GM admits internal cover-up of fatal ignition switch problem

Maintenance/Repairs
81

Asemaster, your driver training class sounds just like mine, though I was in Torrance so not same district. Alas, that kind of training is expensive and many districts dropped it. Many that offer it now use a third-party and charge quite a lot for the instruction. I don’t know if they’re still offering the classroom instruction as a class. I’ve heard very few use simulators. To be honest, they were kind of a joke, with constant breakdowns of certain seats.

I was a whiz on the simulators, but not on the streets. Not much similarity between a classroom of simulators to a painfully slow Volare with four boys and the cross-country coach, who got out and stretched his hamstrings on the hood whenever we changed drivers. That man must have had the longest hamstrings in the world.

And to those slamming Bob Lutz, I couldn’t agree more. Sure, he’s a car guy, not an accountant, but that doesn’t make him any more honest. He always says what he thinks makes him look important and visionary. He was directly involved in running most of the American car companies during the seventies and eighties, when they produced one piece of junk after another.

Listen to him now and he only failed because the beancounters got in his way. Hey, Bob, you outranked the beancounters. If they got their way it’s because you didn’t make a compelling case (or agreed with the beancounters, more likely.) A real car guy with Lutz’s titles would have turned out at least a few great cars, not just the occasional nice looking body with crummy generic mechanicals underneath.

82

More bad news about how GM lied to or stonewalled families of drivers killed in crashes:

83

@jesmed‌
"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."

Here you go, one of my favorites of all time-

The Six Phases of a Project

  1. Enthusiasm
  2. Disillusionment
  3. Panic and hysteria
  4. Search for the guilty
  5. Punishment of the innocent
  6. Praise and honor for the nonparticipants
84

I agree 100% with asemaster’s assesment of spit-poor emergency and abnormal operations training amongst motorists today.

Look at the aviation industry: pilots spend dozens of hours a year going over “emergeny ops” and “abnormal ops,” then testing those skills in pass/fail sim check rides. No pass, no fly. Within the industry, training a pilot only to fly really well when every system is working properly would be considered reckless and negligent…as well it should be. (It should be pointed out that pilots are every bit as human as motorists, and have the same human skills and limitations as a motorist, outside of low expectations and/or lassitude.)

If a human pilot is expected to handle “V-1 thrust reverser deployment with a side of low-level windshear,” then the absolute LEAST a human motorist shoud be expected to do is to safely navigate to the side of the road in the event of PS failure secondary to engine failure!

In fairness, no one who buys a new car expects the ignition switch to turn off accidentally at 70 mph,
Nor does anyone expect a V1 engine failure.
and therefore no one trains/practices/anticipates such a circumstance.
Well, then they're negligent in their behavior! At the very least, have a mental plan in place for how to handle some of the more common issues: PS/PB loss, engine failure, blowout, yaw excursion/over- or understeer. (I realize driving sims aren't realistic options for 98%.)
So expecting, say, a brand new teenage driver to suddenly know what to do when the ignition shuts off...
Gee, I would expect a teenager to be ESPECIALLY experienced in shutting off the engine, while moving, to silently coast into a prime "parking" spot...and how to brake with the e-brake, so as not to leave telltale brake lights. I know I did, and I never thought I was *all that bad* of a kid!
85

Guys, just remember, it could be your elderly mother driving that car. If the same thing happened to her, the ignition shut off and she crashed, would you say the same thing to her (assuming she survived)? I hope not.

@TwinTurbo, thanks that’s the list! Clearly you have had your share of wild enthusiasm, disillusionment, panic, and punishment. :wink:

86

How am I being incorrect? If I flew with a guy that scoffed at emergency checklists, and just hoped and prayed that “nothing bad was gonna happen,” I’d think the guy was a hazard to himself and others. Why the consistently low expectations of motorists relative to pilots, sailors, etc? Remeber that people tend to live up/down to whatever expectations are set.

I know from my very early “single-engine” days, the instructor made a point of pulling throttle when it was least expected, and saying, “Your engine just quit. Where is your field?” If you could point to an emergency landing site, you “passed.”

This is a very basic lesson in emergency preparedness, and easily transferrable. Why is it so unreasonable to expect motorists to have a “SHTF” contingency iin the back of their mind while driving? Knowing how to cope with emergencies certainly helped me get off the highway safely when I had a timing belt fail, and when I had a steer wheel blowout on a 24’ box truck.

(The timing belt was most similar to a loss of power due to key moving to “acc,” and I had my hazards on and had attempted a restart before losing 10 MPH from highway cruise. If this had been a key issue, not only would have I not crashed, it’s possible nobody else would have noticed anything amiss.)

87

I just hope your elderly parents and teenage kids live up to your high expectations of them, and that if, God forbid, they are injured in an accident caused in part by a defective car, you will forgive them for not coping as well as you expected.

88
I just hope your elderly parents and teenage kids live up to your high expectations of them, and that if, God forbid, they are injured in an accident caused in part by a defective car, you will forgive them for not coping as well as you expected.

