Regulators admit to failures in oversight of ignition switches
THE WASHINGTON POST
WASHINGTON — In a scathing self-examination, federal regulators acknowledged Friday that for years, they failed to adequately address a 57-cent defect in an ignition switch that killed 109 people and injured more than 200 others.
The ignition switch problem, which could prevent air bags from deploying, endured for a dozen years before General Motors recalled 2.6 million cars last year.
National Highway Traffic Safety Administration administrator Mark Rosekind, joined in a conference call by U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx, said the agency he took over six months ago deserved much of the blame for the deadly problem.
“If there is a single explanation for why GM’s ignition defect went undetected for too long, it is that this agency believed that it understood how GM’s ignition and air bag systems worked and we believed information from GM confirmed our beliefs,” Rosekind said.
Rosekind issued two reports Friday, one examining the GM debacle and the other using it to plot a path forward for his agency. Underlying both is the realization that the introduction of the computer chip into the automotive industry 30 years ago has radically changed the landscape.
That contributed partly to a record recall of more than 60 million vehicles in the U.S. last year, a record which seems likely to be broken this year after the recent recall of almost 35 million cars for one defect alone — air bags that can spray drivers with deadly shards of metal.
GM began installing the ignition switch in some models 12 years ago, apparently unaware that if it were inadvertently jarred out of the “run” position, it would disable the air bag system.
As the automaker became aware of the problem, one of the reports says, it failed to take action, and “key facts were withheld by, or unrecognized within, GM.” The report says GM “withheld critical information about engineering changes” that would have helped the administration investigators identify the defect.
But the brunt of the critique falls on the administration’s shoulders. The safety agency did not understand air bag technology, accepted what GM told it without demanding sufficient accountability, didn’t dig into the problem deeply enough and failed to follow up on what it found, the report says.