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On Sunday, April 21, a 24-year-old employee at a dealership in Stuttgart, Germany was delivering a Ferrari F40 to a nearby motor event when they crashed the $3.2million vehicle into a tunnel.
Firstly, and most significantly, the employee in question was unharmed. “The driver was checked in the hospital and is uninjured. That's the most important!" said a spokesperson for Mechatroniks, the dealership in question.
Attention has therefore turned to the cause of the incident, as Mechatroniks and local police attempt to discover what happened in the tunnel.
“It is currently unknown whether this was due to a technical defect or excessive speed,” a police spokesman told Bild.
The Ferrari F40 model in question was the last car to be personally approved by Enzo Ferrari, and the automaker only produced 1,315 models. It was originally listed on Mechatronik’s website at $3.2million.
Given the rarity of this luxury motor vehicle, the major damage sustained during the crash will no doubt be hugely costly to repair – prompting the question – when mistakes, accidents, or incidents occur, who is at fault? And is it worth playing the blame game?
Accident through inexperience, faulty vehicle, level of training – is it worth playing the blame game?
At this stage, whilst the driver apparently swerved into the tunnel wall, the cause of the incident is unclear.
What happens to the worker could depend on whether the crash was a genuine accident, a mistake, a case of negligence, or caused by another circumstance or factor beyond the driver’s control.
When mistakes err into negligence, there are legal considerations and in many cases in the US, workers are fired for a serious one-off mistakes. Equally, if the driver was not given the proper training to drive the vehicle, it could be the dealership that is culpable.
Mechatronik will, of course, have to conduct a thorough investigation and build a clear picture of what happened to cause the crash.
In this case, it appears the employer has taken the interest – or at least the health - of their worker to heart. It has certainly not blamed the young driver for crashing the supercar.
But given the Ferrari F40 is renowned for its raw power which can unexpectedly surge and the young age of the driver, some experts have speculated that they may not have had the experience to cope with such an event.
The dealership will likely be legally responsible for the incident, and it may well turn out the accident was caused by the vehicle rather than any error from the driver.
But all too often, employers often find their own ways to punish workers for one-off-mistakes, blaming the employee for the costly error rather than considering what more they could have done.
How should HR respond to mistakes?
Yes, employers have to investigate any incident, especially one as costly as this, with the necessary due diligence to find out what caused the accident. However, they should also always consider what support they can give their workers to stand the best chance of avoiding a repeat event, and what responsibility they had for any accident or mistake.
In this costly car crash, for example, some have questioned whether the worker has received the level of training required to handle the powerful F40, or even whether it was wise to let a driver who is relatively inexperienced behind the wheel of such a luxury vehicle altogether.
The lesson here for HR and employers is that playing the blame game for mistakes or accidents that occur, even if they come at an eye-watering cost, is rarely a good idea. Instead, they are an opportunity for all involved to reflect on what could have been improved, and how everyone will prevent the error from happening again in
