Takata agree to settle PL claims

Takata, the Japanese airbag supplier facing big public liability claims in the US, has agreed a settlement said to be worth 1 billion dollars. The judge preferred to strike the deal rather than risk putting the company into bankruptcy.

The language of product liability

Reuters reports  that US government officials have released to the public internal General Motors documents dating from 2008 in which engineers were told to mind their language when discussing safety matters - with a view to how internal documents would look to outside observers. They are instructed not to use expressions like "safety" and "defect" when identifying product risks, and "explicitly told them not to use inflammatory terms including 'widow-maker' and 'Hindenburg'." And whoever used "inflammatory" and "Hindenberg" in the same sentence should have known better, too.

Did anyone really have to be told this? Or am I just reading this from a cautious lawyer's viewpoint? Seriously, though, there are important points here - first, that what engineers write in their reports could be prejudicial, but second (as the Reuters article points out, quoting a NHTSA official) that the instructions rob the engineers of some of the vocabulary that they might need in order to communicate to others in the organisation the seriousness of a problem. "Defect" is hard to do without: "Hindenberg" will never have a place in such a document.