Opinion ID: 1404934
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Conformance to then-existing state of the art.

Text: Richardson admitted that in 1977, all four major American automobile manufacturers equipped their vehicles with automatic transmissions having the same design as the transmission installed by Ford in this particular F-250 pickup truck. KRS 411.310(2) creates a presumption rebuttable by a preponderance of the evidence that a product is not defective if it conformed to the generally recognized and prevailing standards or the state of the art in existence at the time the design was prepared, and the product was manufactured. While an industry cannot set its own standards by uniformly adopting careless methods, Owens-Corning Fiberglas Corp. v. Golightly, Ky., 976 S.W.2d 409, 411 (1998), Jones v. Hutchinson Mfg., Inc., Ky., 502 S.W.2d 66, 70 (1973), the statute protect[s] a manufacturer from liability for failure to anticipate safety features which were unknown or unavailable at the time the product in question was manufactured and distributed. Golightly, supra, at 411. In the early 1980s, the United States Department of Transportation, National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration (NHTSA), conducted an extensive investigation of allegations of park-to-reverse incidents involving transmissions installed by all major automobile manufacturers during the period 1966 to 1980 and concluded that no safety recall was warranted. 49 U.S.C. §§ 30118 and 30120 require the issuance of a recall upon a finding of a safety-related defect. Since the C-6 transmission conformed to recognized and prevailing standards in existence at the time of its manufacture and installation and since the NHTSA's investigation did not establish that the design was sufficiently unsafe to warrant recall, Ford was entitled to the statutory presumption and to a directed verdict on this issue. II. PEREMPTORY STRIKES.