History Says Meadow Walker May Have A Case Against Porsche

The lawsuit by Paul Walker’s daughter against Porsche over its role in the actor’s 2013 death was the latest in a decades-long battle between the German sports car maker and U.S. lawyers claiming its vehicles can be too dangerous for many drivers—and who’ve had some success in getting American juries to agree.

In 1980, Cynthia Files borrowed her husband’s Porsche 930 Turbo. Driving home after work, with her boss Donald Fresh in the passenger seat, she hit the gas at a stoplight—perhaps to showcase the machine’s notorious power. The speed limit was 25 mph on this particular street in La Jolla, Calif., but within seconds, Files was approaching 60 mph.

Caught off guard by how violently the turbos kicked in, Files panicked and touched the brakes, just as she was entering a bend. The heavy tail of the rear-engined 930, a car known for its unruly behavior, swung around like a pendulum, sending her and her boss into oncoming traffic. Files, who had been drinking, survived mostly unharmed. Fresh, however, did not.

This, according to Craig McClellan, a personal injury lawyer out of San Diego, was the case that birthed a successful career representing individuals against automakers. McClellan and his clients, Fresh’s widow and two children, sued Porsche for wrongful death, contending the car was inherently dangerous for the average, untrained driver. Despite Files driving intoxicated and recklessly, McClellan won the case, with the jury ordering Porsche to pay $2.5 million in damages. The verdict was later appealed, but once again upheld. And despite Files’ wrongdoings, and the fact Fresh’s family sued her too, the jury decided she was not to blame.

A few years later, McClellan won another wrongful death claim against Porsche and its 911 Turbo.

“If an automaker knowingly does not use the technology it has available — something that may be standard on many other cars, especially when it relates to high performance vehicles — then that automaker should be liable in any injuries or deaths that occur due to this oversight,” says McClellan.

Meadow Walker, the 16-year-old daughter of Paul Walker, mirrors those claims in her lawsuit alleging her father would still be alive if the Porsche Carrera GT he was riding passenger in — when amateur race car driver Roger Rodas crashed heavily into a light pole and tree, splitting the machine in half before it burst into flames — was equipped with better safety features, such as stability control.

An investigation after the incident by law enforcement determined that the cause of the accident was reckless driving and excessive speed, noting that the 605-horsepower Carrera GT was traveling between 80 and 93 mph on a street in Los Angeles that was given a 45 mph speed limit. According to the report, the car suffered no mechanical failures and adhered to all safety rules applicable for a 2005 model year vehicle.

But that hasn’t stopped Walker’s lawyer, Jeff Milam, from alleging a different version of what occurred:

Meadow Walker with her late father

A wrongful-death lawsuit in a car crash has two fundamental parts: the cause of the crash—not just the driver but the vehicle, and any potential defects or missing equipment. The second part is crashworthiness: is the vehicle able to protect its occupants in a way that can withstand a foreseeable accident.

In the Walker suit, Milam alleges Porsche’s stability control system (PSM) — a feature standard on all but one Porsche model at the time, but not the Carrera GT — would have prevented or minimized the ferocity of the crash and saved Walker. For part two, he attacks the Carrera GT’s ability to protect its occupants, saying the crash bars inside the doors — designed to withstand side impacts — were inadequate for a supercar boasting this level of performance, despite falling within the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards’ guidelines for a 2005 vehicle. The seatbelts, too, were alleged to be poorly designed; when the vehicle hit the light pole, effectively snapping the Carrera GT in half, the anchors for the lap belt, Milam says, went with the front of the car, while the anchors for the shoulder belts went with the rear of the car.

That, in Milam’s words, “snapped Walker’s torso back with thousands of pounds of force, thereby breaking his ribs and pelvis,” and trapping him in the passenger seat. Finally, the rubber fuel lines allegedly weren’t sufficient to protect against spilling gasoline in the event of a heavy impact, causing the car to burst into flames.

The official investigation reported that both drivers died “within seconds” after the crash, primarily of massive head trauma. Milam, though, alleges Walker was actually alive, and it was 80 seconds until the car caught fire. Being trapped, he says, Walker was unable to escape, and breathed soot into his trachea before burning to death.

“If they can prove these allegations in court, then yes, they have a definite case,” Scott Schlesinger, a Fort Lauderdale-based attorney, tells Yahoo Autos. And while Meadow Walker’s lawsuit does not state the amount she seeks in damages, given her father’s successful career as an actor, the lost wages over the past two years and the loss of any future earnings, it could, according to Schlesinger, result in a substantial settlement.

