Philadelphia Injury Attorney Blog

A sudden acceleration syndrome is something that has affected all of the car manufacturers at one time or another for many years and is not just limited to Toyota. As an experienced automobile product liability lawyer, I have seen this problem on many of the other automobile manufacturers’ cars. Surprisingly, my wife owns a BMW 5 series which apparently accelerated on its own on two separate occasions within the last month and she narrowly escaped injuries to herself and others. When we go to analyze the situation, no trouble codes have been registered or found, yet I am certain that when I was driving the car which was stopped on an uphill grade, the car took off without my foot being on the gas pedal. Unfortunately many of the sudden acceleration problems are difficult to replicate and do not show when the car is connected to a computer for analysis. Many times the situation involves a bad sensor or circuit board which can be affected by elements on the highway or faulty manufacturer design. Specifically, the problem seems to occur when the car decelerates to a stop and the vehicle all of a sudden will buck once or twice with a sudden acceleration of the engines rpms reaching 2,000 to 3,000 rpm. Many times when a sudden acceleration occurs, the brakes do not work quick enough or hard enough to avoid a crash and for the past 10 or 15 years, many courts ruled in favor of the car companies in litigation, blaming the drivers for these accidents. Our law firm has been intimately involved with automotive product defects for many years. We are all too familiar with the manufacturers’ screaming blame game of driver error. As technology continues to advance and mechanical cable throttle is replaced with electronic throttle, software and sensors are involved and as we all know, this apparently is accompanied by technical glitches. Yes, driving by wire technology certainly comes at a cost and the issue here is not really who is to blame but in fact, working together to achieve a satisfactory resolution to this problem so that additional lives are not lost. I believe that the Toyota/Lexus media situation and resulting governmental inquiries and efforts of trial lawyers committed to representing injured consumers will dispel the myth of driver error and perhaps now a little bit of integrity by the manufacturers will be added to the equation.