Yamaha Rhino Trials in California and Alabama Result in Defense Verdicts

Juries in Alabama and California have ruled in favor of the defense in two Yamaha Rhino lawsuits, saying that plaintiffs did not prove that design problems with the popular side-by-side off-road vehicle caused their accidents and injuries. 

The verdicts were handed down last week within 24 hours of one another. The California Rhino lawsuit was brought by plaintiffs Jacob Daniel Lewis and Patrick Hernandez. The Alabama lawsuit was filed by Paul Mathis in Tallapoosa County Circuit Court.

According to the complaints, Lewis and Hernandez were riding a 2007 Rhino 660 in April 2007, when Lewis, who was driving, struck two dirt berms, causing the ATV to overturn. Lewis suffered brain and upper arm injuries, while Hernandez received injuries to his shoulder and suffered post traumatic stress disorder. Mathis suffered a leg injury in his Yamaha Rhino rollover accident. Both complaints alleged that a defective and unreasonably dangerous design of the Rhino made the ATV prone to rollover, and that Yamaha failed to include adequate safety features and warnings.

To date, Yamaha Motor Corp. has successfully defended itself in four out of five Yamaha Rhino trials that have reached a jury. The only loss came in May, when a Georgia jury awarded $317,000 to a man who suffered leg injuries during a Yamaha rollover accident.

There are several hundred lawsuits over Yamaha Rhino accidents that have been filed in courts throughout the United States, with 170 claims pending in California state court alone.

The federal Yamaha Rhino litigation has been centralized for pretrial proceedings as part of an MDL, or multidistrict litigation, before Judge Jennifer B. Coffman in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Kentucky. The first Yamaha Rhino trials in the MDL, which are known as “bellwether” cases because they will be used to gauge how jurors will respond to evidence that will be presented throughout the litigation, were scheduled to begin in October 2010. However, according to recent court documents, the first trial has been pushed back to January 2011.

Although the ATV maker has been successful in the early state court trials, prior reports suggest that Yamaha Rhino settlements have been confidentially reached in a number of other cases that were set for trial.

Similar allegations have been raised in all of the lawsuits, but the individual facts and circumstances of each accident are considered by the jury in determining whether any negligent design of the Yamaha Rhino caused that plaintiff to suffer an injury.

Plaintiffs argue that design problems with the Yamaha Rhino make the vehicle prone to rollover due to the combination of a small wheel base, narrow turning radius, high center of gravity and powerful engine. They also claim that the ATV, which has been found to rollover on flat surfaces at speeds as low as 13 miles per hour, lacked safety features which would reduce the risk of injury in a rollover accident.

In 2009, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) determined that the Yamaha Rhino could roll over on level terrain at slow speeds and a Yamaha Rhino recall was issued so that the manufacturer could make safety improvements to vehicles that had been sold.

Problems with the Yamaha Rhino and the high number of accidents involved with the vehicle sparked the CPSC to propose new safety rules for recreational off-highway vehicles (ROVs).