In the largest personal injury award to date, a Los Angeles jury required General Motors to pay a badly burned family of five and their travel companion a whopping $4.9 billion for a fire that ignited when a drunk driver rear-ended their 14-year-old Malibu at about 70 miles per hour. This amount is far greater than the company's profits for all of last year, would make the plaintiffs among the richest people in the world, and is unlikely to survive appellate review.

Plaintiffs argued that GM could have designed a safer fuel tank for only an extra $8.59 per vehicle, but chose not to do so because it had a corporate policy of not spending more than $240 per vehicle to improve fuel system design, a theory that no witness confirmed. The judge barred evidence on the blood alcohol level of the drunk driver, evidence that a passenger in the Malibu who blocked exit from the car after the crash was also intoxicated and tested positive for cocaine, favorable statistical evidence on the Malibu's safety history, and even prevented GM from showing that the alternative fuel system design advanced by the defense was actually used on a production vehicle that went on to fail a government safety test.

†