Earlier reports have indicated that GM’s own engineers spotted trouble with the defective ignition switch as early as 2001, before the production cars even began rolling off assembly lines. Journalists and customers later reported similar issues in 2004 as sales began and accident numbers continued to climb.
Engineers subsequently initiated several investigations over the next few years without taking action, however on May 15, 2009 the company is known to have verified data from “black box” modules recovered from wrecked cars. They found that the ignition switch was in the accessory position in half of the cases, disabling the airbags at the time of impact, according to New York Times research.
Despite the apparently clear link in 2009 between the ignition switch and disabled airbags, potentially on a wide scale, the company still did not move to recall the affected vehicles.
Potentially confusing GM’s own internal investigations at the time, the company’s engineers quietly changed the switch design in 2006. The revision was put into production without changing the part number, against standard industry practice, and unbeknownst to other divisions within the company, according to an Automotive News report. It is unclear if any higher-level executives were involved in this decision, though documentary evidence of such oversight has yet to be submitted to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
Despite the internal change to fix the faulty switch, GM’s lawyers are said to have aggressively dealt with several families of occupants killed in accidents that were blamed on a defect.
Driving in South Carolina in 2009, Allen Ray Floyd lost control of his 2006 Cobalt and was killed in the accident. The accident occurred on July 9, just one week before the ‘old GM’ became the ‘new GM’ and automatically became protected from previous liabilities.
“They sent us a letter in September telling us to drop our case or else they’d come after us,” said the family’s attorney in the case, William Jordan. “We looked at the prospect of going into bankruptcy court and duking it out with them and looking at the language of the bankruptcy legislation, and it just seemed to be such a big undertaking.”
Later the same year another driver, Benjamin Hair, died when he lost control of a Pontiac G5 and struck a tree and the airbags failed to deploy. Despite the changed part and internal investigations, his family was allegedly told there was no defect to blame for the accident.
The company is currently facing several lawsuits over its actions. Legislators have called on the federal government to step in and quash the liability shield that was established in 2009, though this will likely require formal litigation in court.
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