General Motors ignition switch recalls

On February 6, 2014, General Motors (GM) recalled about 800,000 of its puny cars due to faulty ignition switches, which could shut off the engine during driving and thereby prevent the airbags from inflating. [1] The company continued to recall more of its cars over the next several months, resulting in almost thirty million cars worldwide recalled [Two] and paid compensation for one hundred twenty four deaths. [Trio] The fault had been known to GM for at least a decade prior to the recall being announced. [Four] As part of a Deferred Prosecution Agreement, GM agreed to forfeit $900 million to the United States. [Five]

Contents

The very first recall was announced on February 7, 2014, and involved about 800,000 Chevrolet Cobalts and Pontiac G5s. [1] On March 31, GM announced it was going to recall over 1.Five million more cars of six different models, due to faulty power steering. Of these, over 1.Three million were in the United States, and three of the models were also involved in the faulty ignition recall. The total number of cars recalled during two thousand fourteen as of one April was 6.26 million. [6] On May 15, GM recalled Two.7 million more cars, bringing the total number of recalled vehicles in two thousand fourteen to 12.8 million worldwide, 11.1 million of which were in the United States. [7]

On June 16, 2014, GM announced they were recalling Three.Four million more cars, all of which were produced from two thousand to 2004. They also announced that they intended to substitute the cars’ keys because if they did not, the ignition switches could rotate, causing the car’s engines to shut off and disabling power steering. [8]

On June 30, 2014, GM announced they were going to recall 8.45 million extra cars, almost all of which were being recalled for defective ignition switches. This announcement brings the total number of recalled cars in North America to about twenty nine million. [9] In November two thousand fourteen emails surfaced that displayed GM ordered a half-million replacement ignition switches almost two months before ordering a recall. [Ten]

Unintended ignition switch shut-off happened because the “switch detent plunger”, designed to provide enough mechanical resistance to prevent accidental rotation, was insufficient. General Motors was aware of this potential problem, and held meetings about it, as early as 2005. [11]

The faulty ignitions have been linked (by GM itself) to one hundred twenty four deaths. [Three] GM originally only linked the failures to thirteen deaths and thirty one crashes. [12] The company only counted incidents which resulted in head-on collisions in which the airbags did not deploy. It did not include, for example, an incident where after a car’s ignition switch failed, the car “spun out, hydroplaned, hit an oncoming vehicle and flipped off the road, ripping off fifteen feet into a creek”. [13] In a collision in which two youthful women in a Chevrolet Cobalt were killed when the ignition switch shut off the engine, GM only counted the death of the woman in the front seat, because the death of the woman in the back seat was not caused by the failure of the airbag to deploy. [14] Most of the victims were under age 25. [15] On June Trio, 2014, Reuters published an analysis concluding that the faulty switches were responsible for seventy four deaths, based on Fatality Analysis Reporting System data. General Motors disputed its conclusion, and stood by their original figure of thirteen deaths after the report was released as of June Three, 2014. [16] By the end of September, Reuters stated in an article that one hundred fifty three deaths were linked to the faulty ignition switch. [17] As of March 2015, GM had suggested compensation for eleven Category One injuries, along with one hundred fifteen Category Two injuries. [Legal] In April 2015, GM officially noted that the death toll was believed to have reached 87, higher than the previous number of seventy four they reported in March 2015. [Nineteen] Upon its completion, the compensation fund established by GM had suggested compensation for one hundred twenty four deaths, almost ten times more than the thirteen deaths GM executives reported in April 2014. [Trio] [20] However, the true number of deaths resulting from the ignition switch is likely higher as GM’s compensation fund rejected more than 90% of claims and it did not include claims that are part of the ongoing Multidistrict Litigation. [21] [Trio]

The defect was not disclosed by GM nor was it discovered by government regulators or transportation safety agencies. Instead, public skill came about because Lance Cooper, a Marietta, Georgia attorney who sued GM on behalf of the family of a woman who had died in a crash, obtained thousands of pages of documents from GM and took the depositions of several GM engineers. According to Sean Kane, the president of a vehicle safety research rock-hard, Cooper “single-handedly set the stage for this recall.” [22]