There is not one model of car on the road today that did NOT have sometime a EMERGENCY problem that a driver had to make a quick reaction to. NOT ONE. I have two teenage kids and one twenty something. I made sure they all knew what to do in an emergency. It’s my DUTY as a parent to teach them that. Obviously it’s impossible to teach them how to cope in ALL situations at all times. Although most parents do it…just letting a teenage get their license without teaching them the basic emergency procedures is just plain WRONG.

89

I can see wisdom on both sides of this issue. However, there is another viewpoint as well.

When any company produces automobiles, it is assumed they know the legal and social environment they will be selling cars in. They do have a large legal staff which studies such issues all the time.

They are not driving in the rain at dark. They are sitting in a well lighted, temperature controlled environment. And, they well know that defect will kill people under certain circumstances. They let it go for THIRTEEN YEARS!

Not jail. The guillotine.

Yet, some callous individuals, for personality reasons known only to themselves, want to blame 150,000,000 people for not being totally prepared for those exact once in a lifetime circumstances with a fraction of a second to react appropriately.

I am reminded of the Oshkosh Air Show. I don’t even know if they still have it every year. But, years ago, regularly one or more people would be killed. One of the landing places required a 90 degree turn very close to the ground, and at very low speed. The sharp turn sometimes caused what is called “wing stall”. The wing would lose lift and the plane would crash in some cases killing all aboard.

My smart-aleck brother would say, “Pilot error.”

I tried to discuss it with him. There was obviously a dangerous condition. “Nope, the pilot is supposed to know how to deal with that.”

I was on the Safety Committee of my company. One of the basic safety tips is, most fatal accidents involved more than one issue. First, a dangerous condition, then a human error on top of that dangerous condition. The solution as far as we were concerned was you can never eliminate all human error, but you can work to eliminate known dangerous conditions as you find them.

I honestly think the people who are as callous as my smart-aleck brother is, should go live somewhere where no other humans exist. And, please remember to take my smart-aleck brother with you.

90

My mother would not have driven at twice the legal limit, at 70 mph, on a dark winding road without seat belts, and she had her new 78 Plymouth quit on her a number of times before we found the problem. At some point people need to take responsibility for their own safety.

Now if you want to talk negligence, let’s start looking at sub-standard Japanese fasteners and steel used in US bridges. Now that’s an accident waiting to happen.

91
I honestly think the people who are as callous as my smart-aleck brother is, should go live somewhere where no other humans exist. And, please remember to take my smart-aleck brother with you.

@Irlandes…I realize that you might think your brother has a callous attitude, but in the long run, isn’t “extremism, in defense of aviation safety [or auto safety, FWIW] not a vice?” Who does more harm, ultimately: somebody with a “drill instructor” attitude, or somebody who “coddles” and worries more about self-esteem and feelings (in a safety-critical situation) than getting it right, the first time?

The nation I live in is currently an overweight nation, with mediocrity rewarded all too frequently. As a rule, we would do a lot better with more drill sergeants and fewer sweater-vest wearers; less “how does that make you feel?” and more “what IS your major malfunction?”

P.S. The “prefect of discipline” at my high school (go Central!) was an actual ex-Marine drill sergeant. When he eventually passed…over 100 former students showed up. To say he was appreciated is an understatement.

92

@cdaquila, perhaps it’s time to close this thread (which I started). It seems to have drifted off topic.

93

I believe the Oshgosh show was an experimental/homemade aircraft show predominantly where you would expect more failures. But I agree, seldom does only one condition cause an accident. That’s what defensive driving is all about so that when you make a mistake, likely the other driver will not also make it at the same time.

I’m not going to comment on the drill instructors but I still tend to respond to a teenager mumbling with stand up straight and speak up son.

94

@jesmed…take one side of a polarizing issue, and call for thread closure when opinions go where you’d rather they didn’t?

95

@meanjoe75fan, the thread was opened for the purpose of discussing the GM ignition switch recall, not for cheering the deaths of drunk drivers as another poster (not you) has done.

Yeah, that’s classy.

I have no problem with your call for personal responsibility in driving. But that’s a different topic. This is about the GM ignition switch recall. If you’d like to open a thread discussing better driver training and personal responsibility, please do so.

96

Yeah, and reviewing my most recent post, I went WAY beyond where I should, defending my point…so I edited it for tone. Sorry about that!

97

Thanks for keeping it cool. :wink:

98

Just a point of order that just because you start a discussion doesn’t mean that you control it. Once its out there it is out there with a life of its own and it is what it is. Some of the people I used to work with thought that with enough effort, legislation, and money, they could eliminate all injuries in Minnesota. Of course it wouldn’t be a place I’d like to live in anymore but they were dead serious, so I started to realize we had gone too far. Life is dangerous, simple as that and would we have it any other way?

99

Understood. I don’t object to a healthy and respectful airing of views.

What I did object to was one classless post that cheered the death of a drunk driver. At that point it seemed like the thread was degenerating into the cesspool, and that the moderator might not want that kind of thing on the Car Talk website.

If there’s more to be said on this topic, that’s fine. Can we please just keep it one notch above “yeah, I’m glad the drunk driver died?” Doesn’t really add much to the discussion.

100

I didn’t close the discussion because it was still pretty on-topic. Then came the drunk driver comment and some other stuff. If it gets much further off, I’ll close it. But I thought the first part was very spirited and 100% on topic without ad hominem attacks. Cool.