Crashworthiness is the ability of a vehicle to prevent injury in the event of an accident. In a typical crashworthiness case involving vehicle design defects, the focus is on the cause of the injury, not the cause of the accident. A plaintiff in a crashworthiness case therefore must argue that a defect in the vehicle “enhanced” the injuries beyond what they would have been in a safely designed vehicle in the same accident.

Crashworthiness cases are expert intensive and usually require a complex biomechanical analysis — in which the vehicle defect is directly linked with the cause of the injury.