GM Risked Lives to Save 25 Cents Per Car

Adds up to a lot that can go to the CEO.

http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Articles/2014/04/17/GM-Risked-Lives-Save-25-Cents-Car

Eric PianinThe Fiscal Times
April 17, 2014

Until now, one of the most perplexing questions in the General Motors scandal is why the storied manufacturer waited more than a decade to recall 1.6 million compact cars with faulty ignition switches that contributed to more than a dozen deaths across the country.

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Yet, on Wednesday, two prominent highway safety advocates charged that GM in 2001 intentionally chose an inferior design for an ignition switch that it installed in Chevrolet Cobalts, Saturn Ions and other compact cars that the company now concedes contributed to at least 31 crashes and 13 fatalities – many of them involving young people.

The failure of airbags to deploy in many of those accidents has been linked to a serious defect in the ignition switch.

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The question of whether to address the faulty ignition switch came up again in 2005, the same year that a 16-year-old girl named Amber Marie Rose was killed in a crash in Maryland while driving a 2005 Cobalt when her air bag failed to deploy. GM decided not to change the faulty ignition switch because by then it would have added about a dollar to the cost of each car, according to an internal GM document provided to congressional investigators.

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“It was cost over safety,” Ditlow said in an interview yesterday. “GM made a decision in 2001 to pick the cheaper part over the safer part at a cost savings of no more than 25 cents and that decision then cost the consumers’ untold numbers of lives over the years. Basically GM was saying that consumers’ lives weren’t worth 25 cents.”

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