$160 Million Verdict Against Daimler Over a Truck Cab Design Left Unchanged for Nearly 30 Years

Leonard Street was driving a 2023 Western Star tractor on Highway 84 near Grove Hill, Alabama, when a pickup truck crossed into his lane. The evasive maneuver that followed put his rig on its side. Street survived the rollover, but he did not walk away from it: he fractured his neck and was left with incomplete quadriplegia, a spinal cord injury in which some sensation and function remain but independent movement largely does not.

The case his lawyers built was not about the pickup driver. It was about what happened inside the cab once the truck began to roll.

Beasley Allen attorneys Ben Baker, Kendall Dunson, and Wyatt Montgomery, with co-counsel Matt Drinkard and Eddie Massey, argued that the truck Street was sitting in had been engineered to a standard its manufacturer had stopped revisiting. The roof structure on the 2023 model, they told the jury, traced to a design finalized in 1995 and carried forward essentially unchanged for nearly three decades. In a rollover, the roof is the last thing between a driver and the road, and the plaintiffs' evidence was that this one did not do the job a modern cab should.

The second half of the case concerned the driver's seat. Heavy trucks use air-suspension seats that float on a column of compressed air to smooth out road vibration over long hauls. That same travel becomes a liability in a crash, when the seat can move a driver's body in ways a fixed seat would not. The plaintiffs' theory was that the suspension seat in Street's truck lacked a mechanism to pull the seat down and lock it in position at the moment of impact, so that the restraint system could hold him where it was designed to hold him. Without it, the argument went, Street's body traveled inside the cab during the rollover in a way that drove the injury to his neck.

Daimler Truck North America and Western Star Trucks defended the design. The jury did not accept it. In September 2024, after trial in Clarke County Circuit Court, it returned $75 million in compensatory damages and $75 million in punitive damages to Leonard Street, and a further $10 million to Tracy Street for loss of consortium. The punitive award, equal to the compensatory figure, reflected the jury's view of a manufacturer that had left a safety-critical structure alone for a generation of product cycles.

The verdict drew immediate attention in the trucking trade press, where awards of this size against a manufacturer rather than a motor carrier are uncommon. Transport Topics and FreightWaves both covered it, and the case became a reference point in the industry's ongoing argument about cab crashworthiness standards, which lag well behind those governing passenger cars.

Speaking after the verdict, Ben Baker framed what his client wanted out of it in terms that had little to do with the money. Street hoped, Baker said, that the case would change the way trucks are built, and would push the industry toward stronger regulation of truck cabs and seats.

Daimler indicated it would appeal. As of late 2026 no appellate resolution had been reported, so the $160 million figure remains the jury's award rather than a collected judgment.