Ford Motor Co. is asking a new trial after a jury reached a $1.7 billion verdict against the auto maker last month involving a truck rollover accident that left two people dead.
In new court filings Monday, Ford said it was unfairly precluded from providing evidence that showed the truck involved in the fatal incident was safe and the roof structure was stronger than many of its peers.
The trial was over a crash in 2014 that killed two members of the plaintiffs family. The family sued Ford, alleging that the truck's roof design was faulty and vulnerable to collapse during a rollover crash.
According to the most recent filings, the car company argued Monday that a state judge in 2018 effectively barred Ford from defending itself against the plaintiffs' claims that the truck's roof design was defective.
Ford said in the filings that it wasn't able to show at trial other factors at play that could have contributed to the deaths, including its contention that the occupants weren't properly wearing their seat belts.
Ford didn't get to put its case on, said Theodore Boutrous, an attorney for the auto maker. It was fighting with two hands behind its back. Ford filed two motions Monday in the state court of Gwinnett County in Georgia. One motion sought a new trial, while the other challenged the punitive damages imposed on the company in August.
James Butler, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, said he would address the points Ford raised in these motions and said he doesn't believe Ford has a defense to present.
The Hills were driving from their farm in Georgia in 2014 when they were killed. The right front tire of the couple's heavy-duty truck blew out and the vehicle rolled over, according to court documents.
The Hills were crushed inside the truck, said James Butler, a lawyer representing the plaintiffs in the case.
Lawyers for the Hill family argued at trial that the roofs on the 1999 -- 2016 Super-Duty trucks had a defective design, were dangerously weak, and that the company knew of the risks they posed.
The plaintiffs' attorneys said in a pretrial order that Ford had identified 162 lawsuits involving roof-crush incidents in these specific model-year trucks.
Mr. Boutrous said there are other factors that can cause injury in a violent rollover crash that aren't related to roof design. He said that the company prevailed in four other lawsuits involving similar rollover incidents in Ford trucks. Three of them were decided by a jury, he said.
In the Hill case, Ford's lawyers had argued that the tire installed on the couple's truck had the wrong load-carrying capacity, which led it to fail. Ford said that when the tire broke, Mr. Hill improperly steered his truck, causing it to leave the road at a dangerous angle. There are millions of these vehicles on the road around the United States, according to Boutrous. The safety record is strong. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration shows no investigation or safety recalls related to incidents of collapsed roofs involving heavy-duty Ford pickups from 1999 to 2016 on the top safety regulator.