A Texas jury recently awarded $24 million ($10 million in punitive damages and $14 million in actual damage) to a woman who was injured by a Coca-Cola driver talking on her cell phone. The suit claimed that the victim had to undergo lumbar surgery after the Coca-Cola vehicle hit her car.
Coca-Cola plans to appeal, it said in a statement, because company policy states that all drivers must use hands-free devices when talking on their phones while driving, and the driver in this case alleges that she was doing that. Of course, she also claims that she didn’t know using a cell phone while driving was dangerous, which makes one wonder what she thought the policy was for in the first place.
Read more at Insurance Journal.
Correction: An earlier version of this article stated that the vehicle driven by the Coca-Cola employee was a truck. We have since updated the story for accuracy.
