Tran v. Toyota Motor Corp., 04-12520.

• Decision Date: 18 August 2005
• Docket Number: No. 04-12520.,04-12520.
• Citation: 420 F.3d 1310
• Parties: Mai Thi TRAN, Nader Nemai, Plaintiffs-Appellants, v. TOYOTA MOTOR CORPORATION, Toyota Motor Sales U.S.A., Inc., Tokai Rika Co., Ltd., Defendants-Appellees.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Eleventh Circuit

420 F.3d 1310

Mai Thi TRAN, Nader Nemai, Plaintiffs-Appellants, v. TOYOTA MOTOR CORPORATION, Toyota Motor Sales U.S.A., Inc., Tokai Rika Co., Ltd., Defendants-Appellees.

No. 04-12520.

United States Court of Appeals, Eleventh Circuit.

August 18, 2005.

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Middle District of Florida.

Scott B. Cooper, Cooper, Jones & Jones, LLP, Irvine, CA, Lance A. Cooper, Cooper & Jones, LLP, Marietta, GA, for Plaintiffs-Appellants.

Wendy F. Lumish, Jeffrey A. Cohen, Carlton Fields, P.A., Miami, FL, David Bryan Shelton, Rumberger, Kirk & Caldwell, Orlando, FL, Richard H. Willis, Nelson, Mullins, Riley & Scarborough, LLP, Columbia, SC, for Defendants-Appellees.

Before BLACK, WILSON and STAPLETON^*, Circuit Judges.

WILSON, Circuit Judge:

On December 15, 1998, Mai Tran drove home from work in Orlando, Florida, in her 1983 Toyota Cressida. Her car crossed the center line and collided head-on with another vehicle. Tran's Cressida was equipped with a restraint system consisting of a manual lap belt and an automatic shoulder belt. The shoulder belt was a "passive" restraint. When the driver's door was opened, the belt slid along a motorized track towards the front of the car, allowing the driver to enter or exit. When the door closed, the belt slid back on its track into place, restraining the driver.

Tran was not wearing the manual lap belt during the accident. As a result of the collision, Tran suffered a spinal cord injury that rendered her quadriplegic. Tran and her husband¹ sued Toyota Motor Corporation, the manufacturer of her vehicle, alleging negligence and strict liability in the manufacture, design, and testing of the Cressida, and that these defects were the cause of her injury. Specifically, she contended that the Cressida's automatic shoulder belt improperly fit shorter passengers like Tran. Tran was between 5'2" and 5'4" at the time of the accident. Tran asserted that the shoulder belt rode across her neck at the point of her injury. Tran claimed the belt instead should have been positioned to ride across her shoulder and sternum. Toyota's defense was that the passive restraint system was not defectively designed, that the shoulder belt did not cause Tran's spinal cord injury, that the belt could not have been across Tran's neck given the details of her injury, and that the cause of the injury was the inertial forces of the collision.

At the conclusion of an eight-day trial, the jury, finding that the vehicle's passive restraint system was not defective and that Toyota was not negligent, returned a verdict for Toyota. The district court entered a final judgment in accordance with the verdict, and Tran timely appealed.² Tran presents three claims on appeal, and we address them in turn.

I. Jury Instruction

Tran contends that the court's instruction to the jury on strict liability design defect misstated the law. In a diversity case, the jury charge must accurately state the substantive law of the forum state. Wilson v. Bicycle South, 915 F.2d 1503, 1510 (11th Cir.1990). "[T]he manner of giving jury instructions is procedural rather than substantive," and thus our review is governed by federal law. Id. at 1511. "We review jury instructions de novo to determine whether they misstate the law or mislead the jury to the prejudice of the objecting party." Conroy v. Abraham Chevrolet-Tampa, Inc., 375 F.3d 1228, 1233 (11th Cir.2004) (quoting Palmer v. Bd. of Regents of the Univ. Sys. of Ga., 208 F.3d 969, 973 (11th Cir.2000)).

"Under Florida law, a strict product liability action requires the plaintiff to prove that (1) a product (2) produced by a manufacturer (3) was defective or created an unreasonably dangerous condition (4) that proximately caused (5) injury." McCorvey v. Baxter Healthcare Corp., 298 F.3d 1253, 1257 (11th Cir.2002) (citing Edward M. Chadbourne, Inc. v. Vaughn, 491 So.2d 551, 553 (Fla.1986)).

