Products Liability Law Daily Wrap Up, DESIGN AND MANUFACTURING DEFECTS—INDUSTRIAL AND COMMERCIAL EQUIPMENT—6th Cir.: Summary judgment and discovery rulings in favor of truck maker upheld in worker death case, (Apr 12, 2024)

By Pankhuri Bhatnagar, B.A. LL.B.

A district court did not abuse its discretion by excluding the worker’s estate’s expert evidence since the estate failed to provide the necessary expert disclosures by the specified deadline.

In a suit brought by the estate of a mine worker who died from being run over by a truck, against the truck’s manufacturer for not equipping the vehicle with certain safety features, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit affirmed a lower court’s grant of summary judgment to the manufacturer. The appeals court found that the manufacturer was not liable for negligence because it did not supervise or control the “Certified Rebuild” of the truck and it did not have a post-manufacture duty to upgrade the 1994 truck to 2015 standards during the rebuilding process (Klein v. Caterpillar, Inc., April 11, 2024, Kethledge, R.).

Background. Carmeuse Lime & Stone (employer) was a mining company with a quarry located in Michigan. Among the vehicles that Carmeuse used was a 1994 Caterpillar 785B Off-Highway Truck—a massive earth hauler that weighed 550,000 pounds when fully loaded. The hauler needed repairs by 2014 and the employer hired FABCO CAT—an independent dealer of Caterpillar products—to do a “Certified Rebuild” of the hauler. FABCO’s work-order form had a Caterpillar logo on it and stated that the rebuild would include “all current Caterpillar Engineering Updates applicable to this truck.” The dealer followed Caterpillar’s “scope and parameters'' guide, which specified the parts the dealer needed to replace to make the earth hauler “like a new 1994 785B with the same expected life that [it] had when it was originally sold.”

Once the work was complete, Caterpillar assigned a new serial number to the hauler to reflect that it had been rebuilt and had a new warranty. Carmeuse used the earth hauler without incident for the next three years. However, in November 2018, a woman who worked at the quarry was sitting in her Ford F-150, when another employee driving the rebuilt earth hauler ran over her vehicle, killing her instantly. Her husband/estate brought suit against Caterpillar Inc. (manufacturer), asserting claims for negligence and breach of warranty based on the argument that the manufacturer should have included certain safety features—such as technology enhancing the driver’s ability to see in front of the hauler—in its specifications for the 2015 rebuild. The estate later added a claim that the 1994 hauler was negligently designed and manufactured as it did not include those safety features. A district court granted summary judgment to Caterpillar. This appeal followed.

Negligence. The husband first asserted that genuine issues existed as to whether Caterpillar had voluntarily assumed a duty to rebuild the earth hauler to its present-day safety standard. Under Michigan law, a manufacturer has no duty to repair a product that was not defective when it was manufactured but if the manufacturer “voluntarily undertakes to perform an act” after the product’s manufacture, it must perform that act with reasonable care, Fultz v. Union-Com. Assocs., 683 N.W.2d 587, 591 (Mich. 2004). The court noted that it was FABCO, not Caterpillar, who performed the rebuild. The fact that FABCO’s work order required the rebuild to include “all current Caterpillar Engineering Updates” meant only that—to the extent the “like a new 1994” rebuild required the use of replacement parts—those parts would be ones built to current specifications. Thus, the manufacturer did not assume a duty to upgrade the hauler to 2015 standards.

The husband’s second argument was that Caterpillar was vicariously liable for FABCO’s negligence during the rebuild but he failed to elaborate the manner in which the work was negligent. For instance, he did not allege that FABCO left bolts untightened or neglected to replace parts which the guide required to be replaced. Rather, he claimed that FABCO should have rebuilt the hauler to 2015 standards rather than to 1994 ones. The court found this argument meritless since neither the manufacturer nor the dealer have a duty to rebuild the product to 2015 standards. Moreover, Caterpillar only specified the parts necessary to make a 1994 rebuild, it did not supervise or otherwise control the day-to-day operations of the dealer’s work. Prescriptions for “uniformity and standardization of products and services” could not support a generalized agency relationship under Michigan law that extended beyond the scope of designing the 1994 rebuild, Little v. Howard Johnson Co., 455 N.W.2d 390, 393–94 (Mich. Ct. App. 1990). Accordingly, the lower court properly granted summary judgment to the manufacturer.

Negligent manufacture. The estate next challenged the district court’s dismissal of the amended negligent design and manufacture claim as untimely. This claim first appeared in the estate’s third amended complaint, which was filed more than three years (the applicable limitations period) after the accident at issue, Mich. Comp. Laws § 600.5805(12). Thus, in order for the claim to be timely, it had to relate back to the filing of the second amended complaint. An amendment “relates back” to the date of an earlier pleading when it asserts a claim arising out of the same “conduct, transaction, or occurrence set out” in the earlier pleading, Fed. R. Civ. P. 15(c). Here, the estate’s third/amended claim stated that Caterpillar had negligently designed and manufactured the earth hauler in 1994 due to the omission of certain safety features. Count I of the earlier pleading, by contrast, alleged that Caterpillar was negligent in the 2015 rebuild, based on the same omissions. Therefore, the conduct described in the two counts was similar in kind but was separated by more than two decades. Thus, the third claim did not arise out of an occurrence (the rebuild) pleaded in the earlier complaint but instead out of an occurrence (the original manufacture) almost a generation before. The filing did not relate back, and the amended claim was untimely.

Discovery orders. Finally, the husband challenged three district court orders: the denial of two of his motions to compel and an order granting the manufacturer’s motion to exclude the testimony of both of his expert witnesses. The appeals court reviewed those orders and concluded that the lower court did not abuse its discretion in any of them since the expert evidence was excluded due to the husband’s failure to provide expert disclosures by the date specified in the court’s scheduling order.

The case is No. 23-1762.

Attorneys: Ellen G. Schreuder (Mancini Schreuder Kline PC) for Jill Klein. Michael Brian Hunter (Baker Sterchi Cowden & Rice L.L.C.) for Caterpillar, Inc.

Companies: Caterpillar, Inc.

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