Thanks for helping spread the word in any case.

You may be being a bit unfair to the manufacturers. It might be correct that they have decided that they should not be the one’s paying for an education campaign that has unclear benefits, would not limit their liability and may well make suing them easier. I agree that better knowledge of the dangers would likely help save some lives. But if the Auto Manufacturers put forth such a program, the lawyers would use it to prove that they knew of the danger and did nothing! And a big education campaign is really just a big sticker. People hear about dangers all the time and frequently ignore them in all the babble caused by warning about everything.

Perhaps the best we can do in the current situation is to pass the message on ourselves and hope that no one else has to suffer the loss you did.

Maybe we need to put more emphasis on the general danger of driving and the safety items in the manual. A PSA along the lines of saying:

Cars are inherently dangerous but quite safe if operated correctly. There are many safety features in your car that you need to know about to provide maximum protections. They are described in your operators manual. Every year people are injured and killed by not following the guideline it provides.

Read it. Operate safely. Be informed.

1) Really? I’d like to see some data on that.

2) See #1, AND that in and of itself proves very little (unfortunately). This very site chronicles lawsuits that have ridiculous outcomes, such as one where someone sued because his seat crumpled and he was injured… never mind that such crumpling is intentional because it saves many lives every year… including people who were in the car with him at the time of the accident!

Stupidly, every case stands on its own, allowing a company to simultaneously be too much of something, to the point of liability, and too LITTLE of something, to the point of liability. It is indeed all about lawyers getting money, but not in the way Kip seems to think.

Kip: people WANT reclining seats, just like people WANT hot coffee. Indeed, reclining seats have been present in cars since before many people currently driving were even BORN, back “when society was a society of honest, straight talking folk”, and driving with the seat reclined was just as deadly then.

In fact, as pointed out repeatedly, “normal everyday usage of commonplace vehicles” can quite easily, and not uncommonly do, result in death. Seat reclining or not does not have a noticeable effect on that.

By the way, I consider myself “a reasonable, ordinary person”, and I am not remotely a lawyer (nor a legal assistant, or any other lawyer-related thing).

What came first was not evil corporations selling toxins to children with intent to injure simply to test their lizard lawyers’ ability to absolve them via obscure warnings and disclaimers.

Prior to any such warning or disclaimer being implemented, another reptilian species had successfully argued to some empaneled common folk that Suzie Q would never have ingested a toxin (lets say a cup of bleach that looked like kool aid) if only the container of bleach had stated (in a font and color deemed suitable and appropriate in hindsight) that it may be harmful for children to do so.

Of course, it is irrelevant that Suzie Q was too young to read, and that a parent may bear some responsibility, since we are only concerned with dangerous products foisted upon us and the “duty of care”.

So, the other way to invest those funds as mentioned by OBQuiet would be an educational campaign. Every car manufacturer in the world has been sued on this design issue and all have lost. Some have lost tens of millions overall. They have made an accounting decision that the relatively low number of people dying from this issue is worth less than the costs of an educational campaign, and therefore would rather pay the losses than educate the general public.

Of course its impossible to make any product 100% safe and I’m not saying that we do that. Simply spread the word, help educate the public, and then some good can come from my daughter’s death.