EoW July 2014

Transatlantic Cable

In Washington on 16 th May, federal transportation o cials excoriated GM’s culture and practices, asserting that company investigators, engineers and executives knew for years of a problem with the switches. They also said GM knew since at least 2009 that air bags would not deploy if the ignition were inadvertently bumped or jostled out of the Run position. “They had that information and they told no one,” said Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx. “Crashes happened and people died. Had GM acted di erently perhaps some of this tragedy might have been averted.” A particularly poignant aspect of the sequence of events had come to light on 14 th May, with GM’s publication of the results of 100 tests conducted by the company on each of four recalled vehicles. Indications were that they were safe to drive so long as the ignition key ring carried no additional weight: no other keys, no personal tokens. The ignition key was found to jump from Run to Accessory in some cases in which the key ring bore added weight, but not otherwise. Such a shift could bring the vehicle to a dead stop. GM reported these results to the National Highway Tra c Safety Administration, which pronounced itself satis ed that the “safety risk posed by the defect in a ected vehicles is su ciently mitigated” if drivers take GM’s advice. As noted by Todd Spangler of the Detroit Free Press Washington sta , that advice is to drive with the key alone – or on its own ring – in the ignition. According to GM the test vehicles were driven at various speeds over rough surfaces including granite road blocks and stones, rumble strips, simulated potholes, and a 4-inch-tall wooden median – without incident of unintended key rotation. Sixteen of the tests were conducted with the ignition switch detent plunger and spring removed. Mr Spangler wrote that the results reported by the company disclosed no cases in which, when there was little or no additional weight on the ignition key ring, the key moved by itself. Elsewhere in automotive . . . † BMW said on 9 th May that it would invest $200 million and double its work force at a factory in Washington State that makes carbon bres. The carmaker operates the Moses Lake facility in a joint venture with another German company, the SGL Group. The expansion, set for completion early next year, re ects increasing interest on the part of German companies in manufacturing in the US. Lower energy costs are a factor. Strong and lightweight, carbon bre helps both to improve fuel economy in conventional cars and to extend the range of electric vehicles. But carbon bre parts are much more costly and di cult to fabricate than steel parts for automotive applications.

Automotive

Dominated by another wiring problem, the latest General Motors recall marks a total of 11.2 million vehicles recalled in the US General Motors said on 15 th May that it was recalling an additional 2.7 million vehicles in the United States, bringing to nearly 11.2 million the number of vehicles recalled this year by GM in the US. The US total for 2013 was not quite 758,000 recalls. The recalls announced in May also cover about 290,000 vehicles in Canada, Mexico, and other countries, for a total number of recalls by General Motors this year of 12.8 million worldwide. The major part of the newest recall applies to 2.4 million cars with faulty wiring that could cause brake lights to malfunction and not illuminate – or could illuminate the lights without the pedal being touched. The announcement in mid-May was the latest in a series of responses from GM that began in February with the recall of millions of small cars equipped with ignition-key problems linked by the company to 47 crashes and 13 deaths. The most recent recall is an expansion of a 2009 recall of 8,000 vehicles for the brake-light fault, the adequacy of which was challenged by federal regulators for its limitation to so relatively few models. In 2013 the National Highway Tra c Safety Administration started an investigation into the reasons why GM did not recall other vehicles that apparently used a similar system. The largest US automaker said that it decided to recall the additional vehicles “based on data gathered through additional investigation and eld evaluation process,” a GM spokesman wrote in a 15 th May email to the New York Times . As noted by Times reporters Bill Vlasic and Christopher Jensen, this marked the ninth instance over a period of some 16 months of GM’s recalling vehicles for which it previously only sent out a bulletin to dealers. Federal law requiring automakers to report defects to the NHTSA took e ect in 2004.

Image: www.bigstockphoto.com Photographer Zsolt Ercsel

A tragic irony of the GM recalls: an unencumbered ignition key-ring might have prevented the fatal crashes

Three months after announcing the start of the safety recall centring on faulty ignition switches, General Motors agreed to pay the US government $35 million – the maximum penalty – for its failure to report the potentially deadly defect earlier.

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July 2014