended to motorcycle manufacturers. We reject that argument.
It is clear that the crashworthiness doctrine is simply an aspect of basic principles of negligence and we have no difficulty in finding that these principles extend to motorcycle manufacturers as well as to automobile manufacturers. It is just as foreseeable that a motorcycle will be involved in an accident as it is foreseeable that an automobile will be involved in an accident. Foreseeability is the conceptual cornerstone of the crashworthiness doctrine.
In Bolm v. Triumph Corporation, 33 N.Y.2d 151, 350 N.Y.S.2d 644, 305 N.E.2d 769 (N.Y.1973), the Court of Appeals of New York applied the holding in Larsen to a case in which recovery was sought against the manufacturer of a motorcycle for an alleged defect in design which, though it played no part in causing the accident, aggravated or contributed to the...
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