The GM lesson: failure to warn should be a felony.

• Author: Nader, Ralph
• Position: General Motors Co.

April 8, 2014

Dear Senators Leahy and Grassley, and Representatives Goodlatte and Conyers:

This letter is a request that you introduce legislation to address fatal failures such as those by General Motors to warn the public and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) in timely fashion about ignition switch failures in its Cobalts and other GM models. Such legislation is badly needed to ensure that such failures--and the deaths that come with them--do not happen again.

On February 13, 2014, General Motors announced a recall of about 778,000 of its cars due to an ignition switch failure. That recall has now been expanded to nearly 2.5 million cars.

At this time, the failure of the General Motors ignition systems is implicated in 303 deaths.

Revealingly, nearly ten years before this recall, in November 2004, General Motors initiated an engineering inquiry to examine whether a 2005 Chevrolet Cobalt "can be keyed off with knee while driving." In March 2005, the Cobalt Project Engineering Manager closed this inquiry "with no action" because the "lead time for all solutions is too long," and the "tooling cost and piece price are too high" and that "none of the solutions seems to fully countermeasure the possibility of the key being turned (ignition turned off) during driving.

The project engineering manager's "directive" concludes that "none of the solutions represent an acceptable business case.

It is clear that this tragedy was mostly preventable if General Motors had properly warned the NHTSA and the public at the outset of its documented suspicion of an engineering defect in its cars.

Several members of Congress propose remedies for General Motors' failure to warn NHTSA in timely fashion.

For example, Senators Edward Markey and Richard Blumenthal have introduced legislation requiring auto companies to provide NHTSA with key safety-related documents related to fatal auto crashes, including certain internal safety documents, insurance claims made against them, and information pertaining to lawsuits against them related to the crashes. The legislation would also require NHTSA to make this available to the public via the Internet.

Representative Henry Waxman has introduced legislation to require auto manufacturers to disclose additional information about fatal crashes, NHTSA to provide public notice of inspection and investigation activities, and auto manufacturers to have a U.S.-based senior executive certify the accuracy and...