$30 Million Verdict After a Nissan Altima Rolled Forward and Pinned a Woman Against a Gas Station Wall
After trial: Beasley Allen's own case page notes that interest continues to accrue on the verdict, indicating it had not been paid as of publication. No appeal outcome has been reported.
Won by Beasley Allen.
A Marlboro County jury awarded a 62-year-old woman $30 million after her Nissan Altima rolled forward on its own while she was locked outside it, climbing a parking barrier and pinning her against a gas station building, a result her attorneys traced to metal debris fouling the transmission's forward clutch.
What happened
In 2019, the plaintiff pulled her Nissan Altima into a gas station, left the engine running, and stepped out to lock it with her key fob before going inside. Cars are not supposed to move once locked and unattended. Hers did. It rolled forward on its own, climbed the parking barrier meant to stop exactly this, and pinned her against the exterior wall of the store.
The case that followed turned on a mechanical detail most drivers have never heard of: creep force. In an automatic transmission vehicle at idle, the engine transmits a small amount of forward torque through the transmission even with a driver's foot off the brake, enough to make the car creep forward slowly. That creep is not a flaw. It is the primary signal, felt through the floor and the seat, that the transmission believes it is in gear. A driver who feels no creep reasonably assumes the car is safely in park.
Plaintiff's counsel argued that a manufacturing defect eliminated that signal in the plaintiff's Altima without eliminating the danger behind it. An automotive engineer retained by the plaintiff testified that metal debris inside the transmission fluid had lodged in the select solenoid valve, restricting hydraulic flow to the forward clutch. The practical effect, according to that testimony, was a transmission that could still engage and move the vehicle forward while giving the driver none of the creep sensation that would normally announce it. The vehicle's own computer had logged a stored trouble code consistent with that failure. Testing of the transmission fluid recovered metallic particles. And Nissan itself had issued a service bulletin in June 2016, three years before this crash, warning technicians about debris-related flow restriction in the same transmission family. Nissan's own engineer, testifying at trial, acknowledged that creep force is the primary way a driver knows a vehicle is in gear.
The plaintiff was represented by Chris Kinon and Caroline Barker of the Kinon Law Firm in Conway, South Carolina, together with Mike Andrews, Kendall Dunson, and Dana Taunton of Beasley Allen. Nissan's highest offer before trial was $999,999, short of a million dollars for injuries that left the plaintiff pinned against a wall by her own car.
On June 26, 2026, the Marlboro County jury returned a verdict of $30 million. South Carolina trade press reported it as the largest verdict in the county's history, a marker of how far the gap had grown between what Nissan had offered to end the case and what a jury decided the injury and the conduct behind it were worth.
As of this writing, Beasley Allen's own case reporting notes that interest continues to accrue on the verdict, which indicates it has not yet been paid out. No appeal has been publicly resolved, so the $30 million figure stands as the jury's verdict rather than a confirmed final recovery.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
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