The $131M Ford Rollover Death Verdict That Twitter Broke

http://www.fastcompany.com/1686864/ford-rollover-verdict-brian-cole-131-million-twitter

by mjfern • 16 years ago

27 9 16 years ago

fastcompany.com

WalterBright• 16 years ago

The guy was doing 80 and not wearing his seatbelt. I don't see how Ford is to blame. An SUV is not a sports car.

jrockway• 16 years ago

But some people thought he was going to be good at baseball!

bombs• 16 years ago

I read over some of the coverage and it stipulates that Cole was wearing a seatbelt, but due to the give of the seatbelt, he was still ejected.

The Explorer is unsafe, because if it does roll, it will be crushed by its own weight, regardless of speed. 1 in 2,700 Explorers manufactured between 1990 and 2001, has been involved in a fatal rollover. The numbers are worse for its predecessor, the Bronco II, where it is 1 in 500.

I couldn't find a source of truth for Cole's speed at the time, but by all accounts, it didn't sound like he did anything else wrong (he swerved to avoid a car driving on the wrong side of the road).

anigbrowl2• 16 years ago

Laws about the degree to which involved parties bear responsibility for their actions vary across the US, and I am coming to think much popular cynicism about tort litigation is the result of confusion, with people mistakenly assuming the laws in other states are the same as their own.

Brief readable summary: http://www.the-injury-lawyer-directory.com/negligence.html

cubicle67• 16 years ago

1. It seems he was wearing his seatbelt:

Coles swerved to avoid a driver heading toward him in his lane, and the Explorer rolled over. Coles ejected from car, tho he wore seatbelt.

2. 80 (mph?) is not that fast, less than 130km/h

[Edit: There's three issues at play with the Ford-Firestone debacle; The Explorer was poorly designed and prone to rolling (moreso than other SUVs), The Firestone tyres fitted had a habit of delaminating, which caused a number of rollovers (but that wasn't the cause here) and finally, the roof pillars weren't even strong enough to support the weight of the car, so when it did roll, the roof crushed in on the occupants]

anigbrowl2• 16 years ago

The 'news' here is that the story was put on the internet via Twitter.

In this age of instantaneous media, when being first is celebrated more than being right, and wire services like Bloomberg trumpet beating the competition by nanoseconds, there are still those rare moments when a major story breaks and no one is there to report it.

That doesn't mean the story would otherwise have gone unreported; it just wouldn't have hit the mainstream as quickly.

Usually those big verdicts show up first in the regional legal newspaper/website within a day or two of the court publication of the opinion. Sometimes the law firms involved will put out a press release if they've had a particularly big or legally distinctive win. I'm not sure that condensing the information down to 140 characters and getting it out first adds any real benefit; Ford stockholders obviously have an interest in such news, but generally such things are priced in when the action first comes to court and after appeals have been exhausted and/or settlements reached.

Funny thing is, the writer wasn't there in court either - he tweeted the verdict because someone from the plaintiff's office called to update him (he had written about the attorney and case several times on a freelance basis). Seems to me that his grumpy tone here is to do with the fact that no existing media outlet purchased his story or gave him credit for announcing it, despite its apparent newsworthiness. Unfortunately, the big media outlets are probably correct in assuming that the public is not very exercised about the death of a potential baseball star back in 2001, and is already quite well aware of the fact that Ford Explorers produced in the 1990s had a dangerous tendency to roll over and that it has cost Ford a ton of money already. It just doesn't strike me as the hot story the writer considers it to be.

shortformblog• 16 years ago

This is the guy who broke the Stephen Glass plagiarism story back in the day. He has a history of being first.

EDIT: Steve Zahn played him in "Shattered Glass", which is a pretty great movie. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0323944/

pak• 16 years ago

Surely there was a better way to get this story out than piecemeal via 60 staccato tweets? I know this article is supposed to show Twitter is important "new media" that changes the way news works, but I have never seen such a salient topic so well destroyed by interjecting hard stops every 140 characters. It was like reading a NY Times editorial in the form of an IRC chatlog. The format belied the potential of the content.

jacquesm• 16 years ago

Why not post an article and then tweet the link, that's effectively the same and would be a lot easier on the eyes than trying to piece together a bunch of tweets.

The funny thing is that with multipart-sms the medium that twitter is copying is no longer hampered by the this limitation, but the imitator still is.

The $131M Ford Rollover Death Verdict That Twitter Broke

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