When General Motors was receiving reports of stalled vehicles—the same vehicles that were found to have an ignition switch defect—nothing was done despite the fact that other manufacturers had issued recalled for their stalled cars.
Automotive News reports that competitors issued “about 90 recalls for similar symptoms during the same period and federal safety regulators opened 42 investigations into stalling.” Only after General Motors began to realize there was an issue with the ignition switches that they began to take things more seriously, and the Feds have accused GM of waiting five more years to issue a recall in February. Up to that point, GM’s only response was a series of service bulletins and a document from June 2005 that stated that a vehicle can shut off if the key and ignition is inadvertently bumped.
The Chrysler Corporation, Honda, Nissan, and others all have recalled vehicles for engine stalling during this period, raising questions why the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) didn’t respond to General Motors’ issues. Apparently, the NHTSA was instead focusing on reports of airbags failing to deploy. GM wasn’t clear about the connection between the airbag failure and the ignition switches until 2009. At the time, GM reported the data as “unknown,” and the NHTSA asked GM for more data on two more fatal crashes instead of taking action.
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As the information keeps coming in, it just gets worse and worse.
The picture emerging is beyond one of a bloated incompetent and negligent company with a broken culture lacking any accountability, but of an unconscious and soulless management system that did not possess the most basic principle of human decency and/or compassion, and not only knew, but collectively went out of their way to obfuscate the fact that their products were knowingly killing their customers … outside the corporate world we call people like that psychopaths.
It takes a special type of cognitive dissonance for human beings to act this way onto others, and another type of cognitive dissonance to try to rationalize or defend this behavior … yet undoubtably some will.
I can agree, that the older company pre bankruptcy messed this up pretty bad. I own a cobalt, and I believe the new company is doing pretty well with this.
This issue goes beyond that though. The government (NHTSA) was aware of this issue, and not only said they believe it was an airbag issue, but didn’t force a recall or further study, from that claim.
Yes the older GM knew that it was the ignition, that’s why they sent dealers the technical service bulletin to tell people to reduce the weight on their keychains, similar to instructions of what’s on recall notices now, except the letters state you should remove everything and just use the key. All of that was back during the old GM. The old GM did make revised parts, and someone, somewhere, authorized for those parts to go into production, while keeping the same parts numbers as the older parts. If that didn’t happen, and if it didn’t cause confusion of which was a faulty switch in the new batch inventory, who knows, perhaps a recall could have occurred sooner than this year? I agree the older company messed this up, but the government has a huge hand in this as well.
I don’t defend such behavior. My comments come from what I’ve gathered of this case. I didn’t know there was a problem until I started seeing headlines this year, and my cobalt is a 2005.
I would like to know of the commonality of the switch turning back into accessory mode is, though. All I hear is, it can happen.
The dealership I work at has sold a boat load of these affected cars and we have had two incidences reported to us from customers. Both owners also had a boat load of things hanging off their key chains. One had a 2 foot long lanyard which got stuck under his foot as he move it and it pulled the ignition off.
GM has shown in testing that with a single key (and a key fob in reality) will not turn the ignition off. They have hundreds of miles tested over various road conditions and not once has the ignition turned off.
Years ago Ford actually had a statement in their owner’s manuals stating that having more than the vehicle key and key fob on your keys in the ignition can cause premature wear on the ignition system and potentially cause ignition issues in order to release themselves of liability.
I agree that the old GM is responsible for making the decisions on this issue and the new GM is having to clean it up. Most of the public really doesn’t see the difference between or believe there is an old and new GM but people have to realize that 90% of the decision makers of the old GM throughout the system are no longer there. And when they went, so did any knowledge on these issues so the new GM is having to rifle through paperwork and files to put this all together. Sure, some of the engineers are still there, but they don’t make major decisions. They provide the product design and information to the decision makers, and 90% of these decision makers are not in the new GM.
The new half tons being recalled twice for going up in flames, that’d be on the NEW GM. So are most of the major recalls we’ve been hearing about weekly.
I’m not saying the new GM products wont’ have/don’t have recalls. The first risk of fire recall was a loose clamp fitting on a oil line (all manufactured trucks checked and less than .02% had the issue) and the second only was a lose connection on the fuse block but only affected 300 trucks.
After all, the F150 and Ram have both had recalls for risk of fires too.
Magirus, most of the recalled vehicles are not the new GM since 2.3M are the ignition system, over 2.5M are 04-07 Malibu’s, Saturns, G6’s etc, 09-14 Traverses’ which were designed and approved for the 2007 model year before the new GM and haven’t changed, Express/Savana vans which were designed long before the new GM (been the same vehicle since long before 08).
The majority of new GM recalls are prevention measures like the Cruze shaft issue in which less than .01% of customer have had an issue but instead of doing a TSB like other manufacturers do (and the old GM did) where they inspect the shaft and only replace those with an issue, the new GM decided to recall all and change them all (and good on them).
Quit trolling.