USA TODAY International Edition
Federal safety watchdog drops ball in Cobalt case
When a dangerous product is on the market, like the GM Cobalt with a faulty ignition switch now linked to more than a dozen deaths, the manufacturer has primary responsibility to recall it.
But when companies fail, as General Motors did so deplorably with the Cobalt, the public counts on federal watchdogs to do the job. This time, the watchdog — the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration — failed even to bark, a troubling measure of the agency’s effectiveness.
By the end of 2007, NHTSA had enough evidence, in its own databases and from two crash inquiries, to open a broader recall investigation of the Cobalt.
But it whiffed right up until last month, when GM finally recalled 1.6 million Cobalts and similar vehicles:
In August 2005, NHTSA opened a special inquiry into a Cobalt crash that had killed a Maryland teenager the previous month. It found that the airbags had failed to deploy and that the ignition was in the “accessory” position, cutting engine power — the very defect for which the vehicles were just recalled. There was no publicly known result.
Four months later, when GM issued a service bulletin to dealers with a fix for the faulty ignition switch, it told dealers to act only if owners complained. NHTSA did not intervene.
In 2006, NHTSA began a second “special investigation” of a fatal Cobalt crash, this one in Wisconsin, where two teenagers were killed. That report, issued in 2007, found something that should have set off alarms: The airbags had not deployed, and the ignition was in the accessory position. The report also cited GM’s bulletin on the ignition switch. Again, no recall action was taken.
In March 2007, NHTSA met with GM employees and gave them details of the Maryland crash. Finally, GM assigned an engineer to track such crashes. But NHTSA still didn’t open a re- call investigation.
By the end of 2007, GM had reported a total of 10 fatal Cobalt crashes. In seven, airbags were listed as a “component” of the crash. The GM reports, required by law, went to the agency’s “early warning” database, created by Congress in 2000 to spot defect trends after a similar debacle involving rollovers of Ford Explorers with Firestone tires.
NHTSA has repeatedly said that it did not have sufficient data to open a Cobalt recall investigation. On Wednesday, an official told us that in 2007, the agency “looked at airbag non- deployments across peer vehicles, and the Cobalt did not stand out.”
But NHTSA has opened many recall inquiries with far less data, usually before a single fatal crash. Sen. Edward Markey, D- Mass., calls the agency’s failure “a massive information breakdown” and is pushing a measure to require automakers to file more data, including insurance claims and lawsuits growing out of fatal crashes, with the agency. Markey’s plan would also make far more NHTSA data public so advocacy groups and consumers could help spot trends.
When Congress opens hearings next week into the Cobalt case, investigators should train their sights in two directions: GM’s decade- long foot- dragging and NHTSA’s failure to spot it.