Emily LaPrade, who has had no sensation below her T10 vertebra since a 2014 spinal cord injury, was riding in the front passenger seat of her family's 2023 Volkswagen Tiguan on September 4, 2023, returning from a camping trip. She used the seat heater at its highest setting for roughly 20 to 30 minutes, then at the medium setting for about an hour. She noticed no injury until she arrived home, when she discovered a large blister on her left buttock. Three days later she went to the emergency room at Good Samaritan Hospital in Puyallup, where physicians diagnosed her with two second-degree burn wounds on her left buttock and cellulitis. She received intravenous antibiotics and was prescribed oxycodone.
The central factual dispute at trial will be causation. Plaintiffs' medical expert, Dr. Jan Zemplenyi, concluded that the wounds were consistent with a second-degree, partial-depth burn and that LaPrade's T10 paralysis explained why she felt no pain during exposure. Volkswagen's expert, Dr. Erik Brand, characterized the injury as more likely caused by a multifactorial combination of prolonged sitting, pressure over bony prominences, prior tissue compromise, and lifestyle factors, with heat playing only a possible secondary role. Judge Tiffany M. Cartwright held that resolving that conflict is a jury function, not a summary judgment call.
On the design-defect question, the court held that Volkswagen's own expert evidence created the genuine dispute that defeats summary judgment. Defense mechanical engineer Uwe Meissner conducted temperature tests on the Tiguan's seat and recorded sustained temperatures of 122 to 123 degrees Fahrenheit — roughly 50 degrees Celsius — with an occupant in the seat at the highest setting. The court noted that a graph from SAE J3047, the Society of Automotive Engineers' standard for heated automobile seats, was included in Meissner's own report and shows that 50 degrees Celsius is unsafe after just a few minutes of exposure — the exposure time barely registers on the x-axis of the graph's first-degree burn threshold curve. The court also noted that Meissner's report cited ASTM data indicating that reversible epidermal injury occurs at about 100 seconds of exposure to 50 degrees Celsius and that transepidermal cell death occurs after several minutes, and that SAE J3047 identifies feasible engineering fixes — including thermostatic controls and ECU-based temperature feedback — that could keep seat temperatures within safe limits.
The failure-to-warn claim did not survive. The Tiguan's owner's manual contained a warning, with an orange WARNING header, advising that people who cannot perceive pain or temperature, or who have limited perception of those sensations, could develop burns on the back, buttocks, and legs when using seat heating, and directing that such people must never use the seat heating and seat ventilation functions. LaPrade testified she had never read the manual. Volkswagen's human-factors expert, Dr. Chason Coelho, opined that the manual's warnings complied with SAE J3047 and ANSI Z535.6 and that even in-vehicle warnings near the controls would likely not have changed LaPrade's behavior. The court held that plaintiffs offered no evidence from which a reasonable jury could find the existing warnings inadequate or that any inadequacy caused the injury.
On the Daubert motion, the court split. Plaintiffs' expert Roger Smedsrud, a forensic mechanic with 32 years of experience and more than 3,000 vehicle inspections, may testify about the seat temperatures he measured — 126.5 degrees Fahrenheit at the highest setting — using an infrared thermometer and the vehicle's diagnostic connector. The court excluded his opinion that the temperatures were set too high from the factory, however, because Smedsrud acknowledged he did not rely on any SAE, ISO, or other published standard and could point to no objective benchmark for his conclusion beyond having never seen temperatures that high before. The court held that his methodology was subjective and conclusory — the kind of approach that cannot reasonably be assessed for reliability under Rule 702.
Plaintiffs claim roughly $500,000 in damages. The design-defect claim proceeds to trial; the failure-to-warn claim and Jonathan LaPrade's loss-of-consortium claim are dismissed with prejudice.