Paul Walker Lawyer Claims Porsche Concealed Damaging Carrera GT Info

Court filings also reveal emails in which alleged Porsche employees joke about Carreras crash rates affecting the car’s value.

byMike Guy|
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According to the lawyer in Paul Walker's daughter Meadow Walker's ongoing lawsuit against Porsche, the German manufacturer intentionally concealed evidence that it knew its Carerra GT supercar was dangerous. 

The lawyer, Jeffrey L. Milam, said in a statement that he "learned that Porsche has hidden damaging evidence knowing it knew its Carrera GT—the car that killed Paul Walker—was dangerous and unsafe. Porsche concealed this information from the public to protect its image and brand.”

The relative merits of this lawsuit and the rare qualities of the magnificent Carrera GT have long been the subject of debate here at The Drive, where we've questioned the soundness of the tires on the car that crashed and killed the Fast and Furious star. Walker was an experienced driver, and the Carrera GT was built for that breed of enthusiast. 

Milam's statement continues: “Any ethical company would have withdrawn the car from the market—or, at the very least, warned the public about its dangers, particularly since Porsche had deliberately left its touted Porsche Stability System off this model. Instead, Porsche management did nothing but make callous jokes in internal emails about how this would improve the value of the remaining cars. The company has been caught trying to hide those email along with the names of potential witnesses.”

The email he's referring, which is also filed in the California court, is from 2006, and is from a Porsche engineer who notes that “as many as 200 of the 1,280 Carrera GTs which Porsche produced had been ‘totaled’ in the first two years it was sold, 2004-2006.”

The documents refer to another email from a Porsche manager, which reportedly states: “Another Carrera GT bites the dust,” and crashes of GT’s “would be great news to the remaining owners as the GT becomes more rare.”

Walker was killed in a crash outside of Los Angeles in November, 2013, while riding in a Carrera GT driven by someone else. Meadow filed a suit against Porsche in September 2015, claiming the supercar “lacked safety features that are found on well-designed racing cars or even Porsche’s least expensive road cars—features that could have prevented the accident or, at a minimum, allowed Paul Walker to survive the crash.”

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