Tran requested a jury instruction on design defect drawn from the Florida Standard Jury Instruction PL 5, which provides in relevant part that:

A product is unreasonably dangerous because of its design if the product fails to perform as safely as an ordinary consumer would expect when used as intended or in a manner reasonably foreseeable by the manufacturer or the risk of danger in the design outweighs the benefits.

Standard Jury Instructions Civil Cases, 778 So.2d 264, 271 (Fla.2000). The court ruled that this instruction was "inappropriate" and declined to issue Tran's requested instruction. The court instead issued a jury instruction crafted from the Restatement (Third) of Torts: Product Liability § 2. The relevant portion read as follows:

A product is defective in design when the foreseeable risk of harm posed by the product could have been reduced or avoided by the adoption of a reasonable alternative design by the seller and the omission of the alternative design renders the product not reasonably safe to the user. This standard for judging whether a product is defective in design incorporates a reasonableness ("risk utility balancing") test. More specifically, the test is whether a reasonable alternative design would, at reasonable cost, have reduced the foreseeable risks of harm posed by the product and, if so, whether the omission of the alternative design by the seller rendered the product not reasonably safe. The balancing of risks and benefits in judging product design and marketing must be done in light of the knowledge of risks and risk-avoidance techniques reasonably attainable at the time of distribution.

A broad range of factors may be considered in determining whether an alternative design is reasonable and whether its omission renders a product not reasonably safe. The factors include, among others, the magnitude and probability of the foreseeable risks of harm, the instructions and warnings accompanying the product, and the nature and strength of consumer expectations regarding the product, including expectations arising from product portrayal and marketing. The relative advantages and disadvantages of the product as designed and as it alternatively could have been designed may also be considered. Thus, the likely effects of the alternative design on product costs; the effects of the alternative design on product longevity, maintenance, repair, and esthetics; and the range of consumer choice among products are factors that may be taken into account. The relevance of these factors and other factors vary, depending on the facts as you find them. Moreover, the factors interact with one another. For example, evidence of the magnitude and probability of foreseeable harm may be offset by evidence that the proposed alternative design would reduce the efficiency and the utility of the product. On the other hand, evidence that a proposed alternative design would increase production costs may be offset by evidence that the product portrayal and marketing created substantial expectations of performance or safety, thus increasing the probability of foreseeable harm. Depending on the mix of these factors, a number of variations in the design of a given product may be relevant to determining whether a product is defective. In sum, the rule that a product is defective in design if the foreseeable risks of harm could have been reduced by a reasonable alternative design is based on the commonsense notion that liability for harm caused by product designs should attach only when harm is reasonably preventable.

R. 187 at 9-10.

While the court's instruction did mention "the nature and strength of consumer expectations" as one factor in the risk-utility test it directed the jury to apply, it did not, as Tran requested, provide for a consumer expectation test as an independent basis for liability. The court's instruction was an erroneous statement of Florida law.

A few months after Tran's trial, the Florida Fifth District Court of Appeal decided Force v. Ford Motor Co., 879 So.2d 103 (Fla.Dist.Ct.App.2004). In that case, plaintiff Force alleged that he was injured in an automobile collision when his seatbelt failed to restrain him. He sought a jury instruction, drawn from the standard Florida jury instruction, that provided both the consumer expectations test and the risk-utility test. The trial court agreed with the defendants that only the risk-utility test applied, and instructed the jury accordingly. Id. at 105

The District Court of Appeal reversed. First, the court held that every case to have addressed the issue confirmed the applicability of the consumer expectations test under Florida products liability law, "at least for some products." Id. at 108. Then, the court addressed the defendants' contention that the consumer expectations test was inappropriate in complex product cases, where the jury "simply has no idea how [the product] should perform." Id. at 109 (internal quotation omitted). Surveying cases, the court ultimately concluded that seatbelts were not such a product, and that consumers were capable of forming expectations about their performance. Id. at 109-10.

Force controls our decision on this issue. Toyota attempts to distinguish Force by noting that here the district court included consumer expectations as a factor in the risk-utility analysis, whereas the trial court in Force did not mention consumer expectations at all. However, Florida law recognizes consumer expectations as "one of the independent standards to be applied in at least some Florida products liability cases." Id. at 108 (emphasis added).

We emphasize that we do not hold that the consumer expectations test jury instruction is required in all product liability cases. We merely hold, like the court in Force, that the instruction is proper as an independent basis for liability under Florida law when the product in question is one about which an ordinary consumer could form expectations. Under Florida law, seatbelts are such a product. The district court did not...