stating “we cannot accept GM’s insinuation that ordinary consumers lack any legitimate expectations about the minimum safety of the products they use. In particular circumstances, a product’s design may perform so unsafely that the defect is apparent to the common reason, experience, and understanding of its ordinary consumers.”
How later courts described this case
- stating “we cannot accept GM’s insinuation that ordinary consumers lack any legitimate expectations about the minimum safety of the products they use. In particular circumstances, a product’s design may perform so unsafely that the defect is apparent to the common reason, experience, and understanding of its ordinary consumers.”
- reasoning that, under California law, plaintiffs may recover if they establish a product either falls below consumer expectation as to safety or, if it meets ordinary consumer expectations, the fact-finder determines the product's design yields excessive preventable danger
- refining Barker test and holding that the “consumer expectations test is reserved for cases in which the everyday -6- experience of the product’s users permits a conclusion that the product’s design violated minimum safety assumptions,” (emphases omitted) but that “the risks and benefits of a challenged design must be carefully balanced whenever the issue of design defect goes beyond the common experience of the product’s users”
- refining Barker test and holding that the "consumer expectations test is reserved for cases in which the everyday experience of the product's users permits a conclusion that the product's design violated minimum safety assumptions," (emphases omitted) but that "the risks and benefits of a challenged design must be carefully balanced whenever the issue of design defect goes beyond the common experience of the product's users"
Written by the judges who cited it.
The opinion
MOSK, Acting C. J., Concurring.
.--I agree with the conclusion of the majority in this case, I cannot approve an opinion that purports to “take guidance” (maj. opn., ante, p. 576) from People v. Cahill (1993) 5 Cal.4th 478 [ 20 Cal.Rptr.2d 582 , 853 P.2d 1037 ].
Cahill , an opinion that deemed coerced confessions to be harmless, was and remains a cruel aberration in the law. It casts doubt on our devotion to justice and perpetuates a medieval concept that convictions can be obtained by any means and at any cost to integrity.
Unnecessarily citing Cahill for “guidance” reflects unfavorably on the otherwise satisfactory analysis of this opinion.