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P was driving her 1968 Lincoln Continental in city traffic. After accelerating to enter a freeway, she found that the speed of the car was not responsive to her control. She drove the car from the freeway at the first exit, continuing her efforts to stop. P pumped the brake and pushed with both feet against the brake pedal, but the speed continued. Seeing a busy intersection ahead and recognizing the peril to other persons, she intentionally crashed into the large signal light pole. The automobile had been purchased from Snelling Motor (D) seven months earlier; it had been driven approximately 9,000 miles. Dr. William Tonn discovered that the accelerator linkage to the carburetor was found to be jammed as a result of the indentation of the pole into the engine area, but no pre-accident fault was indicated in the linkage. Two years later, a mechanic, Levertt LaRue, examined the wreckage. He found nothing wrong with the carburetor linkage, but when he looked into the carburetor itself, he found a piece of rubber between the throttle blades and the bore of the chamber of the carburetor. The piece of rubber turned out to be part of the gasket, which was originally installed around the bottom of the air filter housing where that housing was seated on top of the carburetor. The gasket was glued into a trough or groove around the underside of the air filter housing. An alternative design, the one used on the successor model 460 Lincoln engine, substitutes a separate fibre gasket (on and around the carburetor housing at the place where the filter housing is seated) for the gasket previously fixed in the filter housing. P claimed that the gasket was not properly placed in its groove during manufacture, that it protruded from the groove when first sold and was finally cut free, that the piece then lodged in the carburetor and held open the gas feed during P's accident. The jury answered in the negative the issues of whether the gasket was defectively installed by Ford (D) or defectively installed when sold by Snelling (D). The judgment for P was based upon jury findings that the design of the air filter housing was defective and that this design defect was the producing cause of P's damages. The Court of Civil Appeals held that Ds were entitled to have the jury determine issues as P's contributorily negligent conduct following her discovery that the car was not functioning correctly. Under that holding, if the jury determined that a person in the exercise of ordinary care would have avoided injury by stopping the car earlier through the proper use of the brakes or by shifting the transmission control to neutral or by turning off the ignition, Ds would not then be liable. Both P and Ds appealed.

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