May 1, 2020

Grodzitsky v. American Honda Motor Co., 957 F.3d 979 (9th Cir. 2020)

The Ninth Circuit, applying Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharms., Inc. (1993) 509 U.S. 579, has affirmed the denial of class certification in an automobile design defect case based on the District Court’s conclusion that the plaintiffs’ expert’s testimony was not scientifically sound.

Federal opinions under the Daubert test are instructive in applying the similar test adopted by the California Supreme Court in Sargon Enterprises, Inc. v. University of Southern California (2013) 55 Cal.4th 747. In Sargon, the Supreme Court held that trial courts should exercise a “substantial ‘gatekeeping’ responsibility” to “make certain that an expert . . . employs in the courtroom the same level of intellectual rigor that characterizes the practice of an expert in the relevant field,” and have discretion to exclude expert testimony if they conclude it is speculative or otherwise unsound. (Id. at pp. 776, 781.)

The plaintiff in Grodzitsky alleged that window regulators inside Honda Pilot vehicles were defectively designed, causing the windows to fall down into the doorframes and rendering them inoperable. Her expert opined that the window regulators were insufficiently durable and that a window regulator should last for the life of the vehicle.

The district court excluded the expert’s opinions about the durability of the product under Daubert because the expert (a) provided no industry standards, (b) relied on no peer-reviewed literature, (c) provided no information on average window regulator replacement rates, (d) provided no studies to substantiate his claim that consumers expect a window regulator to last forever, (e) relied upon a small sample size of window regulators, and (f) failed to determine whether any of the regulator failures in his sample were attributable to the plaintiffs’ theory of liability.

The Ninth Circuit held that the district court did not abuse its discretion under Daubert in excluding the expert’s opinions.