A commercial truck driver survived the crash itself. He walked away from the impact with no broken bones. He died minutes later because the truck he was driving, a 2009 Freightliner Columbia manufactured by Daimler Trucks North America, was built with exposed, side-mounted diesel fuel tanks that ruptured on impact and ignited into a fireball more than twenty feet high. This truck product defect brain injury case became one of the clearest examples the firm has litigated of a company choosing a cheaper, more dangerous design when a safer alternative already existed inside its own corporate family.
$12M
Jury verdict against the manufacturer
$19M
Judgment with interest after the appeal failed
Broken bones from the collision itself
On August 1, 2014, our client, a roughly 52-year-old commercial truck driver for Swift Transportation, was rear-ended while driving his Freightliner Columbia on Interstate 710 near Imperial Highway in Los Angeles County. The autopsy later confirmed he had no broken bones from the collision itself. He survived the crash. What he did not survive was what happened next: the truck's 100-gallon fuel tanks, mounted on the exterior sides of the frame rather than protected behind the cab, ruptured when the frame extension buckled and the axle rotated into them. Pressurized diesel fuel sprayed outward and ignited almost instantly, engulfing the cab in flames.
The most powerful piece of evidence did not come from an outside competitor. It came from Daimler itself. Daimler Trucks North America's own Mercedes-Benz Actros, sold by the same parent company, placed its fuel tank safely behind the cab, away from the crush zone where a rear impact would compromise it. Daimler had already engineered, built, and sold a safer design. It simply had not used that design in the Freightliner Columbia sold in the United States. That single fact reframed the entire case, turning it from a debate about impossible engineering tradeoffs into a demonstration that Daimler knew how to build this truck more safely and chose not to for its American commercial line.
Each pillar of the case was grounded in physical evidence and in Daimler's own product line rather than in argument alone.
Daimler's Mercedes-Benz Actros, built by the same parent company, placed the fuel tank behind the cab rather than exposed on the frame rails. A safer configuration was already engineered and sold, which made it far harder to argue the safer design was infeasible or too costly.
The risk-benefit test asks a jury to weigh a design's risks against its benefits, including whether a safer, feasible alternative existed at the time of manufacture. The behind-the-cab tank answered that question directly.
Mechanical and structural engineers reconstructed how the frame extension buckled under the rear impact, how the axle rotated as a direct consequence, and how the rotating axle breached the exposed tank, releasing pressurized diesel that ignited on contact with hot exhaust components. Each step was preventable by relocating the tank behind the cab.
Before trial, Daimler offered the family $650,000, and a company representative texted that the case "won't net anything." The family offered to settle the entire case for $5.1 million. Daimler rejected that offer and proceeded to trial.
With the safer design proven feasible and the failure sequence mapped, the design choice itself became the center of the trial.
Commercial trucking product liability litigation drives safety improvements across an entire industry. When a jury holds a major manufacturer accountable for choosing a more dangerous, less expensive fuel tank placement over an available safer design already in its own product line, the result carries well beyond a single verdict. This case sits alongside the firm's record of holding manufacturers and corporations accountable when they choose profit over safety, including a $104 million brain injury recovery, a $65.75 million trucking recovery, and a $38 million wrongful death recovery. Each reflects the same approach: securing the physical evidence, retaining the right engineering experts, and building the case around what the manufacturer knew and what it could have done differently.
The case was tried before Judge Michael Vicencia in Los Angeles Superior Court in Long Beach, with trial running from October 25 to November 12, 2019. On November 12, 2019, the jury returned a verdict of $12 million against Daimler Trucks North America. With interest and costs, the judgment grew to approximately $15 million, and after the Court of Appeal rejected Daimler's appeal in 2022, roughly $4 million more in appellate interest brought the judgment to about $19 million. Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome, and the firm handles trucking product defect cases on a contingency fee basis, so clients pay nothing unless there is a recovery.
The breakdowns below cover the fuel system design defect, the brain injury and life care damages, the corporate representative deposition strategy, the federal preemption defense, and the trucking evidence and discovery framework behind the result.
Fuel system design defect
Catastrophic injury damages
Life care and economic damages
Federal preemption defense
We try catastrophic trucking and product liability cases as counsel or co-counsel and pay statutory referral fees.
Refer a caseOur client survived the initial rear-end collision without broken bones, but died when the truck's exposed, side-mounted fuel tanks ruptured after the frame buckled and the axle rotated into the tank, releasing pressurized diesel that ignited into a large fireball.
The most powerful evidence was that Daimler Trucks North America's own Mercedes-Benz Actros, built by the same parent company, placed its fuel tank safely behind the cab rather than exposed on the frame rails, proving a safer design was feasible and already in use.
On November 12, 2019, a Los Angeles Superior Court jury returned a $12 million verdict against Daimler Trucks North America, which grew to approximately $15 million with interest and costs and to about $19 million after appellate interest.
