Date: Mon, 22 Apr 1996 21:28:02 -0400
From:
[email protected]
Subject: Re: Dead lawyers and irony - vaguely Porsche related
Chuck Olson asks
>Is this in reference to the Porsche Turbo multi-million $ suit a
>few years back, which found the company produced a car that was too
>dangerous for the average driver to control in a turn or some other such
>nonsense?
>
>How did that ever come out - I faintly recall (no pun) something about
forced
>design changes in addition to several million $ of monetary damages ....
Hi, Chuck.
The details of the story are even better than your brief recap. Some rich
butthead's wife had the usual 5-martini lunch or whatever. Then proceeded to
go out on a rain-slick curving road in San Diego County (Californians can't
drive worth a damn in the rain when they're sober, never mind when they're
sloshed) and wrapped Turbo and self around tree. The tree is going to be OK
but the other two parties were totalled. Now Rich Butthead sues Porsche for
selling him a car with "unusually high horsepower" and not warning him that
the car could be dangerous to drive. But what Butthead's attorney failed to
mention is the fact that the Turbo was not even sold in the U.S. for that
model year; Butthead had gone to great lengths to bring this one in from
Canada and have it federalized. Porsche got into trouble when they were
subpoenaed for an internal document describing handling tests, I believe on
the Nuerburgring. The test driver had used the word "giftig" to describe its
handling, which can be translated, but translated erroneously, as
"poisonous." "Giftig" in this context is actually a compliment, somewhat like
"aggressive." Or our more modern "*****in'."Anyway, somebody at Porsche USA
(I know who it is, and he retired honorably a few years later) altered the
document to read something other than "giftig" but the opposition somehow got
hold of the unaltered document and they made all sorts of noise about
evidence tampering etc. and Porsche lost the suit. As part of the trial they
even had Porsche race drivers come in and try to duplicate the feat. I think
Juergen Barth worked on this one. Even a skilled Porsche driver could not get
around the turn with the amount of speed this woman had on the car.
