General Motors engineers, revealing a stark lack of concern and communication within the company as it investigated faulty ignition switches in Chevrolet Cobalts, Saturn Ions, Pontiac G5s, Chevrolet HHRs, Pontiac Solstices, and Saturn Skys, expected owners to safely coast to the side of the road if their cars stalled. Seriously.
The findings come from a case in which the Cooper Firm, based in Atlanta, reached a settlement with GM last year for the death of Brooke Melton, whose 2005 Chevrolet Cobalt's engine had shut off with the ignition switch in the accessory position on a Georgia road in 2010. In court documents newly released by the firm to the Wall Street Journal and obtained by Car and Driver, four GM engineers—three of whom directly worked on the Cobalt before and after its 2004 debut—show how the automaker downplayed the problems early in the car's development.
Gary Altman, the Cobalt's program engineering manager between 2000 and 2005, said he didn't think the cars were unsafe because they "could still be maneuvered to the side of the road, in control, in that condition." Altman said in June 2013 that GM still hadn't determined the "root cause" of the stalling cars and "couldn't hundred percent fix the problem" even after the company quietly redesigned the ignition switch in 2006.
Details in the five deposition transcripts dated between April and June 2013, including one from a GM representative, repeat the carmaker's recall filings to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in February almost to the letter. Ray DeGiorgio, the project engineer for the Cobalt ignition switch, said he was never aware GM redesigned the part and said Delphi had made an unauthorized change. GM states in its recall filing that "the GM design engineer responsible for the ignition switch" had approved the change in April 2006, but didn't name a specific employee. "I was not aware of a detent-plunger-switch change," he said. "We certainly did not approve a detent-plunger design change."
Engineer Brian Stouffer said the initial GM investigation—linking 23 crashes where the airbags didn't deploy to many of the initial 1.37 million cars recalled—was passed on to him in 2011 from another team. However, after looking at 100 owner complaints on the issue and later finding the same part number attached to the old and revised ignition switch, Stouffer didn't think it was a problem. "On close to 500,000 vehicles, I have 100 complaints for that, which is a very, very low complaint rate," he said.
But in 2004, three years after GM said it first discovered the problem on a pre-production Saturn Ion, three GM employees driving production Ions reported their cars had stalled from a loose ignition switch. "The switch should be raised at least one inch toward the wiper stalk," one engineer said. "This is a basic design flaw and should be corrected if we want repeat sales."
Dealers, even after receiving the technical service bulletin for a rubber key insert in December 2005, had no consistent message from GM on how to handle the repairs. After customers brought in their cars due to repeated stalling, dealers tried all sorts of fixes to no avail, replacing throttle bodies, reflashing the ECU software, replacing the ignition-system computer, and flushing fuel injectors. In many cases, the dealers blamed the gasoline itself or gave up entirely, leading GM to repurchase multiple vehicles but leaving most owners in limbo. One corporate response to a dealer in September 2005 said the switch's low torque was a "known vehicle concern" and pleaded for the customer to be "patient in waiting for a possible solution." Many of the engine-stalling complaints GM received were for cars with less than 10,000 miles.
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What's especially disheartening is how quickly this law firm sifted through the automaker's internal documents and found the troublesome part—even turning up ignition switches with identical part numbers and different torque ratings—before either GM or NHTSA publicly admitted to an actual safety defect. By the time GM settled with the Melton family last September, its own engineers hadn't finished an in-house investigation that began months after the lawsuit was filed in June 2011.
from Car and Driver Blog http://ift.tt/nSHy27
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