A 2013 Hyundai Elantra was rear-ended at well below highway speed in Caledonia, Wisconsin. Three passengers walked away with minor injuries. The driver, Edward Vanderventer, suffered a T-6 spinal fracture and was left permanently paralyzed from the chest down.
The disparity made no sense until plaintiff’s counsel discovered that Hyundai had redesigned the driver’s seat frame for the 2011–2016 Elantra, replacing a robust seat back structure with a single hollow tube — saving approximately $7 per seat. When the vehicle was rear-ended, the hollow tube buckled, the headrest posts bent downward toward Vanderventer’s spine, and the force that should have been absorbed by the seat was instead directed into his vertebral column.
The jury needed to see this. The failure mechanism was invisible in photographs. The biomechanics were counterintuitive — a low-speed rear-end collision causing catastrophic spinal injury. And Hyundai’s defense was that the seat met all federal safety standards and that the plaintiff’s injury theory was, in their words, “an impossibility.”
California Technical Media produced the litigation animations used by plaintiff’s counsel, Habush Habush & Rottier, S.C., in the trial of this case. The engagement was coordinated through a litigation support firm retained by the plaintiff’s legal team.
California Technical Media created a 3D animation showing the occupant’s skeletal structure, the seat frame, and the headrest system under rear-impact loading. The animation made visible what could not be photographed: the hollow tube buckling in real time, the headrest posts deflecting toward the spine, and the moment of vertebral fracture.
The animation was built from the vehicle’s engineering specifications, the plaintiff’s medical imaging, and biomechanical expert analysis. It was designed to run alongside expert testimony — giving the jury a visual framework before the technical explanation arrived, so they could follow the biomechanics on the first pass rather than trying to build a mental picture from words alone.
A second set of visuals compared the seat frame designs across model years — the pre-2011 design, the 2011–2016 cost-reduced design, and the post-2017 redesign — showing the jury exactly what Hyundai changed, what they saved, and what they changed back after the crash.
The Racine County jury awarded $38.1 million, finding Hyundai’s defective seat design 84% responsible for Vanderventer’s injuries. It was Wisconsin’s largest single-plaintiff compensatory verdict in the state’s history and the largest compensatory verdict for the spouse of an injured plaintiff.
Hyundai appealed for three years. The Wisconsin Court of Appeals affirmed in October 2022. The Wisconsin Supreme Court declined review in February 2023. The verdict stands.