You might want to get comfortable with regular updates on General Motors' massive ignition-switch recall, because this thing is just getting started. Just days before GM CEO Mary Barra testifies before congress, the company has announced it is adding 971,000 more 2008 model-year-and-later cars to the ignition switch recall, about 824,000 of which are in the U.S. This means that every car that was built with a faulty ignition switch—or repaired with one—is blanketed by GM's recall.
Now that the ignition switches for every single 2003-2007 Saturn Ion; 2005-2010 Chevrolet Cobalt and Pontiac G5; 2006-2011 Chevrolet HHR; 2006-2010 Pontiac Solstice; and the 2007-2010 Saturn Sky built fall under the recall, bulletin's tally rises to a cool 2.2 million cars in the U.S. The worldwide total for the recall currently stands at nearly 2.6 million units; previously, GM had restricted the global recall to 1.62 million cars due to a fix that affected 2007 and later models.
The reason for adding every model originally built with the faulty ignition switch to the recall is simple: GM doesn't actually know whether some defective parts made their way back into customer cars during repairs. Since the automaker changed the defective part in 2006 without changing the part number, there is no way for GM or service technicians to distinguish good ignition switches from the bad without taking them apart. GM said it knew of 90,000 faulty switches that were installed on "older vehicles" prior to the February recall, and it is telling dealers and parts distributors to send back the 5000 parts that remain in stock.
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As CEO Mary Barra states: "Trying to locate several thousand switches in a population of 2.2 million vehicles and distributed to thousands of retailers isn't practical. Out of an abundance of caution, we are recalling the rest of the model years. We are going to provide our customers with the peace of mind they deserve and expect by getting the new switches into all the vehicles."
That is nice for customers, for sure, but GM isn't quite out of the doghouse yet. It is under three federal investigations, including a criminal probe by the Justice Department, for why it recalled these cars 13 years after first discovering the problem. At least 12 people have died due to the faulty switches, and GM didn't publicly address the problem over that time period despite hundreds of owner complaints received by the company and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Like we said, batten down the hatches, because GM is facing down a difficult and likely protracted process—including litigation—over this issue.
from Car and Driver Blog http://ift.tt/nSHy27
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