It sounds like a joke, but it actually happened in Munich: a Porsche driver drives her coupe out of the underground car park, the roller door goes down, the Porsche roof breaks. The driver, however, didn’t think it was all that funny. On the one hand, she suffered a real shock, and on the other hand, she sued the residential complex because of an allegedly defective gate. But the woman is dismissed at the district court.
The Porsche driver is the owner of an apartment in the west of Munich. The residential complex also includes an underground parking space, and her Porsche Coupé 911 was parked there. When she wanted to leave the garage, she opened the gate from the inside with her sensor key, as usual. The traffic light belonging to the gate then turned green and she drove up the access ramp, she tells the court.
But when the Porsche was right under the roller door, it moved down and crashed onto the roof of her car. “I stopped in shock and got out,” she told the court. And from the outside she saw the dilemma: the gate had hit the coupé roof exactly in the middle – and significantly damaged it, as the plaintiff explained. Since she was of the opinion that she had exited the underground car park “properly”, she sued the homeowners’ association for damages amounting to a good 8,600 euros.
The Porsche driver was of the opinion that there must have been a defect in the gate, a malfunction. It suddenly crashed down because “the necessary security was missing.” And she herself is not obliged to explain or prove the causes, but rather the other side has to explain and exonerate themselves.
The homeowners association had a completely different opinion. She countered that she didn’t know anything about it. “At the time of the alleged accident, the gate complied with the generally accepted rules of technology and functioned flawlessly,” she said.
The court invited the driver to an “informational interview,” as it is called in legal jargon, and came up with its own assessment. According to the court, a violation of traffic safety obligations on the part of the defendant has not been proven. Purely hypothetically, the incident could have been triggered by “some kind of failure of the gate’s holding or safety systems.” However, according to the court, it was more likely that the woman had only entered the access ramp when the gate was closing.
In this case, the plaintiff would have to prove that the traffic light was green when she accelerated and drove up the ramp. And that she wanted to pass through the roller shutter “without delay.” “The plaintiff did not provide this evidence,” said the district court in its verdict.
Finally, the court explained that the lawsuit would have to be dismissed if the Porsche driver failed to provide proof that she was driving on the green light. Apart from that, the homeowners’ association is also not obliged to have a security system in place in case a driver tries to pass through the gate at a red light. The judgment is not final.