Technology applied to vehicles is incorporating numerous advances that make the day-to-day life of users easier and include a large number of safety solutions that go completely unnoticed by the driver, however, they are there to save your life. But among so much innovation, there are still cases in which reality is stranger than fiction.
a door that bites
Our protagonist is an 81-year-old man from Florida who was enjoying his brand new Jaguar XJL-R, a high-end vehicle launched a few years ago whose price reached 100.000 euros and which included a system that is responsible for close the door automatically in a smooth way. This system was something like the first version of the current systems that is responsible for opening and closing the door automatically (Jaguar offers it in its latest vehicles), although unlike today, it required opening the door manually and pushing it. to close it.
By pushing to close, the system softens the impact of the door against the chassis and activates a mechanism that is responsible for closing with a certain amount of pressure until the latch reaches its secure position. Basically it is a system that prevents the doors from being left ajar, in addition to eliminating the need to slam the door. In the video below you can see the system in operation.
A lawsuit for losing the finger
The problem is that it seems that the door is not capable of detecting any type of obstacle, and it continues to close even if there is an object that prevents the door from being closed. This is exactly what happened to Theodore Levy on August 7, 2018, although the object in question was nothing more and nothing less than his thumb.
The poor man must have placed his hand at the wrong moment and saw how the closing system (which by the way is called a soft door closing, or SCAD) slowly crushed his thumb until it was partially amputated, destroying part of the bone structure, nerves, tendons and blood vessels of his thumb. The lawsuit includes a photo of the current state of Levy's finger, an image we chose not to include in this article.
Levy claims that the system closes "firmly" and not "softly" as Jaguar itself describes it, further alleging that the lack of sensors to identify obstacles (in the same way that a power window stops going up when it hits an arm). make the door a dangerous system that threatens the safety of users.