$4.9 Billion Verdict Against GM for Defective Fuel Tank That Burned Six on Christmas Eve

On the night of December 24, 1993, Patricia Anderson was driving home from church through South Central Los Angeles with her four children and a family friend, Jo Tigner, in a 1979 Chevrolet Malibu. A drunk driver struck the car from behind at highway speed. The Malibu's gas tank, positioned just eleven inches from the rear bumper, ruptured on impact and the car erupted in flames. All six occupants were trapped inside and suffered severe burns.

The children ranged in age from roughly fourteen months to eight years at the time of the crash. Their injuries were catastrophic and required extensive, long-term medical treatment. Jo Tigner and Patricia Anderson also sustained serious burn injuries.

The trial, which ran nearly three months in Los Angeles Superior Court, centered on what General Motors knew and when it knew it. Attorneys for the plaintiffs, including Christine Spagnoli of Greene, Broillet, Taylor, Wheeler and Panish, introduced a 1973 internal GM memorandum in which an engineer calculated that relocating the fuel tank to a safer position would cost $8.59 per vehicle. The same memo pegged GM's projected litigation cost for fuel-system fire deaths at $2.40 per car. The document framed the human toll in purely financial terms, estimating the value of a life at $200,000 and projecting 300 to 500 preventable deaths each year.

On July 9, 1999, the jury found that General Motors had acted with fraud or malice. It awarded $107 million in compensatory damages and $4.8 billion in punitive damages, a combined $4.9 billion total that stood as the largest personal-injury verdict in United States history at that time.

The trial judge subsequently reduced the punitive award to $1.09 billion, citing proportionality to the compensatory damages. The case then settled confidentially before the appeal concluded; the final settlement amount was never disclosed. The compensatory award of $107 million was maintained through the reduction.