I am based in Europe and would be interested in input from somebody who is actually in the business of making and selling some "widget" which is sold in the USA.
How easy is it to get product liability insurance, and what are the main risk factors which insurers look at?
For example, take the whole Aircraft Spruce catalogue. 500 pages or so. Each packed with widgets, any one of which could potentially cause a fatal accident.
Now, it would be stretching things immensely if the maker of say wirelocking pliers could get sued, but that's only because the A&P doing the work is supposed to inspect the finished job visually.
Now take a spark plug tester. It could fail to diagnose a spark plug which has a defect which causes an engine stoppage, and it kills somebody. How is that handled? I do not frankly believe the maker pays say $1000 for insurance.
And the same goes for loads of other stuff. An oil filter is about $10, and could definitely stop an engine.
An OAT gauge which reads 10F out (don't the cheap ones do that?
) could kill somebody too.
Yet it is obvious (from the pricing of many of these parts) that there are no significant insurance premiums involved.
I am not talking about high end avionics e.g. re a GTN650 Garmin would be a prime target for any lawyer working on a percentage - regardless of fault. But then Garmin don't make anything cheap, and they have plenty of money to fight stuff with.
Let's say one wanted to make something like an OAT gauge - like Davtron etc do. What sort of product liability issues could be expected there?
I am assuming that disclaimers e.g. "use at your own risk" are virtually worthless. But that may not be completely correct.
Feel free if you prefer to email me directly - peter@peter2000.co.uk
How easy is it to get product liability insurance, and what are the main risk factors which insurers look at?
For example, take the whole Aircraft Spruce catalogue. 500 pages or so. Each packed with widgets, any one of which could potentially cause a fatal accident.
Now, it would be stretching things immensely if the maker of say wirelocking pliers could get sued, but that's only because the A&P doing the work is supposed to inspect the finished job visually.
Now take a spark plug tester. It could fail to diagnose a spark plug which has a defect which causes an engine stoppage, and it kills somebody. How is that handled? I do not frankly believe the maker pays say $1000 for insurance.
And the same goes for loads of other stuff. An oil filter is about $10, and could definitely stop an engine.
An OAT gauge which reads 10F out (don't the cheap ones do that?
Yet it is obvious (from the pricing of many of these parts) that there are no significant insurance premiums involved.
I am not talking about high end avionics e.g. re a GTN650 Garmin would be a prime target for any lawyer working on a percentage - regardless of fault. But then Garmin don't make anything cheap, and they have plenty of money to fight stuff with.
Let's say one wanted to make something like an OAT gauge - like Davtron etc do. What sort of product liability issues could be expected there?
I am assuming that disclaimers e.g. "use at your own risk" are virtually worthless. But that may not be completely correct.
Feel free if you prefer to email me directly - peter@peter2000.co.uk