We should start taking responsibility for our inability or recklessness when using potentially dangerous products.
Unless the product was faulty in some way, which it doesn't seem it was, trying to extort millions from manufactures can't be seen as an act of progress.
Also did you even read the article? They argue the brake failed because of the design of the bike.
"The suit goes on to argue that the quick release came loose as Steinsapir’s friend was applying the front brake, which allegedly caused the wheel to wobble and ultimately caused the crash. The plaintiffs also say that the surviving girl—who we’re not naming because she’s a minor—attempted to turn off the bike, but that the electrical power failed to shut down."
That's because most other first world relatively wealthy countries have much more interventionist governments when it comes to things like product safety. The US approach is more to let companies try pretty much anything that isn't actually malicious and if it turns out to be a bad idea, but not bad enough that it isn't profitable enough to keep making after the lawsuits, maybe step in and regulate.
That necessarily means the US will have a lot more lawsuits, both reasonable and unreasonable.
BTW, that's also one of the big reasons that we don't have "loser pays" as the default in civil suits in the US, unlike much of the rest of the world. In the US we use civil suits by the aggrieved party to enforce a lot of civil rights laws. There's almost always some risk of losing even if you have a pretty strong case that you were, say, turned down for housing or a promotion because of your race, sex, religion, etc., and loser pays for such suits would discourage a lot of people who were in fact discriminated against from suing due to that risk.
Much of the rest of world relies primarily on government agencies to enforce such laws. They civil court cases are mostly just truly private disputes like breaches of contract or torts.
> We should start taking responsibility for our inability or recklessness when using potentially dangerous products.
> Unless the product was faulty in some way, which it doesn't seem it was, trying to extort millions from manufactures can't be seen as an act of progress.
It's interesting when you look at that from an economic efficiency point of view. Most of us use a ton of products that are potentially dangerous. We could make it so that it is entirely our responsibility to deal with the danger.
So for each product, we would need to evaluate the risk and figure out how to deal with it. In most cases the way to deal with it, if we decide not to ignore it, would be to buy insurance to cover the damages if the product harms us.
An efficient way to do that is to make the product manufacturers strictly liable for the harms involving their products, regardless of whether it is due to some flaw in the product or the occasional careless, reckless, or stupid user.
That funnels all the data about the injury rates and costs from those products to the manufacturers, which can combine that with their sales data, which puts them in the best position to figure out how much insurance is needed to cover the injuries. The cost of that insurance gets priced into the cost of the product.
Handling it closer to the consumer involves more duplicated effort as more parties need to make independent evaluations, and those parties have less data. Besides being inefficient that is probably more expensive because underinsured people can still get expensive injuries and run up emergency room bills that they can't pay--and then the public ends up paying instead.