How the growing GM recall is being covered

General Motors Co. announced yet another recall, adding to the totals this year as new Chief Executive Mary Barra works to stem the bad press from the company’s handling of problems. The move comes before Barra testifies in front of Congress this week, giving lawmakers even more ammunition in questioning her.

Jeff Bennett had this story in the Wall Street Journal:

General Motors Co. recalled another 1.6 million vehicles Friday, expanding an earlier ignition-switch recall and disclosing other problems with newer cars and recently launched pickup trucks and sport utilities.

GM has now recalled about 4.8 million vehicles world-wide since early February, when it announced the first recall of 2005-2007 Chevrolet Cobalts and several related small cars to fix an ignition-switch defect linked to 13 deaths.

GM’s latest recalls came just days before the auto maker’s chief executive, Mary Barra, is set to be grilled by lawmakers over the company’s handling of safety defects. House and Senate subcommittees have hearings scheduled Tuesday and Wednesday for their investigations into why GM waited nearly a decade after its engineers discovered the ignition-switch defect to order repairs for vehicles on the road. Lawmakers say they also want to know why the federal agency that regulates auto safety didn’t act more quickly on the problem.

The New York Times story by Christopher Jensen pointed out that the number of vehicles being recalled in such a short period is derailing the good will that marked the beginning of the year for GM:

Having so many recalls, particularly in such a short period of time, is a problem for General Motors, which is still trying rebuild its reputation and is more vulnerable than an automaker like Toyota, said Kevin Lane Keller, a professor of marketing at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business.

“One of the advantages of having a strong brand is that it helps you weather a crisis more easily,” he said.

G.M. has recalled about 2.5 million of its small cars, including 2.2 million in the United States. The automaker has acknowledged that it knew about the defective ignition switches for more than a decade but did not recall the vehicles. That has prompted governmental investigations, including a congressional inquiry that will start on Tuesday with Ms. Barra scheduled to testify.

On Friday, the automaker also said it was aware of a 13th death related to the faulty ignition switches. It said the crash involved a 2007 Cobalt and occurred in Quebec, Canada.

G.M. recalled about 758,000 vehicles in the United States in 2013, ninth among automakers, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Toyota was first, with about 5.3 million vehicles, followed by Chrysler with 4.7 million and Honda with almost 2.8 million.

Writing for Automotive News, Mike Colias and Nick Bunkley reported earlier this week that some of GM’s problems were caused by not giving a new part number to a redesigned switch, something one of their sources called a “cardinal sin”:

Stung by rising warranty costs, General Motors decided in the mid-1990s to pull design work for ignition and turn-signal switches from suppliers and put its own employees in charge. One of the first projects for the in-house team was the ignition switch for the Saturn Ion and Chevrolet Cobalt.

“We wanted to have control over the design,” Ray DeGiorgio, the lead design engineer for the Ion and Cobalt ignition switch, said in an April 2013 deposition obtained by Automotive News. “So we brought them in-house.”

That part has now been linked to at least 34 crashes and 12 deaths over the past decade. It’s also at the center of a deepening mystery in the wake of GM’s recall of 1.6 million 2003-07 vehicles fitted with the defective ignition switch:

Why did GM authorize a redesign of the part in 2006, eight years before the recall? And why was the change made so discreetly — without a new part number — that employees investigating complaints of Ions and Cobalts stalling didn’t know about it until late last year?

These questions, among many that will be posed by lawmakers and federal safety regulators looking into GM’s handling of the recall, have confounded some former GM engineers, who say the company’s reports to regulators describe a sequence of events that was fundamentally at odds with standard operating procedure.

Not assigning the new part number would have been highly unusual, according to three people who worked as high-level GM engineers at the time. None of the engineers was involved in the handling of the ignition switch; all asked that their names not be used because of the sensitivity of the matter.

“Changing the fit, form or function of a part without making a part number change is a cardinal sin,” said one of the engineers. “It would have been an extraordinary violation of internal processes.”

That raises some difficult questions for Barra as she gets ready to speak to Congress. Ben Klayman and Richard Cowan had this in a story for Reuters:

GM built a system to deliberately keep senior executives out of the recall process. Instead, two small groups of employees in the vast GM bureaucracy were tasked with making recall decisions, a system GM says was meant to bring objective decisions.

It means that lawmakers may also focus on asking who is responsible for a system that failed so badly that there weren’t red flags raised for those higher up the food chain.

“In this day and age, to think that stuff like this can be kept quiet or forgotten is ridiculous,” independent auto analyst and author Maryann Keller said. “The right question to ask is who knew, when did they know and why was this not brought forth to be dealt with. Did they hope that it was just going to go away?”

The company has recalled 1.6 million cars for a problem first noted in 2001, spurring the congressional enquiries as well as investigations by federal safety regulators, who will also testify, the Justice Department, and GM itself.

GM has said Barra and other top executives did not learn of the defective switches until January 31, explaining that smaller groups of lower-level company executives are responsible for leading a recall. Some executives who might use this argument include former CEO Rick Wagoner and his immediate successor Fritz Henderson, who have not discussed the matter publicly.

The more people dig into the internal processes behind the recalls, the worse it seems. Not alerting top executives makes it harder to gain traction for spending money to fix problems. It also shows a lack of oversight, which is alarming, particularly when you think about how many of these vehicles are produced. The questions continue to mount and how Barra handles them will be a true test of her ability.