Feds sifting GM 'timeliness' info for evidence of delay
Federal safety officials are sifting through mounds of documents from General Motors, trying to pinpoint when the big car company should have recalled millions of cars with faulty ignition switches.
If it delayed, it could be fined.
GM in February and March, in three separate actions, recalled a total of 2.6 million of its 2003-2011 small cars, worldwide, to replace the switches. Almost all those cars -- about 2.5 million -- are in the U.S. GM links the fault to 12 deaths in 31 crashes in the U.S. and one fatal crash in Canada.
Some safety advocates believe there are more.
The switches can unexpectedly move out of the "run" position and into "accessory." That shuts off the engine, kills power assist to the steering and brakes, and can prevent airbags from operating in a crash.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration previously ordered GM to answer 107 questions about the matter by Thursday, in what's called a timeliness query. The GM documents have been arriving ever since, and it appears GM has met the deadline -- although NHTSA is likely to allow some slack so GM can continue providing information after the deadline.
The agency said late Thursday, "NHTSA has been receiving documents from the automaker and will take appropriate action based on the agency's review."
The documents won't be public immediately. In a process that could take weeks, NHTSA first has to redact -- censor -- parts of the documents to protect names of victims of the crashes to meet its own privacy policy, and to blot out information that it has agreed to consider proprietary GM business information.
The law requires an automaker to notify NHTSA within five business days when it determines there is a safety defect. If the agency decides an automaker was tardy, it can impose a fine of as much as $35 million.
The U.S. Justice Department can go further. It recently fined Toyota $1.2 billion for not disclosing defects related to the company's unintended acceleration recalls. NHTSA says five people died because of Toyota cars that sped out of control.
Documents previously provided by GM to NHTSA show that a problem with the ignition switch first was noted in 2001, during development of the 2003 Saturn Ion. In 2003, GM records show, a mechanic noted the problem on a customer's car. And a GM engineer experienced the switch problem in 2004 during final development of the 2005 Chevrolet Cobalt.
By 2005, GM was receiving fairly frequent complaints from owners that their cars were unexpectedly stalling. The first fatality apparently linked to the problem occurred in 2005.
In 2006, the switch was redesigned to make it less likely to move out of position inadvertently, but that wasn't widely reported within GM and the new switch wasn't assigned a new part number.
GM policy, and engineering standards generally, require a new part number in such cases. If the change was made to fix a safety problem, and NHTSA wasn't notified, that could be a violation of federal law.
GM did not recall the cars in 2006 to put the new-design switch into the older cars.
An analysis by trade publication Automotive News suggests that misstep could have cost eight lives in crashes of the older cars, which might have been prevented if they had the new switches.
Under withering attack by a Senate subcommittee Wednesday, GM CEO Mary Barra said "one of the findings" of an internal GM investigation headed by former U.S. Attorney General Anton Valukas is that "there were silos, and as information was known in one part of the business -- for instance, the legal team -- it didn't necessarily get communicated as effectively as it should have been to other parts. That is something that I've already corrected."
Barra, who took the top job at GM in January, told Senators that the Valukas investigation has long to run and many answers to key questions won't be known until the probe concludes.