Harley Davidson ABS lawsuit - does this guy have a case?

Chill out there hoss no one is arguing with you. The guy just said an expensive bike should have a well designed instrument panel and tried to clarify that he wasn't insinuating that the HD design was a bad one because he simply didn't know. The courts decided the HD design was good enough but that doesn't make the statement invalid (just kind of irrelevant for this particular case).

If you want to defend HD's honor you probably want to save your energy for when someone is actually talking about the brand. I'm sure you won't have to wait long before someone gives you something to stay busy but if you like picking fights there is a very nice subforum called JoMamma where they absolutely love to play that game...

As for the original topic, I'm glad this one ended up the way it did. I can't fathom a person buying a motorcycle and not knowing what they bought. I suppose you could get away with it in a car but on a bike it's a bit more important to understand how the thing works if you want to stay alive.

I have a ST1100 and it came with an instrument cluster appropriate to the version.

The standard version - ST1100 - had this dash.


The ABS TCS version - ST1100A - had this dash.


The bike also had clear labels whether it has ABS or not.

This is not necessarily true. 80s and 90s K bikes had different instrument clusters for ABS and non-ABS bikes.

Woman hurt in 2009 crash loses suit in Sacramento against Harley-Davidson #scsharelink { background: url(http://media.sacbee.com/static/sacco...share-icon.png) no-repeat left center; padding-left: 20px; } Share By Andy Furillo afurillo@sacbee.com By Andy Furillo The Sacramento Bee Last modified: 2011-12-19T21:31:26Z Published: Monday, Dec. 19, 2011 - 1:27 pm Copyright 2011 The Sacramento Bee. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. A Sacramento Superior Court jury today exonerated Harley-Davidson in a lawsuit filed by a woman who suffered severe brain damage in a 2009 wreck on Highway 99.Plaintiff Judy Wilson had charged in her suit that the motorcycle her husband crashed while she was riding on the back had a defective design because of an icon on its tachometer that made him think the bike had anti-lock brakes when it didn't.Wilson also charged that a salesman for Harley-Davidson of Sacramento told her the motorcycle had an anti-locking braking system. The company argued that the design was not defective and that it's been selling motorcycle with the "ABS" icon for years without incident. The dealership denied that its salesman ever told Wilson the bike had the anti-lock braking system.

http://api.viglink.com/api/click?fo... | Sacram...&jsonp=vglnk_jsonp_13243981133473

Wife gets thrown out of the saddle for 35ft.:eek1...they should sue Harley for not fitting a seatbelt.
Or the wife should sue her husband for being an arsehole, but he probably wasn't good for 2.6 million

Nothing do with HD Honor, I just ride an HD have owned other brands too and thier all just motorcycles. Motorcycles, Cars, Cameras, Computers, GPS all have different desgins and it's my job as the owner to become familar with it. We live in a world that seems to place the blame on every thing else except for the individual who is doing the action. We have people following a GPS to nowhere instead of using thier common sense, a guy slams on his rear brake and then can't understand why he crashed, all they know is it couldn't be their fault. Having ABS is a nice option but if I brake hard and I feel my bike is going out from under me I'm not going to let my ABS make the decision for me, I'm going to let 35 years of riding make that decision, I'm going dig deep and try to remember what I did when I practiced and none of it is going to come from a shiny leather vest that some riders think is more important than training (a HD thing). I also understand that the coffee is hot when it is served, I don't need a warning label; I must be Old School.

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I just don't know how we survived "back in the day" when you sometimes bought a brand new dirt bike that had no lights, gauges, or indicators of any kind and no manual either.

done deal, and yee haw. i perused the thread (but didn't read every word) to see if anyone talks about the fact that,
if you are paying attention, you NORMALLY would not have to slam on the brakes.
so (yeah i KNOW it's been said) i call pilot error.

Fixed that for you, you don't need to thank me.

Your 35 years of riding experience translates to no one else's riding ability. There are plenty of new riders, like me, who have much less experience and while we may strive to learn, still have months of experience, not years. It is nice to have a motorcycle that works on limiting mistakes, not one that has needed info in the manual, but not observable.

Maybe the guy who crashed was an idiot, but you argument that so long as information is in the owners manual, there can be no criticism of the intuitiveness of the bike is crazy. Dakez had a good argument. He said, paraphrasing him, "the instrument panel is good." Your argument, if I understand it correctly, is that so long as an explanation of the panel is in the manual, "all is good." Good design is always a good thing.

Just my opinion, for what its worth.

I don't think that is what anyone was saying. Realize everything said was based off of the lawsuit. People aren't saying don't criticize, they are saying that allowing someone to sue for that basis is wrong. The other stuff should get sorted out when people decide what bikes to buy and which is the better designed bike.

Riding motorcycles isn't like most other things.

Take kayaking as an example; obviously pretty much anyone can paddle around on a glassy pond in a stable, sit on top, kayak. After a while you start to paddle farther, maybe get out when it's kind of windy and you learn how to cope with sidewinds and head winds. After a while you get a longer, narrower, faster, but less stable boat, with a skirt. Now you learn to Eskimo roll, and self rescue in open water, you are up to 10-12 miles of sustained paddling in offshore wind and chop. You also get a white water boat and start messing around in breaking surf and rivers with strong currents and eddies. At what point do you think you are ready for Class V big water, or unsupported passages offshore?

If you want to make a parallel with riding motorcycles, you should start out riding a small dirt bike off road until you can ride pretty much any gnarly trail. Then maybe you should get an older, used, 250 to 500cc street bike and start working your way around low traffic areas for a few months until you understand just how badly the average car driver is at paying attention. At this point you are probably ready to decide if you are serious about riding and whether you want to move up to a top line bike.

I think that riding around the greater Los Angeles (or insert 500,000+ population city name here) streets and freeways is about the equivalent (danger wise) of surfing big Mavericks, BASE jumping Half Dome, night carrier landings, or running the Grand Canyon at peak flow. How many people do you know who do that on a regular basis?

My VW doesn't have ABS but has the cutoff indicator. I think it's time to go drive into something and sue VW!!!!!

I am sorry this woman got injured, but the rider is a f***ing IDIOT!!!! RIDER ERROR is what caused this accident.

The only way this woman should of been able to win is if motorcycle and car companies had known that there were large numbers of people that were so stupid that they regularly made the mistake of thinking their vehicles were equipped with safety devices that did not come with their vehicles because of the use of standardized gages which sometimes had non functioning "idiot lights" for features not equipped on those specific vehicles. They also would have to know that the mistaken belief in the presence of these incorrectly assumed safety devices would encourage the drivers to operate the vehicles in such a way that would lead to a significant difference in the accident rate for those operating similar vehicles who were not total morons.
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Truly they should have known...

I feel sorry for the woman. She is probably just going along with what her "estranged"(per the article) husband is/was telling her to do for what he probably thought would be easy money. She probably has no idea the accident was caused by operator error. If he really didn't know the bike didn't have ABS after owning it for 15 months then he is a fool.
Thank doG common sense prevailed with the jurors.
She should sue her estranged husband for damages, both physical and mental and just for general principle.

See? Still going strong!

Keep up the good work guys!

M