Automobile negligence; Sudden emergency doctrine; Vander Laan v. Miedema; White v. Taylor Distrib. Co., Inc. (White I & II); “Reasonably prudent person”

In this third-party no-fault case, the court held that the trial court properly granted summary disposition to defendants on the basis of the sudden emergency doctrine, and affirmed. Plaintiff argued that “defendants failed to present clear, positive, and credible evidence sufficient to overcome the presumption of negligence that arises out of defendant-driver crossing the centerline and colliding head-on with plaintiff’s vehicle.” The court disagreed. Plaintiff used “the majority of his brief on appeal to highlight what he perceives to be inconsistencies in defendant-driver’s statements relating to the symptoms he experienced immediately before blacking out.” It was true that he “reported slightly different symptoms in the days following the accident. [He] reported to officers at the scene, and testified in his deposition, that he experienced a violent coughing fit before blacking out. Comparatively, [he] reported to his treating physicians that he felt a twinge in his chest, or crushing chest pain, and then blacked out.” However, what plaintiff failed to appreciate was that defendant “consistently maintained that all of his symptoms came on suddenly and with no advanced warning before” he was rendered unconscious. Further, the physical evidence was clear that he “never applied the brakes: there were no pre-collision skid marks at the scene, and the satellite GPS log from the semi” he was driving indicated that he never braked. The physical evidence supported his “position that he experienced a sudden medical emergency.” Plaintiff also argued that a reasonably prudent person with defendant’s “cardiac history would not have been driving a semi. However, [he] had undergone rigorous testing as recently as 2013 in order to recertify his Class A driving endorsement.” There also was no evidence in the record to even suggest defendant “had experienced any cardiac symptoms contemporaneously to the accident, or that [he] had ever experienced an episode of sudden unconsciousness.” The court found that he presented sufficient “evidence that he experienced some type of syncopal episode while driving without any advance notice, and that he was entitled to rebut the presumption of negligence as a matter of law. In response, plaintiff failed to identify anything in the existing record, or to offer any new evidence, to show that defendant-driver could have done anything differently to avoid the accident” or that there was any genuine issue of material fact to submit to a jury.