DENVER – A woman who spent nearly a week trapped in her overturned car and lost the lower half of her legs in a crash near Fairplay filed a federal lawsuit against General Motors on Tuesday in Denver.
Kristin Hopkins’ lawsuit asserts that General Motors knew about defects in her 2009 Chevy Malibu well before the crash and failed to notify its customers until recall notices were issued later.
The lawsuit claims the car’s electronic stability control “failed to engage” and its electronic power steering “gave out” on Red Hill Pass on April 27, 2014. Because of these malfunctions, the lawsuit states that Hopkins, 45, was “deprived of these crash-avoidance systems at the moment she needed them most.”
Additionally, the lawsuit claims that based on documents GM provided the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the company first learned of the problem with the electronic stability control on the Malibu in 2008 – six years before Hopkins’ accident.
The dramatic crash, in which Hopkins careened off U.S. 285 near Fairplay and tumbled 140 feet down an embankment into an aspen grove, and her improbable survival, made national headlines.
GM on Tuesday didn’t specifically comment on the lawsuit’s claims, but in a statement said it would “investigate this matter and work to understand what happened and why.”
The automaker has been embroiled in high-profile legal trouble over vehicle recalls since last year, when defective ignition switches were blamed for at least 169 deaths. Evidence emerged in that case that GM knew about the problem for a decade before finally issuing a recall.
The scandal could end up costing the company more than $5.3 billion in fines and victim compensation.
The lawsuit states that a former Chrysler engineer hired by Hopkins’ attorney determined that the data on the Malibu’s “black box” definitively linked the malfunctions described in the notifications to the crash.
