Toyota Prius Owners Say Windshield Class Action Isn’t Overly Broad

Toyota vehicle owners are pushing back against the company’s move to deny Class certification in a lawsuit claiming 2016 and 2017 Prius windshields are defective and can spontaneously crack under normal driving conditions, saying that denying the Class certification would be premature.

The opposition brief was filed on Monday, and in it, the vehicle owners fight back against Toyota’s claim that their proposed Class of consumer is overly broad.

The company took issue with the plaintiffs’ inclusion of owners and lessees who had damaged their windshields in ways not covered by warranty, but in the brief, the owners argued that including these cases in the Class is appropriate.

According to the owners, it is too early to deny Class certification, as Toyota requested, because there are so many reasons why a windshield may become damaged. It is not possible at this point in the legal process to determine if the windshields in vehicles of the proposed Class were damaged for common reasons, the plaintiffs claim.

The owners’ opposition to the move to deny Class certification argues that “plaintiffs need only demonstrate the existence of a common defect and warranty to establish the commonality, regardless of whether class vehicle windshields might fail for reasons other than the defect.”

In their move to have Class certification denied, Toyota claimed that Class certification would be too difficult to establish, because each owner or lessee would have a different damage estimate for their broken windshield.

On Monday, the Prius owners countered this argument by saying that a common damage figure could easily be established using expert reports.

The Prius owners also countered Toyota’s claim that the proposed Class does not share enough commonalities, making it impossible to reach a single declaratory ruling in court that would help all of the putative Class Members sufficiently. 

According to the vehicle owners’ opposition, “the injunctive or declaratory relief plaintiff seek in the form of a recall would provide all plaintiffs and class members with that for which they bargained: class vehicles with non-defective windshields,” thereby repairing the financial injury they incurred from their windshields breaking.

The initial class action lawsuit was field by Michelle Nidever, Ahmed Khalil, William Squires, John Murphy, Kevin Neuer, Jesse Badke, Nicholas Williams and Dominick Viscardi.

The Prius windshield class action lawsuit claimed that Toyota should replace the broken 2016 and 2017 Prius windshields at no charge because the damage falls under the vehicles’ warranty. The owners claim that Toyota should honor the warranties and stop advertising the vehicles as safe and reliable.

The Toyota owners are represented by William B. Chaney and Andrew K. York of Gray Reed & McGraw LLP and by Bryan L. Clobes, Daniel O. Herrera, and John Scheflow of Cafferty Clobes Meriwether & Sprengel LLP.

The Toyota Prius Defective Windshield Class Action Lawsuit is Squires, et al. v. Toyota Motor Corp., et al., Case No. 4:18-cv-00138, in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas.