Maintenance on a vehicle can be expensive. As U-Haul recently found out, lack of maintenance on a vehicle can be even more expensive.
A suit was brought by a renter of a U-Haul truck who was severely injured when the parking brake did not hold and the truck rolled over him. The man’s pelvis and spine were crushed, his bladder was ruptured, and he suffered a number of other injuries. Treating him required numerous surgeries, and he is partially paralyzed and bedridden. The cost of treating him for the rest of his life has been estimated to be $25 million.
The renter sued U-Haul for negligence, and the evidence showed that U-Haul failed to properly maintain the brakes and transmissions of many of the trucks in its fleet. The renter presented evidence showing that almost a third of the trucks that U-Haul rents had brakes that did not work properly, and that the truck which had rolled over the renter was 18 years old and had been banned from being rented in Canada because of poor maintenance. Rather than fixing the problems, U-Haul chose to ship the truck to the United States for use as a rental.
Although U-Haul argued that it could not reasonably be expected to know that the parking brake was faulty and that the accident was the renter’s fault, the jury did not agree. It awarded the renter over $84 million in damages, including $63 million in punitive damages, although the law required that this amount be reduced to a judgment of $46 million.
