Grimshaw v. Ford Motor Company (119 Cal.App.3d 757, 174 Cal.Rptr. 348) was a personal injury tort case decided in Orange County, California in February 1978 and affirmed by a California appellate court in May 1981. The lawsuit involved the safety of the design of the Ford Pinto automobile, manufactured by the Ford Motor Company. The jury awarded plaintiffs $127.8 million in damages, the largest ever in US product liability and personal injury cases. Grimshaw v. Ford Motor Company was one of the most widely publicized of the more than a hundred lawsuits brought against Ford in connection with rear-end accidents in the Pinto. The trial judge reduced the jury's punitive damages award to $3.5 million. On appeal, Ford contested the trial court judgement on the basis of errors, and contested the punitive damages award on the grounds of an absence of malice and that the punitive damages award was not authorized by statute and was unconstitutional. The appellate court affirmed the trial court.
Trial A 1972 Pinto rear-end impact and fire in San Bernardino, California, resulted in the death of the driver Lilly Gray and severe injury to passenger Richard Grimshaw. Gray's family and Grimshaw filed separate suits against Ford, but the actions were consolidated for trial. The jury awarded $127.8 million in damages; $125 million in punitive damages, and $2,841,000 in compensatory damages to Grimshaw and $665,000 in compensatory damages to the Gray family. The jury award was the largest ever in US product liability and personal injury cases. The jury award was the largest against an automaker until a $150 million verdict in a 1996 case, Hardy vs. General Motors. The judge reduced the jury's punitive damages award to $3.5 million, which he later said was "still larger than any other punitive damage award in the state by a factor of about five."
Reaction University of California Los Angeles law professor Gary T. Schwartz, writing in 1990, said that the jury verdict was plausible, and that the "core of the Pinto story" was:
Given this description of the Pinto's design problem, some comments can be offered on the decision-making process within Ford that resulted in the Pinto. As shown above, a famous Ford report cannot be interpreted as showing Ford balancing lives against dollars in designing the Pinto. To state that the report does not itself reveal such a process does not mean, however, that such a process did not take place. Accordingly, I have consulted the Grimshaw record to learn what light it sheds on this question. As far as basic gas tank location is concerned, I am persuaded that the trunk capacity problem, in conjunction with American auto custom, provides the best explanation for Ford's choice to place the Pinto gas tank behind the axle. As for additional design proposals brought forward by the plaintiffs, several of them-for example, a bladder within the gas tank, and a "tank within the tank"-concerned somewhat innovative technology that had never been utilized in actual auto production. At trial, there was testimony that a bladder would have been feasible in the early 1970's, but also rebuttal testimony that a bladder was at this time beyond the bounds of feasibility. The jury's general verdict does not reveal whether and how the jury resolved such conflicts in the evidence; and I am in no position to resolve them here. Consider now, however, the combination of a stronger bumper, a smooth (bolt-free) differential, and the addition of both hat sections and horizontal cross-members. This combination of design changes clearly would have improved the Pinto's safety to some appreciable extent. According to the evidence, the overall cost of this combination would have been $9; and it makes sense to assume that these items were turned down by Ford in planning the Pinto primarily on account of their monetary costs. It is plausible to believe, then, that because of these costs, Ford decided not to improve the Pinto's design, knowing that its decision would increase the chances of the loss of consumer life. Once a variety of misconceptions are stripped away, this limited core of the Pinto story remains. And this is a core that may well be strong enough to support the "myth" of the Ford Pinto case in the second of the meanings described above. What follows is my effort to explicate the elements of that myth. According to the Los Angeles Times in 2010, the award "signalled to the auto industry that it would be harshly sanctioned for ignoring known defects."
Appeal In discussing the appellate court findings of fact Schwartz (1990) notes that the appellate court was under strict rules of interpretation. He states:
For reasons quite beyond the court's control, its opinion must be treated cautiously as a source of actual facts. Because the defendant was appealing a jury verdict in favor of the plaintiffs, the court was under an obligation to view all the evidence in a way most favorable to the plaintiffs and essentially to ignore evidence in the record that might be favorable to the defendant. See id. at 773, 820, 174 Cal. Rptr. at 359, 388. In fact, Ford's basic position at trial-which the court's opinion at no point mentions-was that the approaching car (a Ford Galaxie) had not slowed down at all, and had struck the Gray car at a speed in excess of 50 miles per hour [80 km/h]. There was an enormous amount of evidence at trial supporting each of the parties' factual claims as to the Galaxie's closing speed. Had the jury accepted Ford's speed estimate, there would not have been much of an issue of crashworthiness: for the plaintiffs' position throughout trial was that even a state-of-the-art fuel system could not maintain integrity in a 50-mile-per-hour [80 km/h] collision.
Appellate court findings of fact The trial court's findings of fact regarding the accident, the design of the Pinto, Ford's crash testing, and Ford's cost benefit analysis were not contested on appeal, and were accepted by the appellate court "in accordance with established principles of appellate review."
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