Reaction to the recall Edit

The families of the thirteen people who died in car crashes involving the recalled vehicles gathered outside the US Capitol prior to Mary Barra’s testimony on April 1. They were joined by four Democratic politicians in support of tougher rules regarding the disclosure of automobile defects. [23] At the Capitol, they also said that their relatives had died “because they were a cost of doing business GM style.” [24] The recall cost GM more than $Trio billion in shareholders’ value over four weeks. [25]

One mother, Laura Christian, created a Facebook page to bring together the family, friends and those who support them. [26]

Congressional testimony Edit

Mary Barra’s testimony also stated that she doesn’t know why it took almost a decade to attempt to initiate a recall, but that she has accelerated efforts to fix the switches, [27] and that she offers “my veritable apologies to everyone who has been affected by this recall, especially to the families and friends of those who lost their lives or were injured. I am deeply sorry.” [28] [29] These remarks were sharply criticized by some of the victims’ family members, one of whom dismissed Barra’s meeting with them as a mere PR stunt, [12] and by Heidi Moore, who wrote that “[Barra] telling sorry to Congress won’t cut it” and that GM “has been good at telling stories that the public wants to hear.” [30] Also attending the hearing will be David J. Friedman, the Acting Administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), who will be asked why he did not act sooner to recall the cars with the faulty switches, since the NHTSA was aware of the problem before the recall. [23] Friedman’s written testimony blames GM for not conveying “critical information” to regulators which could have led to recalls years earlier. [23]

Barra made a number of statements during her testimony which received much media attention. She testified that General Motors would employ Kenneth Feinberg as a consultant to help them determine how to compensate families of those injured by the recalled cars. This decision was praised by Paul M. Barrett, who wrote in Businessweek that “. bringing in Feinberg is an excellent very first step” because he has more than twenty years of practice in mass-injury cases. [31] Barra also said that she asked attorney Anton R. Valukas to help find out why GM took so long to initiate a recall of the defective cars, [32] and that a utter account of why this did not happen sooner would have to wait until the results of Valukas’s investigation were announced. [33]

Another of her widely reported remarks was that she found GM’s concern about the cost of substituting the faulty switches “disturbing” (this was in response to Congresswoman Diana DeGette telling the subcommittee that it would have only cost fifty seven cents to fix each faulty ignition switch). [34] After being asked by Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill whether a GM engineer had evidently lied under oath, Barra confirmed that this had indeed happened (or at least seemed to). [33] McCaskill later appeared on This Week, where she said of GM that “They’ve attempted to lawyer up and play whack-a-mole with these lawsuits, and terrible things have happened,” and that “Now it’s time for them to come clean, be translucent and most of all make victims entire no matter when this deadly ignition caused heartbreak in their families.” [35]

During the hearings, Barbara Boxer asked Barra why, during the thirty three years she worked at GM prior to becoming the CEO in 2013, she never heard anything about the faulty ignition switches. After Barra failed to give a substantive reaction, Boxer exclaimed to her that “You don’t know anything about anything,” and that “If this is the fresh GM leadership, it’s pretty lacking.” [36] [37]

Also in April 2014, federal safety regulators testified before Congress that they had expected the airbags in the defective cars to be able to deploy for sixty seconds after the engine stalled, but General Motors later told the Associated Press that they actually can only do so for one hundred fifty milliseconds. [38]

Reactions to Barra’s testimony Edit

In the Wall Street Journal, Holman Jenkins praised the fact that Barra didn’t argue that the failure to recall the defective vehicles was due to “. the problems of a company that no longer exists and a product that’s no longer made.” However, for the same reason, he also criticized her for suggesting that the company would be more customer-focused with her as the CEO than it was when GM very first found out about the faulty switches. [39]

