OAKLAND AND LOS ANGELES — Kimberly Young has recurring nightmares. She is rolling over and over and over, helpless, pinned inside a car.
Outside Manteca, Calif., last August, the 43-year-old accountant was driving to dinner with her daughter to celebrate a promotion. Her memory of the accident is fuzzy, but she believes she swerved to avoid something, then tried to correct. She remembers hearing a horn.
Her 2004 Jeep Grand Cherokee rolled over three times. The roof caved in, and her neck snapped. The accident left Young a quadriplegic. By the time she got out of the hospital, the home she had owned for 11 years was in foreclosure, and she needed round-the-clock care.
Young's lawyers argue the Jeep was prone to rolling over and want to sue Chrysler to pay for her medical bills and care.
That's not likely to happen. Along with hundreds of other people who have unresolved injury claims against Chrysler or General Motors Corp., Young has little chance of collecting from the auto company because of its bankruptcy.
Plaintiffs' lawyers tried unsuccessfully to have the new automakers that emerged from bankruptcy held liable for damages caused by their predecessors' products. They won a partial victory with GM, but both companies will shed liability for most claims.
The "new" General Motors and Chrysler will both be liable for damages caused by cars manufactured after bankruptcy. Neither company will be liable for damages from accidents that took place before their bankruptcy filings.
The difference between the two is that GM will be liable for future accidents involving cars built before the bankruptcy filing; Chrysler will not be.
Spokesmen for the companies say that result is just one of the side effects of bankruptcy, a process that has also cost tens of thousands of jobs, put thousands of dealerships on a quick path to closure and wiped out billions of dollars in debt owed to bondholders.
The companies also point out that the fact that a person was injured in an accident doesn't prove the car was defective.
"Bankruptcy is a very complex and difficult process," Chrysler spokesman Mike Palese said. It was "really important for the future viability of the company that we would be free from this type of liability."
