## Facts

- Fourteen-year-old Leticia Martinez drove her uncle’s car in a parking lot while her uncle taught her how to drive.
- The uncle owned “The Club,” a steering-wheel antitheft device manufactured by Wolo Manufacturing Group (Wolo).
- When the device was not installed on the steering wheel, it was kept under the driver’s seat.
- While the car was moving, The Club slid from under the seat and lodged under or behind the brake pedal.
- Martinez could not brake and the car struck Marcos and Emma Salazar and their child, causing injuries.
- The Salazars sued Martinez and Wolo. As to Wolo, they asserted strict products liability and negligence theories, including:
  - a marketing defect for failing to provide warnings or instructions about safe storage of The Club when not in use, and
  - a design defect based on the claim that a safer alternative design existed when Wolo made the product.
- Wolo moved for summary judgment. The trial court initially denied the motion, later granted it after reconsideration, and severed the claims against Wolo to create a final, appealable judgment.
- The Salazars appealed, arguing that issues such as foreseeable use (including storage) and defect/causation could not be resolved as a matter of law on this record.

## Issues

1. Whether Wolo was entitled to summary judgment on the ground that The Club was being “stored,” not “used,” so the incident fell outside legally relevant product use as a matter of law.
2. Whether the foreseeability of storing The Club under the driver’s seat, and the risk it could interfere with the brake pedal, raised a jury question that defeated summary judgment.
3. Whether the summary-judgment record raised genuine issues of material fact on marketing defect (warnings/instructions), design defect (safer alternative design), and producing cause.

## Decision

- The court of appeals reversed the summary judgment and remanded the case for further proceedings.
- The court rejected Wolo’s attempt to obtain judgment as a matter of law by characterizing the incident as mere “storage” rather than “use.”
- Viewing the evidence in the nonmovants’ favor, the court held the record presented fact questions for the jury, including whether:
  - storing The Club under the driver’s seat was reasonably foreseeable,
  - the absence of warnings or storage instructions could make the product unreasonably dangerous, and
  - the claimed warning and design problems were producing causes of the Salazars’ injuries.

## Legal Principles

- A defendant seeking traditional summary judgment must show there is no genuine issue of material fact and that it is entitled to judgment as a matter of law; appellate review credits evidence favorable to the nonmovant and draws reasonable inferences in the nonmovant’s favor.
- A defendant may obtain summary judgment by conclusively negating at least one essential element of the plaintiff’s claim or by conclusively establishing an affirmative defense.
- In Texas products-liability cases, liability generally turns on whether the product was defective (by design or by marketing/warning) and whether the defect was a producing cause of the injury.
- A marketing-defect (failure-to-warn or failure-to-instruct) claim focuses on whether the lack of adequate warnings or instructions rendered the product unreasonably dangerous and whether that omission contributed to the injury.
- A design-defect claim requires evidence that a safer alternative design existed at the relevant time and that the challenged design was a producing cause of the injury.
- Whether a product’s use or misuse (including how it is kept when not actively deployed) was reasonably foreseeable is commonly a fact question, making summary judgment improper when the record supports competing inferences.

## Conclusion

The court of appeals held that Wolo was not entitled to summary judgment based on the “storage, not use” argument because the record permitted a jury to find that under-seat storage and pedal interference were reasonably foreseeable and that the claimed warning and design defects, if proven, could have been producing causes of the Salazars’ injuries; the judgment was reversed and the case remanded.


Salazar v. Wolo Manufacturing Group, 983 S.W.2d 87 (1998)