General Motors’ scramble might be comical, if it weren’t so deadly serious for so many people. The automaker’s focus now is to convince customers, regulators and lawmakers that it’s responding as quickly as possible after recalling 1.6 million vehicles linked to more than a dozen deaths.
Worse, GM must answer hard questions about who knew what and when. Its preliminary chronology indicates that some GM employees knew as long ago as 2004 that a faulty ignition switch on some models could kill the engine in a moving car, disabling airbags, making steering difficult and leading to crashes.
For reasons not fully known, GM did not initiate a recall until Feb. 13 of this year, then expanded it Feb. 25 to about twice as many models. It now covers the 2005-07 Chevrolet Cobalt and Pontiac G5, 2003-07 Saturn Ion, 2006-07 Chevrolet HHR, 2006-07 Pontiac Solstice and 2007 Saturn Sky.
And remember that GM employs thousands of North Texans at its Arlington assembly plant. Problems in Detroit radiate across America. GM officials can ask their counterparts at Toyota how safety issues can shake a company’s foundation.
New CEO Mary Barra supposedly had no knowledge of the ignition-switch problem before she initiated the recall, writing to employees that she “acted without hesitation.” This week, GM brought in Anton Valukas to head its internal investigation. He’s the Chicago lawyer who led the court-ordered investigation of the Lehman Brothers collapse in 2008.
GM will get plenty of uninvited outside help. The House Energy and Commerce Committee, chaired by Michigan Republican Fred Upton, has announced it will hold hearings. Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller says he will order them, too. The Justice Department has opened a criminal investigation, as it did four years ago with Toyota’s unintended acceleration problems. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has given GM until April 3 to answer 107 questions about how it handled the issue.
The NHTSA might also request a mirror. Joan Claybrook, the agency’s former head, wants the parent U.S. Department of Transportation to investigate why the NHTSA failed to order a recall despite knowing about the ignition-switch problem as far back as 2007. Claybrook, now a safety advocate, says her former agency also “failed to carry out the law” by not forcing GM to fix the problem.
Soon, we’ll run out of fingers to point.
Claybrook, as much as anyone, understands that the NHTSA’s credibility is at stake with an American public wary of the cozy relationships that can develop between regulators and the regulated.
If an automaker like General Motors isn’t moving fast enough to protect its customers from potentially dangerous product flaws, who speaks for those customers?
The answer, in this case, appears to have been no one. For the sake of an iconic American company and, more important, the people who buy its products, we deserve a stronger and timelier response than this.
2004: GM concedes it knew in 2004, before it launched the 2005 Chevrolet Cobalt, that the ignition switch might inadvertently move from “run” to “accessory,” stalling the engine and cutting power to safety systems.
2005: A partial fix in key design is proposed but not adopted. Dealers are told to modify existing keys with an insert and to tell owners to take extra items off their keychains if they complain of stalling problems.
2007: Federal safety officials tell GM that a 2005 fatal Cobalt crash involved a switch that malfunctioned and airbags that failed to deploy.
2009: GM adopts the key design proposed in 2005.
2013: GM determines that switches made before the 2006 modifications failed to meet design specifications.
2014: Finally, GM announces and expands its recall of vehicles with faulty ignition switches.