Hearing of the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee - The GM Ignition Switch Recall: Why Did It Take So Long?
Hearing
Mr. Chairman, I have a sad sense of déjà vu as I sit here today.
I was part of this Committee when we held our Ford-Firestone hearings in 2000. I led the Committee's hearings into Toyota's problems with unintended acceleration in 2010.
Each time, we heard about how auto manufacturers knew about potential defects and about how federal safety officials at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration missed signals that should have alerted them to defective cars on the road.
We are here today under similar circumstances.
Over the last month, the full dimensions of another auto safety disaster have unfolded. General Motors has recalled over 2.5 million vehicles due to a defective ignition switch, and the company has acknowledged that these cars have caused dozens of crashes and 13 fatalities.
Mr. Chairman, I know the families of some of these victims are in the audience for today's hearing. I want to acknowledge them and thank them for coming today. We owe it to them to find out what happened.
The facts that we already know are hard to believe. GM has known for years about this safety defect and has failed to take appropriate action to fix the problem. The company installed an ignition switch it knew did not meet its own specifications. Numerous internal investigations resulted in nothing but a non-public Technical Service Bulletin that partially fixed the problem for fewer than 500 drivers.
A new analysis I released this morning revealed that over the last decade, GM received over 130 warranty claims from drivers and GM technicians who experienced and identified the defect. Drivers reported that their cars shut off after hitting bumps or potholes at highway speeds when they did something as simple as brushing the ignition switch with their knee. One GM technician even identified the exact part causing the problem -- a spring that would have cost, at most, as much as a few postage stamps.
Because GM didn't implement this simple fix when it learned about the problem, at least a dozen people have died in defective GM vehicles.
What's more, new information the Committee received last week suggests that GM still has failed to fully own up to potential problems. GM finally modified the ignition switch for later model cars. But Delphi, the manufacturer of the ignition switch, told the Committee that the switches installed in model year 2008 to 2011 vehicles still did not meet GM's own specifications. GM finally announced a recall of these vehicles late Friday -- but told the public that it was because of bad parts installed during repairs, not because of defective parts originally installed in the vehicles.
There are legitimate questions we need to ask about whether NHTSA did enough to identify and uncover this problem. In retrospect, it's clear that the agency missed some red flags.
But NHTSA was also laboring under a handicap. There appears to have been a lot of information that GM knew but didn't share with NHTSA.
We need to make sure that NHTSA and the public have access to the same safety information as auto executives.
That's why today I am introducing the Motor Vehicle Safety Act of 2014. This bill is modeled on the legislation that the Committee passed in 2010, but was never enacted into law. It will make more information on defects available to the public. And it will increase NHTSA funding and increase civil penalties for manufacturers when companies like GM fail to comply with the law.
Mr. Chairman, we should learn as much as we can from this investigation. Then we should improve the law to make sure we are not here again after another auto safety tragedy.
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