These lawsuits are part of a longstanding effort by cities and states to try and develop a theory of manufacturer legal accountability through public nuisance law, an effort that is perhaps morally laudable but legally fraught; to date, other than a few outlier environmental cases from the '70s, courts have almost uniformly declined to create a kind of parallel product-liability law through nuisance. While individual car owners have legal recourse through traditional product liability and negligence routes, hard to see these cases succeeding in court; on the other hand, they do create some additional political pressure on Hyundai/Kia to take more responsibility, which is ultimately where the tobacco lawsuits in the '90s ended up -- not winning at the bench, but at the conference table.