Walker (right) with co-star Vin Diesel during filming for “The Fast and the Furious”

McClellan, the attorney responsible for taking down Porsche in the ‘80s, is skeptical of the official investigation: “Law enforcement doesn’t have a big interest in getting to the bottom of this,” he tells Yahoo Autos. “There’s nobody around to be prosecuted for manslaughter. And secondly, they called in Porsche to help with the investigation and the download, which is kind of like asking the fox to guard the chicken coop.”

Law enforcement responsible for the report did not return our request for comment. Porsche however sent the following statement: “As we have said before, we are very sad whenever anyone is hurt in a Porsche vehicle, but we believe the authorities’ reports in this case clearly establish that this tragic crash resulted from reckless driving and excessive speed.”

Why has this lawsuit from Meadow Walker only been submitted now, almost two years after her father’s death? McClellan reasons that their own team will have been conducting their own investigation, creating their own report—a task that takes time. But do they really have the ability to prove what they’re alleging, or are they taking a page out of McClellan’s own book by going after the Carrera GT for being notoriously difficult to drive?

The 2005 Carrera GT, a supercar described by Porsche as “as close to a race car as we will ever get,” has been known to provide a challenge even the most experienced of racers admit can be daunting. Its lack of stability control, despite the technology being available, was deliberate and well-publicized at its creation. The Carrera GT marketed itself as being analog and raw in a time when fancy electronic wizardry was beginning to mute the driving experience in many of its competitors. This was a key reason the rare Carrera GT was so popular among car enthusiasts who appreciated its back-to-basics engineering. But you had to respect it; Jay Leno lost control while testing one at Talladega, and many auto journalists praised the car for being wonderfully engaging and yet at the same time, quite sketchy to drive; Pulitzer Prize winner Dan Neil said, “If you are not entirely respectful of the car’s power, it will hurt you. This is a good thing.”

Like the 930 Turbo, then, the Carrera GT could scare the unprepared. However in the 930 case, McClellan didn’t just claim the car was known to behave unruly and therefore Porsche shouldn’t have sold it to the average person. He obtained a secret document from an anonymous source at Porsche where the 930 Turbo’s development driver had described the car’s behavior as “poisonous.” The document Porsche showed at the trial, however, had been modified, with the word “poisonous” switched to “normal,” and “a tendency to oversteer” changed to “understeer.” It was this original letter McClellan acquired that was the catalyst to his whole case.

The Carrera GT has been taken on before, by McClellan, in a case from 2006: Ben Keaton and passenger Corey Rudl were killed in a crash at Auto Club Speedway in California while lapping a Carrera GT during a Ferrari Club track day. After a Ferrari driver was released unsafely onto the circuit, Keaton made an evasive maneuver, losing control and hitting a concrete barrier at around 100 mph. There were multiple defendants in the case, including the track, the club, the driver of the Ferrari, and even Keaton’s estate for failing to inform Rudl that he had been having trouble with the handling of the car earlier in the day. Porsche were also on the hook, with McClellan claiming that stability control would have prevented the car from crashing during the evasive maneuver.

In total, $4.5 million was awarded to the Rudl family, which was settled before trial. Keaton’s family had to pay 49 percent of that, the track and its organizers 41 percent, while Porsche’s portion was around 8 percent: “The case settled with many parties settling independently of each other,” Frank Wiesmann, product experience manager at Porsche, tells Yahoo Autos via email. “PCNA settled for $350,000, less than 8% of the total (7.77%). This represented less than the costs of trial to Porsche. Ordinarily in such cases, the settlement amount is confidential. Porsche insisted that its settlement amount NOT be confidential.”

Did McClellan truly have a case against the Carrera GT? He says he had proof that stability control would have prevented the accident, but then $350,000 out of a $4.5 million settlement hardly insinuates guilt: “There’s no reason why the Carrera GT didn’t have stability control,” McClellan contests. “A button can turn it on or off if one desires, but it’s a safety feature a vehicle like this should have had.”

In an nutshell, among the other allegations, that’s what Meadow Walker’s lawyer, Milam, is betting on—that stability control was a technology that was available at the time, and that a jury will find Porsche negligent for not adding it to the Carrera GT.

“The fact that it was not mandatory for an automaker to include stability control is somewhat besides the point,” Schlesinger tells me. “What’s important here is, would having the system unquestionably have saved Walker’s life?”

Looking at the severity of the wreck and the destruction it did to the car, it’s difficult to imagine any technology or safety device that would allow either Rodas or Walker to survive. But the legal system has its own logic, and once again, it will be used to question Porsche’s choices.