On October 8, 2024, after nearly four years of litigation in Beaumont, Texas state court, Kuchler Polk partners Janika Polk and Marcus Hunter obtained summary judgment on behalf of a heavy truck manufacturer in a wrongful death case brought by the survivors of a truck driver who died in a post-crash fire. The Decedent was operating a heavy truck manufactured by our client, which was towing a tanker trailer fully loaded with hazardous materials, when he failed to negotiate a curve on Interstate 10 in Beaumont, Texas, causing the tractor to roll over on its driver’s side. The driver survived the crash, but an electrical fire originating in the vicinity of the vehicle’s battery box engulfed the cabin, causing his death. Discovery revealed multiple post-sale modifications to the vehicle’s electrical system, including removal of one of the four batteries, removal of one of the battery retaining brackets and failure to secure another, and installation of an aftermarket power inverter without any fuse protection and with the use of undersized electrical cable intended for powering air conditioners. In the crash, the unsecured batteries moved about the battery box, causing the aftermarket positive inverter cable to contact the negative cable leading to the starter. Because there was no fuse protection leading to the inverter, this contact caused a sustained electrical fault, causing the fire. Plaintiffs argued that notwithstanding the modifications, our client should have anticipated the possibility of an electrical fire in the battery box, and should have designed a battery box cover that could not burn in the event of a fire. We successfully argued that the fire would not have started had our client’s electrical system not been modified, that the modifications to the electrical system were the producing and proximate cause of the fire, and that the modifications were both substantial and unforeseeable. As a result, our client had no duty to foresee the need to design a battery box cover incapable of burning.