Ford Motor to appeal its $1.7B verdict over Georgia crash

Ford Motor Co. is preparing to make a court appeal after a Gwinnett County jury stated it should pay $1.7 billion. The verdict has been delivered last week and it was for a civil lawsuit that centers on the automaker’s Ford F-250 pickup truck that crashed and killed Melvin and Voncile Hill.

As per Fox Business, the case has been going on for years before the jury finally reached a verdict. The more than a billion penalty against Ford Motor is said to be the largest that a jury had ever imposed in the state’s history.

The automaker’s 2002 Ford F-250 model was involved in a car crash in April 2014. Its passengers, a couple named Melvin and Voncile Hill, died when the pickup truck rolled over. The plaintiff’s legal team said that the vehicles’ roofs were “dangerously defective” and this resulted in the demise of the couple.

The children of Melvin and Voncile - Kim and Adam Hill - were named the plaintiffs in the civil case for the wrongful death of their parents. Their lawyer, James Butler Jr., shared that he was shocked by all the evidence presented against Ford. he described the roofs in the F-250 truck as "weak."

On the other hand, Ford Motor's lawyer, William Withrow Jr., continued to defend its client and its engineers during the case’s closing arguments. The automaker’s legal team fight the allegations of “weak” roofs by saying “Ford and its engineers acted willfully and wantonly, with a conscious indifference for the safety of the people who ride in their cars when they made these decisions about roof strength."

The plaintiffs' legal team presented evidence of similar rollover crash incidents involving the pick-up truck. They showed at least 80 documentations of the roofs being crushed and the drivers were either injured or died.

"While our sympathies go out to the Hill family, we do not believe the verdict is supported by the evidence, and we plan to appeal," Ford said in a statement in response to the verdict.

The Guardian reported that the hill family decided to pursue the case against Ford Motor to warn other motorists about the pick-up trucks’ roofs. The automaker still insists that its vehicles are of high quality and an appeal is underway to reduce the amount of the fine or even scrap it entirely.