RDA

JEEP SUDDEN ACCELERATION

Romualdi, Davidson and Associates, in conjunction with Mr. Walter D. Salyer II of Infospace, has performed an extensive investigation of the phenomenon of sudden acceleration in certain 1991-1995 Jeep Cherokees and Grand Cherokees. At the culmination of this work, testimony was provided in Seattle, Washington in March of 2001 in the matter of Santosa v. Gerstel and DaimlerChrysler Corporation. The jury found that the accident in which Ms. Santosa was injured was not due to driver error on the part of our client, Mrs. Ida Gerstel. Rather, the jury concluded that the accident occurred as a result of a defect in the 1993 Grand Cherokee operated by Mrs. Gerstel. The verdict was appealed by DaimlerChrysler but was upheld by the Court of Appeals.

Following the Santosa trial, we submitted a formal defect petition to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, requesting opening of an engineering investigation of the SAI issue. The text of our submittal and NHTSA’s response are provided below.

		Click here for the Defect Petition Adobe Acrobat required

		Click here for the NHTSA Response Adobe Acrobat required

It is disappointing that NHTSA’s review of our petition failed to address the salient technical issues we raised, such as our analysis of the affected population of vehicles and analysis indicating that operator error could not be proximate cause of these events. In our identification of the population of Jeep vehicles having a defect giving rise to SAI, we used a methodology identical to that used by NHTSA in an engineering investigation of SAI in Ford vehicles.

An excellent source for general information concerning the SAI phenomena in various automobiles is provided by a website provided by Dr. Antony Anderson:

http://www.antony-anderson.com/cruise/cruise.htm