$55.4 Million Against Continental General Tire in the First Tread-Separation Case Tried to Verdict After the Firestone Recall

On June 26, 1996, Cynthia Lampe was driving her 1993 Ford Taurus across the desert between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, her mother Sylvia Cortez in the car with her. The tread on the left rear tire separated and came off the wheel at highway speed. Lampe lost control, the car left the road and hit an embankment, and it rolled. She was left quadriplegic. Her mother was injured as well.

The tire was a General AmeriTech ST, one of the four the Taurus was sold with, and it had been driven close to 50,000 miles. Lampe and both her parents sued Continental General Tire, which built the tire at its plant in Mount Vernon, Illinois.

Brian Panish and Adam Shea tried the case in Los Angeles County Superior Court to a jury of ten women and two men. Their theory was a bad tire rather than a bad design: contamination in the rubber, and a plant under enough production pressure that workers routinely took shortcuts to keep tires moving. Panish told the jury the tires were 'ticking time bombs on the roadway' and that Continental 'knew the tire was defective; they knew it had contamination in it.'

Continental's trial counsel, Walter Yoka, argued that something on the road had struck the tire, possibly as much as 1,500 miles before the crash, and that the tread came apart because of that impact rather than anything that happened at the plant. He also argued that Lampe had oversteered once the tread let go, and that the oversteer, not the tire, was what put the Taurus into a roll.

The jury deliberated eight days. On April 13, 2001, it found that the AmeriTech ST had a manufacturing defect that caused the crash, rejected the claim that the tire was defectively designed, and found no malice, which foreclosed punitive damages. It awarded $49,856,921 to Cynthia Lampe, $4,505,575 to her mother, and $1,000,000 to her father, Joseph Cortez: $55,362,496 in all. The New York Times reported the total that week as roughly $54.9 million.

It was the first tire tread-separation case tried to a verdict after the Ford and Firestone recalls, and Yoka said afterward that the publicity around Firestone 'may have bled over into our case.' The award was believed at the time to be the largest in a tread-separation case, and the National Law Journal ranked it 37th among the largest verdicts of 2001. Continental said it would appeal, called several of the trial court's evidentiary rulings wrong and prejudicial, and moved to set the verdict aside. No public record of how those motions or any appeal were resolved has surfaced.