Court Opinion

ID: 9573556
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 20:56:43.410322+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T12:41:36.694198
License: Public Domain

JUSTICE LACY, with whom JUSTICE COMPTON and JUSTICE KEENAN join,
dissenting in part.
I disagree with the majority’s conclusion that automobile engines “do occasionally cut off without warning” and, therefore, that the loss of power-assisted brakes was not a sudden emergency.
An emergency is a sudden, unexpected, or unforeseen event that calls for immediate action. Garnot v. Johnson, 239 Va. 81, 86, 387 S.E.2d 473, 476 (1990). The majority draws an analogy between Garnot and the instant case and concludes that there was *122no unforeseen or unexpected event here that constituted a sudden emergency. In Garnot, an accident occurred after a vehicle suddenly stopped in front of another vehicle on the highway. This Court held that there was no sudden emergency because “a driver knows, or should know, that a car immediately in front of him may stop suddenly.” Id. Implicit in the Garnot decision is the premise that the operator of a vehicle generally can anticipate another vehicle’s stopping and can prevent an emergency by maintaining a safe distance between his vehicle and the vehicle immediately in front of him. However, one cannot conclude by analogy, as the majority does, either that a driver operating a vehicle with power-assisted brakes and steering “knows, or should know” that his engine will shut off or that the driver can take preventive measures to drive in a manner to avert any accident that may ensue when the engine shuts off inadvertently.
First, in my experience, the cut-off of an automobile’s engine without any warning does not happen with any frequency and is not in any way similar to the relatively common experience of having a preceding car stop suddenly. It is the frequency of that experience which made the sudden stop in Garnot an expected and foreseeable event and, therefore, not a sudden emergency. The cut-off of a car’s engine simply is not such a common experience and, therefore, I do not believe it meets the foreseeability test of Garnot.
Secondly, in contrast to the sudden stop event in Garnot, the fact that cars with power-assisted brakes and steering may shut off occasionally does not imply that such an event can be foreseen or expected in a manner that allows the driver to take actions which would prevent an accident. Therefore, when a car’s motor dies without warning, that circumstance should qualify, under Garnot, as a sudden emergency.
In this case, when the engine stopped running for unknown reasons, Felts was placed unexpectedly in an unforeseeable situation which called for immediate action. Once the engine stopped, difficulty in maneuvering the car and operating the brakes was expected and foreseeable, but these difficulties were results of the emergency event, and did not constitute the emergency itself.
As to the other elements of the sudden emergency doctrine, there is no suggestion that the engine shut-off was due to any prior negligence by Felts, and the instruction, therefore, would not be precluded on that basis. The remaining question, then, was *123whether Felts reacted to the emergency as an ordinary, prudent person would react. While Felts testified on cross-examination that he “probably wasn’t pushing [the brakes] hard enough to get the car stopped,” he did not testify that he could have stopped before entering the intersection. Possibly, Felts could have taken other actions to avoid entering the intersection, such as steering the car to the shoulder of the road. Whether Felts’s reaction to the emergency was reasonable was a question properly submitted to the jury.
Accordingly, because I concur with the remainder of the majority’s opinion, I would affirm the judgment of the trial court.