- Ford must pay $2.5 billion to a grieving family after two people died in a Super Duty truck.
- Herman and Debra Mills were crushed when their F-250 flipped over and landed on its roof.
- The jury decided that Ford’s 1999-2016 trucks had “defective and dangerously weak roofs.”
Ford is on the hook for $2.5 billion in punitive damages after a jury determined the automaker was responsible for the deaths of a couple from Georgia who died in a single-vehicle accident in 2022.
Herman and Debra Mills were crushed when their 2015 F-250 Super Duty Truck flipped over at speed after leaving the road and hitting a drainage culvert hidden by grass. The pickup flew through the air for around 81 ft (24.7 m) before turning onto its roof as it came into contact with the ground.
Related: Ford Fights $1.7 Billion Payout Over Fatal F-250 Rollover, Lawyers May Lose $549 Million
Debra Mills died at the scene of the crash and her husband succumbed to his injuries in hospital nine days later. Lawyers representing the couple’s family argued that the pickup’s lack of roof strength caused their deaths, claiming that all of Ford’s big trucks built between 1999 and 2016 were produced with “defective and dangerously weak roofs.”
The legal team said the trucks had a strength-to-weight ratio of 1:1, but the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety requires vehicles to achieve 4.0 to be awarded a “good” rating. Ford’s lawyers contended that the trucks were safe, and that Debra Mills suffered a heart attack, causing the crash, but the automaker was fighting an uphill battle, having already been ordered to pay $.17 billion in punitive damages in 2022 relating to another fatal rollover accident that happened in 2014.
Since the first ruling, Ford has been hit by a number of suits, Ford Authority notes. Following the latest judgment, it continues to claim that the trucks were correctly built to meet the crash standards of the time, and believes that a $30 billion payout is far too high.
“While our sympathies go out to the Brogdon family, the verdict is impermissibly extreme and not supported by the evidence,” a Ford spokesperson told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, adding that the automaker planned to appeal the verdict.
