Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/boundvolumes/529bv.pdf
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529US3

Unit: $U62

[09-26-01 12:54:01] PAGES PGT: OPIN

Cite as: 529 U. S. 861 (2000)

865

Opinion of the Court

1987 vehicles with passive restraints. We ask whether the
Act pre-empts a state common-law tort action in which the
plaintiff claims that the defendant auto manufacturer, who
was in compliance with the standard, should nonetheless
have equipped a 1987 automobile with airbags. We conclude
that the Act, taken together with FMVSS 208, pre-empts
the lawsuit.

I

In 1992, petitioner Alexis Geier, driving a 1987 Honda Ac-
cord, collided with a tree and was seriously injured. The
car was equipped with manual shoulder and lap belts which
Geier had buckled up at the time. The car was not equipped
with airbags or other passive restraint devices.

Geier and her parents, also petitioners, sued the car’s man-
ufacturer, American Honda Motor Company, Inc., and its af-
ﬁliates (hereinafter American Honda), under District of Co-
lumbia tort law. They claimed, among other things, that
American Honda had designed its car negligently and defec-
tively because it lacked a driver’s side airbag. App. 3. The
District Court dismissed the lawsuit. The court noted that
FMVSS 208 gave car manufacturers a choice as to whether
to install airbags. And the court concluded that petitioners’
lawsuit, because it sought to establish a different safety
standard—i. e., an airbag requirement—was expressly pre-
empted by a provision of the Act which pre-empts “any
safety standard” that is not identical to a federal safety
standard applicable to the same aspect of performance, 15
U. S. C. § 1392(d) (1988 ed.); Civ. No. 95–CV–0064 (D. D. C.,
Dec. 9, 1997), App. 17.
(We, like the courts below and the
parties, refer to the pre-1994 version of the statute through-
out the opinion; it has been recodiﬁed at 49 U. S. C. § 30101
et seq.)

The Court of Appeals agreed with the District Court’s con-
clusion but on somewhat different reasoning.
It had doubts,
given the existence of the Act’s “saving” clause, 15 U. S. C.
§ 1397(k) (1988 ed.), that petitioners’ lawsuit involved the po-