GM Failed to Announce Serious Quality Defects for Over a Decade! - How will Their Fine Compare to the 1.2 Billion Fine for Toyota?

General Motors (GM) not only delayed announcing a well known and serious quality defect of their vehicles for over a decade, but now had to recall over 3,000,000 vehicles, related to at least 31 crashes and 13 deaths.

GM is recalling over 3 million vehicles worldwide due to faulty ignition switches. The faulty inanition switched can not only cut off power to the engine but causing the driver to lose power steering, breaks, and air bags.

The unbelievable part is, that GM did not make the serious quality defects public for more that a decade! GM knew about the problems as early as 2001 and failed to initiate any warning nor made any attempts to fix the problem.

Car makers are required to report any safety issue within five days or incur a penalty, based on the Tread Act. Right so, that now GM not only has to answer to the Senate Commerce Committee and the House of Energy Committee, but also to a Criminal Probe initiated by the Justice Department.

Now we will wait and see what consequences for GM may occur, for not announcing well known quality problems years earlier. This is especially of interest after the huge Toyota Gas Pedal
problems in 2009 which turned out to be mostly a floor mat (third party mats!) and sticky gas pedal issue. The investigation under involvement of NASA concluded, that there was nothing wrong with the vehicles electronically, but that the uncontrolled acceleration was caused by driver errors and media hysteria.

However, in 2010 Toyota announced recalls of approximately 5.2 million vehicles the the pedal entrapment/floor mat problem plus an additional 2.3 million vehicles for the accelerator pedal problem. Adding the additional recalls in China and Europe, Toyota recalled around 9 million vehicles. In addition, Toyota was fined with a 1.2 billion settlement over the safety problems.

GM's CEO Mary Barra is scheduled to testify before Congress next week and to explain why GM has failed for over a decade to order a recall, especially since GM has recently acknowledged it knew the switch was defective at least for a decade ago.

No wonder that even Crash Test Dummies resist in getting into any GM....