A 28-year-old woman who suffered second-degree burns from the heated seat in her 2023 Volkswagen Tiguan is getting her day in court. A federal judge in Tacoma has allowed the design defect claim to proceed to trial, even after dismissing other parts of the complaint.
Emily LaPrade has been paralyzed below her hips since a car crash on New Year’s Day 2014. She has no sensation below her T10 vertebra, just a faint tingling she compares to a limb waking up after falling asleep. Medical staff trained her to be hypervigilant about her legs, specifically warning she might burn herself without realizing it.
On September 3, 2023, LaPrade was riding in the front passenger seat of the Tiguan. She turned the seat heater to its highest setting for 20 to 30 minutes, then dialed it down to medium for about an hour. She noticed nothing until she got home and found a blister on her buttocks, and by the next morning the outer skin had peeled off.
She had used the same heater on high during previous trips without incident.
Volkswagen’s defense is straightforward: the seat heater was not defective, was never found defective by the automaker or safety regulators, and LaPrade’s injuries were not caused by any design flaw. VW also attacked the qualifications of the plaintiff’s expert witness, noting he has no background in vehicle design, didn’t reference relevant SAE or ISO standards, and only tested the plaintiff’s own Tiguan rather than comparing it to other vehicles.
Judge Tiffany M. Cartwright wasn’t persuaded. She allowed the expert’s testimony based on his test results, which indicated the seat heater temperature was set too high from the factory. The design defect claim survives.
The failure-to-warn claim, however, is dead. LaPrade and her husband admitted they never cracked open the owner’s manual. That manual contains explicit warnings in multiple sections, including one with an orange “WARNING” header stating flatly that people with limited perception of pain or temperature “must never use the seat heating.”
The language could not be clearer: “Anyone experiencing reduced sensitivity to pain or temperature due to medication, paralysis or chronic illness could sustain burns on the back, buttocks and legs.” You cannot sue a company for failing to warn you about something it warned you about in the document you chose not to read. The judge saw it the same way.
But the design defect question is a different animal entirely. If the plaintiff’s expert can convince a jury that the Tiguan’s seat heater runs hotter than it should, hotter than what’s reasonable for a consumer product people sit on for hours, then VW has a problem that extends well beyond one plaintiff.
Heated seat burns are uncommon but not unprecedented. Between 2005 and 2011, NHTSA received 138 complaints about malfunctioning seat heaters, including reports of burning smells and visible flames. Most involved Mercedes-Benz and BMW models, and Mercedes attributed some incidents to electrical wire degradation in the heating mat over time.
The population most at risk is exactly the one LaPrade belongs to: people with diminished sensation in their lower body. For them, a seat heater that runs even slightly too hot becomes a slow-cooking hazard they literally cannot feel.
That’s the real question heading to trial. Not whether Volkswagen warned LaPrade, because it did, and she didn’t read it. The question is whether the heater itself was designed to reach temperatures that no one should be sitting on, regardless of what the manual says.
A warning doesn’t fix a defect. If the seat gets hot enough to blister skin during normal use, the engineering failed before the owner’s manual was ever printed.
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