GM’s settlement vindicates ‘at-fault’ victims

Automaker tries to buy back public trust

GM is set to pay out at least $1-million for each death attributed to the company’s faulty switches. They’ve finally worked out a formula calculating how much each person, now dead as a result of a flawed part they were aware of and decided to hide, is worth. They will factor in potential earnings, spouses and dependents. Of course they have to pay, and of course there is no good way to put a dollar amount on a dead person.

GM has lots of people to make claims. There is the official count of 13, but they know it will go higher. As recall notices ramped up, investigators started a redo on old cases. GM was aware of a problem in 2001; they started recalls in February, 2014. The first attributable death happened in 2005, when a Maryland teen died in her Cobalt when the airbags failed to go off. Reuters News Agency ran an investigation of its own, using crash statistics, and came up with 74 questionable deaths, and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) acknowledges they believe the official numbers will escalate.

“Reuters searched the Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS), a national database of crash information submitted by local law-enforcement agencies, for single-car frontal collisions where no front airbags deployed and the driver or front-seat passenger was killed.” This is admittedly swinging a broad net, but it quite aptly describes the circumstances of the fatal crashes in the official 13. They put the results against cars in the same segment, and found Saturn Ions fatally faltering at nearly six times the rate of the Toyota Corolla, and Cobalts at over four times.

As late as February of this year, GM officially stated, “(All of) these crashes occurred off-road and at high speeds, where the probability of serious or fatal injuries was high, regardless of airbag deployment,” which is sort of mind-boggling, if you think about it. The cars were “off-road” because the brakes and steering failed when the ignition switched itself off, not because drivers were trying to, well, go off-roading. It is this type of insult that has compounded the pain of surviving families.

The wording of the settlement offer package has been stripped of all judgment. Prove the crash involved one of the cars in question (there is a list of 10 vehicles in the document) and that the airbags failed to deploy. You only give up your right to sue if you accept a cheque.

Can you buy back public trust? Money talks, but so does 13 years of silence.

Manuel Balce Ceneta/The Associated Press Rosie Cortinas, centre, listens to details of the GM Ignition Compensation Program. She said her son Amador, 23, died in an accident involving “a defective GM vehicle.”