If 2 or more people know something then it will never be a secret. Any rumblings will make their way around the water coolers, lunch tables, or the pub in the evening when lips are lubed a bit by liquor.
Mary Barra has worked at GM for 30ish years and it’s very difficult for me to believe that she and many others have not heard any hints of a problem over a multi-year period.
Well, she’s hired an outside law firm to investigate inside GM how this problem never got elevated to the proper level of management. She wouldn’t be doing that if her fingerprints were anywhere on this, and as an engineer she strikes me as the type of person who would have fixed the problem if it had been under her jurisdiction at the time and she had been made aware of it.
Usually it’s the engineers who want to fix things and the bean counters who don’t want to spend the money to do so if they can avoid it. It was an engineer who first discovered the problem and proposed a key redesign that got nixed…a decision that was probably made by the bean counters.
GM now saying they first became aware of the issue in 2001, not 2004 as they had previously said:
As far as I’m concerned, anyone who covers up a problem that leads to injury or death should be charged and jailed.
I’m not saying that Barra’s fingerprints are on the problem; only that keeping secrets is impossible when multiple people know about something and it’s hard for me to believe that switch rumblings weren’t circulating around the building.
What about Honda? They have a Recall out for switches which lead to stalling and the Recall is applicable to 1997- 2000 models. That switch problem has been around since long before 1997 and even after 2000. Pure and simple; too much electrical current being routed through a plastic switch when a little additional wiring and a relay would have prevented any problems.
It’s claimed there have been no deaths or injuries reported to Honda because of this but how would anyone know one way or the other? A failing switch may be fine a nano-second after impact.
Companies are NOT being held CRIMINALLY responsible for their actions. It’s almost impossible to determine who within a company is liable. So the whole company should be held criminally liable. After all - Companies are people.
@MikeInNH Companies occasionally get convicted, but in a recent case, the owner/president went to jail for 2 years. It involved a plating company in Michigan which knowingly dumped very toxic waste in the city drains.
The president made all the decisions in this firm and the courts found him and his company liable. There was also a large fine involved.
@MikeinNH, did you mean to say “Individuals” are not being held criminally responsible…?
Small companies - it’s easy to find who’s responsible. But with Large companies like GM it’s IMPOSSIBLE. And in many cases…the number of people involved are in the THOUSANDS. And there are times large companies are held criminally liable…but punishment amounts to just a fine…where as if you or I committed this same act…we’d be spending 20 years in prison.
It keeps getting worse:
What is going on at NHTSA? They have data that shows airbags didn’t deploy in fatal crashes that killed 303 people in Cobalts and Ions and they can’t connect the dots and see a problem?
Maybe you can cut and paste articles from the Times, with proper credit of course. Nothing from the Times will load for me on Fox, IE, or even Chrome for me. Maybe its just me but even the Google version just sits there.
Apparently it’s more complicated. The USA Today article posted at the beginning of this thread showed 3 investigations by NHTSA. In the two cases I remember, alcohol and not using seat belts were contributing factors in the deaths. These examples were probably picked to show how difficult it is to assess accident data. How would you view an accident where the driver was drunk and no one in the car wore seat belts? And since NHTSA was involved as these failures occurred, it is not out of the question to presume that GM was waiting for the recall demand that never came from NHTSA.
@jtsanders, yes, alcohol was a factor in at least one crash of the three you mentioned. But airbags are still supposed to deploy in a crash.
And over the years NHTSA was notified of HUNDREDS of fatal crashes in which Cobalt and Ion airbags didn’t deploy. How could they not have seen the trend and ordered a recall?
As for GM waiting for a recall order from NHTSA, well, apparently so. But NHTSA’s incompetence doesn’t excuse them from failing to notify NHTSA of a known safety issue as required by law and fixing the problem. And it doesn’t excuse them from liability in court.
The latest Times article says GM has settled out of court on at least one occasion where the family of a killed driver sued GM because the airbag didn’t deploy. No doubt there were other lawsuits too.
My friend recently bought his teenage daughter a used Saturn Ion. I just told him about the recall and asked him to check with the delaership, and sure enough, her car is being recalled. Thank goodness she’s still alive.
I didn’t suggest that GM was without fault. I said that it appears to be a difficult problem to resolve because because people died when they didn’t wear their belts, the NHTSA apparently didn’t pay enough attention to it, and GM had a lot on its plate in 2008 and later when they went through bankruptcy.
Good comment JT on having a lot on their plate at the time. If I remember right, they also fired a lot of their engineers and support staff during those years which wouldn’t contribute to a well oiled machine. Not to excuse at all any bad behavior or incompetence and the terrible loss of life, but cars are dangerous devices no matter with air bags or not. My 59 Pontiac never had air bags or seat belts so driving it into a tree at 70 mph, drunk or not, would not have been pretty. We have come to expect that machines will protect us no matter what and never fail. And if these mechanical/electrical devices do fail, then someone must be at fault.
I admit it is somewhat ironic that car safety has become so good that we expect whizzing around at 70 mph and dodging other 3000 pound chunks of steel to be a low-risk activity.
A class-action suit has been filed and it will be interesting to see if Mary Barra is scapegoated in a few years; a la Richard Pryor in the “Moving” movie…
Odds are some execs saw this coming before it ever made the news and got out while the getting was good.
There’s a humorous list somewhere of the phases of a typical corporate project that begins with great enthusiasm and ends in failure, with punishment of the innocent and rewards for non-participants.
But I don’t think Mary Barra will take the fall. Since she’s an engineer I think she would have done the right thing had she known about the issue and been in a position to fix it. And people see she’s trying to change the culture to one of accountability instead of sweeping things under the rug.
“sweeping things under the rug.”
Sounds like something that arrogant prick Bob Lutz would do . . .
I acknowledge his genius and his importance/contribution to the auto industry
Nevertheless, he seems like a first class jerk
At least to me
I have a suspicion if I were to be in a conversation with him, I’d want to knock his nose off his face within a few minutes. Yeah, I think he’d piss me off that quickly
And I strongly believe he also rubs a lot of other people the wrong way
They all sweep things under the rug. Not just car companies but other companies both big and small and on down to one horse contractors.
GM sweeps the switch problem under the rug much as Ford did the TFI modules, Subaru with the pinion springs, Toyota with ball joints, Mitsubishi with ball joints, Honda with that irritating CEL problem for which they paid a huge fine, etc, etc, etc.
At least with the Japanese they arrested some execs over problem sweeping…
@ok4450
Of course all companies sweep things under the rug
But not all heads of companies come across as that arrogant POS Bob Lutz
Perhaps Bob Lutz simply doesn’t give a f . . k what people think of him
He doesn’t need to prove anything to anybody, after all