Automotive Defect Lawyers Serving New York City and the New York Metro Area

Automotive defects can turn everyday vehicles into deadly hazards. Malfunctioning airbags, seatbelt failures, weak roof structures, and defective fuel systems often cause catastrophic injuries or fatalities that should never have happened. Despite decades of safety regulation, many cars, SUVs, and trucks still contain dangerous design or manufacturing defects that manufacturers choose not to fix.

McCartney Stucky's Rye, NY office focuses on serious automotive defect litigation throughout the New York Metro area, the kind of cases that require deep technical knowledge, significant resources, and seasoned trial experience. We are product liability lawyers with a track record against the world's largest automakers, and we hold them accountable when their decisions cause preventable harm.

How We Build Automotive Defect Cases

Unlike ordinary accident claims, defective vehicle cases demand an intense investigative process, including crash reconstruction, engineering analysis, and forensic inspection of the vehicle itself. Our attorneys work directly with leading automotive safety engineers and biomechanical experts to identify the specific design failures that caused or amplified the injuries.

Founding partners Terry McCartney and Chris Stucky have decades of trial experience in automotive crashworthiness litigation, including airbag defect cases, seatbelt failures, and rollover claims. We prepare every case as if it will go to trial. That preparation creates leverage and has produced verdicts, including a $4.3 million verdict against BMW in an airbag defect case and a $22.3 million verdict against Honda in a rollover case.

We also maintain an in-house evidence storage facility with a vehicle lift, allowing us to physically preserve and inspect defective vehicles that most firms have no capacity to hold.

Crashworthiness Failures: The Legal Concept That Connects Every Automotive Defect Case

Most automotive defect claims are crashworthiness claims, the legal argument that a vehicle failed to protect its occupants in a crash it was designed to survive. The crash itself may not have been the manufacturer's fault. The injuries that resulted from the vehicle's failure during that crash are.

Crashworthiness failures encompass airbag systems that don't deploy, seatbelts that don't restrain, roof structures that collapse in rollovers, fuel systems that ignite after impact, and seatbacks that fold under rear-end force. Each is a separate defect with its own engineering analysis, but they all fall under the same legal framework.

Automotive Defect Cases We Handle

Airbag Failures

Airbag defect cases are claims against the manufacturer. The argument is that the system was designed or manufactured in a way that caused it to fail when it was needed most, whether it failed to deploy, deployed with excessive force, or deployed without a crash.

Seatbelt Defects

Seatbelt defect cases turn on proving that the restraint system failed to perform as designed, whether by unlatching on impact, tearing under crash forces, or allowing excessive forward movement.

Roof Crush in Rollovers

Roof crush cases are crashworthiness claims. The standard is whether a stronger roof design was technically feasible and would have prevented the occupant's injuries. Weak roof structures in SUVs and trucks can collapse during rollovers, causing severe head and spinal injuries.

Tire Failures and Tread Separation

Tire defect cases involve both design and manufacturing defects, and the legal claim may be against the tire manufacturer, the vehicle manufacturer, or both, depending on where the defect originated.

Automotive Defect Cases in New York City

McCartney Stucky litigates automotive defect cases in New York state and federal courts, including New York Supreme Court and the Southern and Eastern Districts of New York, from our Rye, NY office. The New York Metro generates a consistent volume of automotive defect and crashworthiness claims from vehicle crashes on high-traffic corridors including I-95 and I-78.