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Victims of Drunk Driver Suffered Worse Injuries Because of Drunk Driver's New Vehicle

A man and his wife were driving on an undivided highway in a full-sized pickup when another full-sized pickup traveling in the opposite direction, driven by an drunk driver, passed in a no passing zone causing a head-on collision.

The couple's truck rolled onto its side and they were both injured very seriously. Bystanders rescued the wife from the truck, but before they could free the husband from his seatbelt the vehicle bursts into flames, burning him to death.

The drunk driver was driving a pickup given to him by his father. It was a company vehicle before that. Just before he got the pickup as a gift, his vehicle had been a Mitsubishi Galant, a substantially smaller vehicle. One of the issues of the case involving punitive damages was whether the resulting injury and death would have been different had the collision been with the Mitsubishi rather than the full-sized pickup.

The forensic epidemiologist expert in this case analyzed statistics for an estimated 71,479 vehicles that were either a pickup struck by a pickup, a pickup struck by a car, or a car struck by a pickup at highway speeds. He compared the injury and death outcomes and found that the cumulative death rate for pickups struck head-on by other pickups at highway speed is 4.8%, where as the death rate for pickups struck by passenger cars was 0.9%.

This means that the relative risk of death between the two scenarios is 5.6, and that the risk of dying to the plaintiff would have been decreased by 82% had the drunk driver been driving a car rather than a pickup.

In addition, the risk of serious injury to the surviving wife was increased by around 50% by the pickup impact versus a car impact.

This powerful analysis removed any room for defense speculation on the issue.

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