Keeping Our Children Safe: ATV Accidents Caused by Defective ATV Design
This is one in a series of blog posts on ATV accident injuries and deaths by Kentucky Injury Lawyer Blog contributor and personal injury attorney, Shawn Cantley.
Here are some of Shawn's earlier posts on the subject:
ATV Accidents & Deaths: Why ATVs Keep Killing
4 Kentucky ATV Accident Deaths Last Week Alone
Each year, ATV accidents send about 136,000 riders to emergency rooms and kill 800 more. About one of every three fatal crashes starts with the ATV overturning. Many of these victims are children and minors.
The Oregonian newspaper conducted independent tests of ATV stability along with an analysis of federal safety data to determine why ATVs were overturning and killing with such regularity. The ATV industry and its backers claim that ATV rollovers only occur as a result of rider's failing to follow safety precautions.
The unexpected result: Riders who followed the comapanies' safety warnings overturned in about two out of five rollover 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.
What roll does ATV design play in making them deceptively dangerous and overly-prone to rollover: ATVs are designed to have a narrow track width and also a high ground clearance, necessary qualities to live up to their marketing and their name: allow them to travel on "All Terain"--i.e., on rough territory and narrow trails. These are the same qualities make them far less stable than cars or SUVs. Narrow wheel-base also allows most ATVs to be placed in the bed of even small pickups and trailers.
Under pressure about rollovers, the ATV companies in 1988 signed agreements with the Consumer Product Safety Commission pledging not to build four-wheel ATVs with less sideways stability than those they sold at the time. Since 1991, the commission hasn't performed tests to check whether the companies kept their pledge.
The Oregonian newspaper hired engineer Thomas R. Fries of Portland, Oregon to measure the stability of four popular models.
Fries followed industry and Consumer Product Safety Commission methods. He first measured front and back stability -- called pitch stability -- and found that all four machines met the current, industry-adopted standard. But Fries said the government's test method overstates stability by 10 percent to 15 percent.
To get a more realistic result, he performed a different test. ATVs were placed on a table and tilted sideways to discover their tip angle -- the point at which their upper wheels lift off the surface. The tilt table method is better, Fries said, because it accounts for the way an ATV's suspension and tires behave.
On the tilt table test, all of the machines came in below a stability threshold Fries considered safe. "They're dangerous," Fries said. "They are too prone to tipping over."
Fries said that small changes in ATV design -- such as widening the track width by a couple of inches and lowering the rider seating position -- would significantly increase stability. His report can be read online at www.oregonlive.com. To date, there is no indication that ATV manufacturers plan to follow this advise as the death toll from ATV rollovers continues to mount in Kentucky and the rest of the country.
Those interested in the legal implications of ATV accidents can contact Shawn Cantley at (502) 598-2002 or by clicking here: email_shawn.