Lawsuits Edit

A large number of lawsuits have been filed in response to the recall, by those claiming to have been injured due to the recalled vehicles’ faulty switches. These lawsuits include at least two class activity ones, one filed by a man from Myerstown, Pennsylvania on April two and another filed in federal court in California. [40] Two other lawsuits have also named Delphi Automotive, the car parts manufacturer who produced the defective switches, as one of the parties partly responsible for the deaths caused by the now-recalled vehicles. [41] On July 29, 2014, a lawsuit was filed in US District Court in Manhattan on behalf of six hundred fifty eight people who claim that they were injured or killed because of the faulty ignition switches in GM’s recalled cars. The lawsuit alleges that GM knew about the faulty switches since two thousand one but did not recall any of its cars until 2014. [42] The Orange County District Attorney has also filed a lawsuit against GM on behalf of the People of the State of California alleging the company engaged in unfair competition and false advertising in disturbance of California law when it failed to disclose defects. [43]

In April 2016, General Motors reached a confidential settlement with the Pittsburgh-based law rigid Pribanic & Pribanic in a wrongful death lawsuit [44] [45] [46] filed on behalf of the family of James E. Yingling III – a Pennsylvania man killed in a November two thousand thirteen one-vehicle crash. The case was selected as the third in a series of bellwether trials related to the company’s extensive recall of defective ignition switches. [47] General Motors won the very first two bellwether cases, but days before the Yingling case was expected to go to trial, General Motors suggested a settlement that both Mr. Yingling’s widow, Nadia, and lead attorney Victor Pribanic found acceptable. [48]

Prosecution deferred and compensation to victims Edit

On September seventeen 2015, General Motors entered into a Deferred Prosecution Agreement with the United States Department of Justice, in which GM admitted that “from in or about the spring of two thousand twelve through in or about February 2014, GM failed to disclose a deadly safety defect to its U.S. regulator. It also falsely represented to consumers that vehicles containing the defect posed no safety concern.” [Five] As part of the Deferred Prosecution Agreement, GM agreed to forfeit $900 million to the United States. [Five] [49] GM gave $600 million in compensation to surviving victims of accidents caused by faulty ignition switches. [50] [51]

General Motors has stated that the recalled cars are safe to drive unless the driver has extra items fastened to the key ring. However, some consumer advocacy groups have urged GM to announce the cars unsafe for driving no matter what, telling they still pose a danger. [52] In fact, a lawsuit was filed in Texas on April Four, with the plaintiffs aiming to force GM to announce its recalled cars unsafe to drive, but the judge, Nelva Gonzales Ramos, refrained from doing so that day, telling she needed more information. [53]

Repairs Edit

GM said the parts needed to repair the faulty ignition switches were expected to become available on April 7, 2014. However, that same day, CNN Money contacted six dealerships, none of whom had received these parts. A spokesman for GM, Alan Adler, said that he didn’t know how many replacement parts had been shipped to dealerships, or when the majority of parts would be available. [54]

Fines Edit

On April 8, the NHTSA fined GM $28,000 because the company hadn’t supplied the agency with the information it had requested it give them by April Trio, and the agency charged them $7,000 for each day after then that GM didn’t provide this information. [55] On May 16, GM agreed to pay the Department of Transportation the maximum fine of $35 million for delaying the recall of the defective cars they recalled earlier in 2014. [56]

Executive departures Edit

On April 14, 2014, GM announced that two of its executives—Selim Bingol, senior vice president for global communications and public policy, and Melissa Howell, senior vice president for global human resources—were departing the company. GM did not say whether Bingol and Howell had resigned or were fired. [57]

Valukas report Edit

On June Five, 2014, Valukas’ report on the recall was made public. In it, he asserted that the company’s failure to fix the defective switches sooner was not due to a cover-up on the company’s part, [58] but rather due to “their failure to understand, fairly simply, how the car was built.” [59] The report led to Barra firing fifteen of her employees. [58]

Feinberg plan Edit

On June 30, 2014, Kenneth Feinberg unveiled a plan to compensate victims of recalled GM cars, including an agreement to pay “whatever it costs” to do so. At a press conference held by the National Press Club, Feinberg added that the compensation fund will accept applications from August 1, two thousand fourteen until the end of the year, and that he has the last word as to how much the victims’ families should be compensated. [60] [61] In the very first week after the fund began accepting applications, one hundred twenty five claims were filed, sixty three involving fatalities. [62] As of September 15, 2014, according to Feinberg’s deputy administrator, Camille Biros, nineteen deaths are eligible for compensation under Feinberg’s plan. [63]

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