Racine Jury Awards $38.1 Million Against Hyundai Over Defective Seat and Head Restraint

On July 31, 2015, Edward Vanderventer was driving his 2013 Hyundai Elantra in Racine County when another vehicle struck him from behind. It was the kind of rear-end collision most drivers walk away from. Vanderventer did not. The impact left him with a spinal fracture and paralysis.

Vanderventer and his wife, Susan, sued Hyundai Motor America. Their attorney, Timothy S. Trecek of Habush Habush & Rottier, argued that the Elantra's driver seat was defectively designed. A weak, hollow horizontal tube in the seat back buckled on impact, and the head restraint failed to do its job. Trecek's position was blunt: if the parts had not been defective, Vanderventer would have walked away from the crash.

The case went to trial in Racine County Circuit Court in January 2020 and ran 18 days. More than 25 witnesses testified. Vanderventer was wheeled into the courtroom on a hospital bed to give his own account. Trecek built the design-defect case around engineer Kenneth Saczalski and neurosurgeon Dr. Shekar Kurpad, and introduced evidence of a stronger seat design Hyundai itself rolled out in 2017 to show that a safer alternative had been feasible back in 2013.

In February 2020 the jury found the driver's seat defective and unreasonably dangerous, and separately found that Hyundai had negligently designed or tested it. It assigned 84 percent of the fault to Hyundai. The total award to Edward and Susan came to $38,164,263.34, reported as $38.1 million. It was the largest single-plaintiff compensatory verdict in Wisconsin history, and the largest compensatory award for the spouse of an injured plaintiff.

Hyundai rejected the result. The company called it "an outrageous verdict, which we believe was not supported by the facts," and said it would appeal.

The appeal did not shrink the award. On October 26, 2022, the Wisconsin Court of Appeals affirmed the judgment in full (2022 WI App 56), holding that the circuit court had properly admitted the plaintiffs' expert testimony and the alternative-design evidence. Hyundai then asked the Wisconsin Supreme Court to take the case. In February 2023 the court denied the petition for review, leaving the $38.1 million judgment in place.