Articles Posted in Products Liability

An article published in Friday’s New York Times brings the issue of General Motors and its massive recalls sharply back into focus. It tells the story of a 27-year-old Virginia woman who died in a car crash only days after receiving a recall notice on her 2006 Saturn. That notice concerned the ignition switch issue that has received so much media attention this year. It is also noteworthy that it was the third issue for which her car had been recalled. It is useful to be reminded that the GM recall story is far from over – but several details buried deep inside the article are points of special concern.

The victim in the crash highlighted by the article died earlier this year. That fact is significant, because even though the defects in GM cars stretch back many years the fatal crashes associated with them have been seen by most people as something that happened several years ago and is only now traceable to the company’s negligence. The article notes that as of this week the mediator administering a fund to compensate victims “had determined that 21 deaths were eligible, raising GM’s longstanding death tally of 13 by more than 50 percent.”

Equally disturbing (though, admittedly, not a new development for anyone who has followed this issue closely) is the paper’s reporting that “during months of outcry over GM’s handling of the (ignition) switch issue, as investigations and lawsuits mounted, the company has fought any effort to get the recalled cars off the road until they are repaired… To date, hundreds of thousands of cars remain on the road, and the automaker continues to maintain that they are safe.”

On Friday General Motors announced yet another expansion of the widening recall of its small cars. According to the New York Times, the company “is expanding its ignition-switch recall to include an additional 971,000 small cars worldwide, including 824,000 in the United States, that may have been previously repaired with defective switches.”

As I noted in a post earlier this month, well before today’s announcement GM had already recalled more than a million cars built since the 2003 model year because of a defect that may lead the ignition switch to cut off. That, in turn, could mean that air bags fail to deploy in the event of a crash. As the latest developments indicate it is now clear that many cars had the faulty switches added to them when they went in for repairs.

More disturbing, however, are the continuing revelations about the way in which GM has handled this scandal. In a move that may yet lead to wrongful death lawsuits, company documents have shown that GM misled grieving families for years, telling those who had lost loved-one in crashes linked to the flaw “that it did not have enough evidence of any defect in their cars, interviews letters and legal documents show.” This happened even as the company was internally debating the best way to fix the problem, the newspaper reports.

A disturbing article published this week in the New York Times outlines a series of failures by both corporate America and the federal government. Its focus is General Motors’ recent recall notices involving well over a million vehicles manufactured since the 2003 model year (click here for GM’s latest news release with full details of models and years effected). The vehicles have a defect in the air bag system that in some instances means the air bags will not deploy during a crash because the ignition switch has been cut off.

According to the Times, GM now acknowledges that at least 13 deaths can be tied to the defect. What is disturbing is the paper’s report that the automaker’s engineers were aware of the issue in 2004 – more than a year before the first of those 13 documented deaths. Equally bad is the record of federal regulators from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. According to the paper, “after two of the (Chevy) Cobalt crashes, the regulators took a close look at the cause, each time raising the possibility of a defect. They also met with GM about the issue. But despite the red flags, they never opened a broader investigation into whether the car was defective.”

As the paper goes on to report, a number of lawsuits related to the documented deaths have already made their way through the court system. Class action law was created precisely to enable ordinary Americans to defend their rights in cases of this sort of willful and negligent misconduct, especially when it results in wrongful deaths. The recall notices are still new and are still sinking in for many people (the initial recall was issued on February 19 and was later extended to hundreds of thousands of other vehicles) so it is also important to note that the full impact of the situation is not yet clear. It is clear that the court system will probably hear much more about these vehicles in the months and years to come.