ATV Accidents & Deaths: Why ATVs Keep Killing
I try to blog about child safety issues at least once a week here on Kentucky Injury Lawyer Blog. Being both an injury attorney and a father of two young boys has given me a unique perspective on safety. I just see and read about too many things that a person who doesn't do this for a living usually doesn't learn about. And the fact is, ATV accidents are killing way too many people--many of whom are children--here in Kentucky.
Kentucky leads the nation in ATV accident deaths. Since Kentucky is a relatively small state in terms of population, you might think that we lead the nation in ATV accident deaths on a per capita basis (that is, as a percentage of our population). But, unfortunately, we lead the entire nation in overall deaths in ATV accidents.
So, why do ATVs kill so many children and adults every day in this country? Well, conventional wisdom is that it's because people are not using them properly and being careful--for example, not wearing helmets or driving them too fast. It's their own fault. This is the refrain that the ATV manufacturers are pushing hard and, truthfully, this is what most of us believe before we learn of all the facts about how unnecessarily dangerous many ATVs are designed, how they are being marketed, and what is being hidden from purchasers and riders of ATVs by the manufacturers.
We all know that riding an ATV, or a dirt bike, or pretty much any machine can be dangerous. What most people don't realize, is just how easily many ATVs flip, and just how many of those rollovers result in death or serious injury to the riders. And, many of these machines are being marketed to children.
The major ATV manufacturers (Honda, Polaris, Yamaha, Kawasaki, Suzuki, Bombardier and Arctic Cat) insist their machines are safe and stable if operated properly. They fault riders for accidents. "The safety issue is with the appropriate use," William Willen, a lawyer for ATV market leader Honda, told The Oregonian newspaper, who did a series of investigative storis on ATV safety. "It's how people use the machines."
Honda's safety slogan sums it up: "Stupid Hurts."
But reckless riders are only part of the problem. The federal government has not extensively tested ATV stability since at least 1991. An engineering firm hired by The Oregonian tested the stability of four popular ATV models and concluded they were dangerously prone to overturns.
The newspaper also analyzed fatal crashes and reached a surprising finding: Overturns were as common among riders who appeared to be obeying basic safety warnings as among those who didn't.
Here's a link to the Oregonian stories: Deceptively Dangerous ATVs.
Federal crash data shows that more than half of those who die on ATVs perish in crashes where the machines roll over sideways or flip forward or backward, such as while going up or down a hill. In some cases, overturns happen after the ATV hits something or tumbles off a steep drop. But about a third of the time, the government data shows, rollovers are the first known event in a fatal crash.
ATV companies are quick to point to the large number of crashes in which riders ignore warnings. That is true more than 80 percent of the time in the government's database of fatal crashes, The Oregonian's analysis found.
But failure to comply with warnings doesn't always explain rollovers, The Oregonian found.
Working with the Consumer Product Safety Commission's crash data, the newspaper examined 2,732 fatal accidents involving four-wheel ATVs since 2000 and separated the cases into two groups: the large group of riders who ignored at least one safety warning, and the much smaller group of riders who didn't.
The newspaper then looked to see how often overturns were the primary event in the crash.
The unexpected result: Riders who followed the warnings overturned in about two out of five cases. This rate was almost identical to the frequency of rollovers in the group that ignored one or more warnings.
In other words, the failure to comply with the warning had very little to do with causing the rollover.
The persistence of rollovers among riders who followed the basic precautions shows why engineers and safety advocates have long pointed to another factor: ATV design. ATVs could easily be designed to be much safer, but they are not.
This is the most important issue and is the reason ATV manufacturers--who make hundreds of millions of dollars a year selling these machines--share in the responsibility for the thousands of needless deaths ATVs have caused.
This issue will be explored in more depth by Kentucky injury attorney Shawn Cantley in the next post in this series. To contact Shawn in the meantime, call 502-587-2002 or email him by clicking here: email_shawn.
