Japanese automaker Mitsubishi Motors, an ally of Renault and Nissan, has announced that it has been ordered to pay $1 billion in damages in the United States following a road accident involving one of its vehicles.
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Mitsubishi Motors immediately stated in a press release that it does not accept this ruling as regards its North American subsidiary MMNA, which plans to appeal, according to Le Figaro.
While it is not unusual to see damages in excess of a million dollars in car accident cases in the United States, the amount awarded in this case is particularly large, but not a record. In 2022, the American car manufacturer Ford was sentenced to pay 1.7 billion dollars in damages for a manufacturing defect in one of its models that led to the death of a couple in Georgia (southern United States) in a road accident in 2014, according to G4Media.ro.
Shares fell 4.4% on the stock market
This lawsuit, which began in 2018, related to a traffic accident that had occurred the previous year in Pennsylvania (Northeastern United States). Francis Amagasu, who was driving a Mitsubishi 3000 GT, lost control of his sports car while trying to overtake a vehicle in front of him. The accident left him a quadriplegic. A Philadelphia court ruled in favor of the plaintiff, the driver’s wife, who argued that her husband’s serious injuries were caused by a seat belt defect and that the vehicle manufacturer should therefore be held liable.
Mitsubishi Motors “disputes the plaintiff’s claim that the vehicle was defective,” the automaker said in a statement. The ruling, handed down on Monday and served on Mitsubishi Motors on Wednesday, confirms the decision of a popular jury in the same court last October, which ordered similar damages. As Mitsubishi Motors plans to appeal, the impact of this verdict on its future financial results is still “uncertain”, he added. That clarification didn’t prevent its shares from falling 4.4% during the mid-session break on the Tokyo Stock Exchange on Thursday, bucking the market’s uptrend.
