I’m glad I don’t own a GM.
Whoever made the decision to cover up the defective switch should be ashamed of themselves. How do you sleep at night?
I can’t even imagine myself putting profit before life.
I know this is a weak pitting and I hope someone else will speak to this more eloquently than I can, but I figured it’ll end up here anyway, so that’s why I chose this forum.
Here’s one of many stories about the recall: General Motors Announces Another Recall Before Congressional Testimony | Time
It appears they’ve already decided on their scapegoat.
But it wasn’t one person. This was an organizational leadership wide coverup spanning almost 10 years.
The truly disgusting part is that the lid was blown off GM’s practice of ignoring safety issues A HALF-CENTURY AGO!
Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed, published in 1965, was hugely influential and led to big changes in the industry. It’s most remembered for its chapter on the Chevrolet Corvair which debuted in 1960 and the way GM refused to install an anti-roll bar in the suspension in order to cut costs. (It’s a good read all around if you’re interested in these sorts of things.)
Or 54 years, depending on how you want to look at it. This particular problem may be only 10 years old, but I guess some things don’t change.
Isn’t the UAW the largest shareholder of GM, with board seats? Sounds like some proportion of the blame should come to rest on them.
Random union bashing? I wouldn’t put much blame on anyone on the board. At best the BOD sets a tone (and even that is mostly CEO driven) - this sort of decision wouldn’t come anywhere close to them.
Obama. Clearly.
Board members are more accountable than donors to a non-profit organization. But for some reason, everyone thinks that Koch brothers control the daily actions of the AFP and the Tea parties.
I’m content to wait until I see that the decision to scuttle the engineering fixes is credibly tied to deliberations that took place in the boardroom.
Once that has been established, I’ll happily call for the ouster of UAW representatives who sat on the BOD.
And really, ISTM that the UAW members of the board would be delighted to have an opportunity to send some corrective action hours to union members.
“A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don’t do one.”
“Are there a lot of these kinds of accidents?”
“You wouldn’t believe.”
“Which car company do you work for?”
“A major one.”
I don’t have a firm opinion on this, but I suspect it was more of a process failure, than a deliberate intent to cover up and save money.
Also, contrary to popular belief, car companies can not throw unlimited amounts of money at anything safety related. Driving is dangerous business and vehicles are incredibly complex machines that all have flaws and failures.
I’m really not sure Soulcatcher, they didn’t renumber the replacement part on the initial repairs. That is a big no-no and should never be part of a normal process.
I really think that greed is behind this, the timing was near when they were getting the bail out money.
I guess we’ll see what the investigation brings, but it smells bad to me so far.
UAW Retiree Medical Benefits Trust owns 140 million out of 1.5 billion outstanding shares of GM, giving them ownership of about 8.9% of the company.
More importantly, hasn’t the concept of the corporation for 500 years been that individual shareholders are not liable for the actions of the corporation? Hence “limited liability.”
Look people, it’s just a matter of actuarial science. If in the long run you’re likely to spend less money paying out wrongful death civil suits than you would in retooling all those defective vehicles, then it really only makes sense to cover it up and just pay up when your machine kills people. What’s so hard to understand about the basic principles we all learned in Class Action.
Yes these situations have occurred many times in the past decades. For example one of the most famous was the Ford Pinto–where the gas tank was accident prone:
http://fordpintoethics.webs.com/
It should have been well beyond obvious that if your ignition switch is prone to shutting itself off while the car is being driven, there is a freaking defect that needs to be fixed - and not to issue farcical instructions to drivers not to put too many keys on their key chain.
Those responsible for avoiding the recall should be put in the stocks for a few hours every day for a month, to be subjected to the jeers and rotten vegetables of the citizenry (the public humiliation would exceed the value of criminal prosecutions, which are very unlikely to succeed anyway).
A few years ago we had a Ford Escape hybrid which developed an unnerving habit of lurching forward as the vehicle braked to a stop. It seemed like only a few inches or so, but it was highly unsettling to be almost stopped and then lurch like that (who knew when the braking might suddenly fail altogether?). At the first dealership we took it to for repairs, they told us that was part of natural operation (and produced a service letter from Ford explaining such - hmm, think Ford knew damn well there was a problem?). We took it to another dealer, whose service department finally investigated and found a bad part, which it replaced - no more problem.
Auto companies, domestic and foreign, show way too much willingness to cheap out rather than admit defective manufacturing. Now GM is paying the price - though not as big a price as those people who got killed.
Hey, I own one of the defective vehicles. GM has not shipped the replacement parts to the dealerships yet, so I can’t get the warrenty work done. I would have to pay for it if I want it fixed now. At least I know what to do if my car goes dead…
GM installed an anti-sway bar on the Corvair long before the book came out. The issue with the early corvairs (pretty much 1963 or older) was that if you over-inflated the tires and drove like an idiot you could get them to roll because of the design of the rear axles. People didn’t trust what GM, the dealership, the owners manual, and the sticker in the glove box told them about tire inflation, so there were problems. most of the complaints Nader had about the car were either exaggerated or outright fiction. It’s a horrible book.
Exactly what I came here to post!
Now I need to go watch *Fight Club *again!
Huh. I guess General Motors determined that the cost of pursuing a defamation action was estimated to exceed that of eating any losses in reputation/public goodwill/future automobile sales. :rolleyes:
kind of a no-win situation the big bad auto giant trying to bully the courageous consumer advocate…bad PR either way, and probably more people would read the book with a lawsuit.
The DOT pretty much cleared the Corvair, but it was a couple of years after it was out of production: