ABSTRACT
Some products manufactured and distributed for use by people contain hazards that may cause injuries. When such hazards are known to (or should have been known by) the manufacturers, they are obligated to design out, guard against, or, at the very least, provide users with an adequate warning of the associated danger. Warnings are at the lowest level in this hierarchy of remedial procedures principally because their success is dependent upon eliciting certain types of behaviors on the part of the product user. Some warnings developed for this purpose may be inadequate due to high costs of compliance, the requirement for users to perform behaviors beyond their capabilities, or because they require users to perform actions that are contrary to other user behaviors that may have become well entrenched through repetition or
practice - i.e., ones having become conditioned responses or learned reflexes. This article describes some circumstances involving two different types of vehicles - a utility tenain vehicle and a personal watercraft - in which certain warnings were judged inadequate for just these types of reasons. The paper also examines actual or possible modifications to the products likely to conect the problems encountered.
