General Motors CEO Mary Barra and National Highway Traffic Safety Administration Acting Administrator David Friedman testified before the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations on Tuesday regarding recent automobile recalls.
The subcommittee’s hearing is part of an ongoing bipartisan investigation into GM’s and NHTSA’s handling of consumer complaints about stalling, airbag non-deployment and ignition switch issues that led to recalls.
House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.) said the investigation would continue until the committee is able to ensure the nation’s highways are safe.
“With a two-ton piece of high-velocity machinery, there is zero margin for error; product safety is a life or death issue,” Upton said. “We will follow the facts where they lead us. And we will work until we have those answers and can assure the public that they are safe.”
Upton said documents indicate that GM and NHTSA received complaints and data about issues with an alleged faulty ignition switch over the last 10 years.
“NHTSA engineers did crash investigations as early as ’05 and twice examined whether complaints with airbags constituted a trend,” Upton said. “GM submitted early warning reports to NHTSA, including data about crashes in the recalled cars. With all this information available, why did it take so long to issue the recall? In this case, just as it was with the Ford-Firestone affair, it was news reports that brought the problem to the nation’s attention.”
Upton held oversight hearings on Ford’s and Firestone’s handling of recalls involving faulty tires that allegedly contributed to crashes that killed 100 people in 2000. Following the investigation, Upton sponsored the Transportation Recall Enhancement, Accountability and Documentation Act to improve automobile safety and enhance communication between manufacturers and the federal government.
“The TREAD Act has now been law since November 2000, yet here we are, investigating another safety failure,” Upton said. “It’s déjà vu all over again. One month ago, GM issued a recall for an ignition switch defect in six vehicles, totaling 1.6 million cars. And last Friday, they recalled another 900,000 vehicles. GM acknowledges that a dozen people have died in automobile crashes associated with that defect. Two were teenagers from my own community.”
Members of the subcommittee questioned Barra about what GM knew about the safety issues, when they knew it and why no immediate action was taken. Barra, who was not CEO of the company at the time, could not answer why action was not taken sooner.
Documents show that NHTSA considered investigating complaints about airbags not deploying in 2007 but decided it was not a trend and didn’t pursue further action.