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| General Motors CEO Mary Barra pauses as she testifies on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, April 1, 2014, before the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on Oversight and Investigation. The committee is looking for answers from Barra about safety defects and mishandled recall of 2.6 million small cars with a faulty ignition switch that's been linked to 13 deaths and dozen of crashes. |
WASHINGTON
(AP) -- The fix for a faulty ignition switch linked to 13 traffic deaths
would have cost just 57 cents, members of Congress said Tuesday as they
demanded answers from General Motors' new CEO on why the automaker took
10 years to recall cars with the defect.
At a
hearing on Capitol Hill before a House subcommittee, GM's Mary Barra
acknowledged under often testy questioning that the company took too
long to act. She promised changes at GM that would prevent such a lapse
from happening again.
"If there's a safety
issue, we're going to make the right change and accept that," said
Barra, who became CEO in January and almost immediately found herself
thrust into one of the biggest product safety crises Detroit has ever
seen.
But as relatives of the crash victims
looked on intently, she admitted that she didn't know why it took years
for the dangerous defect to be announced. And she deflected many
questions about what went wrong, saying an internal investigation is
under way.
Since February, GM has recalled 2.6
million cars - mostly Chevrolet Cobalts and Saturn Ions - over the
faulty switch, which can cause the engine to cut off in traffic,
disabling the power steering, power brakes and air bags and making it
difficult to control the vehicle. The automaker said new switches should
be available starting April 7.
Barra was
firm, calm and polite throughout the proceedings. But she struggled at
times to answer lawmakers' pointed questions, particularly about why GM
used the switch when it knew the part didn't meet its own
specifications.
When she tried to draw a
distinction between parts that didn't meet specifications and those that
were defective and dangerous, Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, shot back:
"What you just answered is gobbledygook."
She
also announced that GM has hired Kenneth Feinberg - who handled the fund
for the victims of 9/11, the Boston Marathon bombing and the BP oil
spill - to explore ways to compensate victims of accidents in the GM
cars. Barra stopped short of saying GM would establish such a fund.
Some
of the questioners appeared surprised that Barra hadn't reviewed the
tens of thousands of pages of documents that GM submitted to the
committee, and that she was unaware of some decision-making processes at
the company.
Rep. Diana DeGette, D-Colo.,
held up a switch for one of the cars and said a small spring inside it
failed to
provide enough force, causing engines to turn off when they
went over a bump.
DeGette showed how easy it was for a light set of car keys to move the ignition out of the "run" position.
GM
has said that in 2005, company engineers proposed solutions to the
switch problem, but the automaker concluded that none represented "an
acceptable business case."
"Documents provided by GM show that this unacceptable cost increase was only 57 cents," DeGette said.
The
57 cents is just the cost of the replacement switch. The figure does
not include the labor costs involved in installing the new part.
Barra
testified that the fix to the switch, if undertaken in 2007, would have
cost GM about $100 million, compared with "substantially" more now.
Under
questioning, she said the automaker's decision not to make the fix
because of cost considerations was "disturbing" and unacceptable, and
she assured members of Congress that that kind of thinking represents
the old General Motors, and "that is not how GM does business" today.
"I
think we in the past had more of a cost culture," Barra said, adding
that it is moving toward a more customer-focused culture.
Rep.
Tim Murphy, R-Pa., chairman of the House Energy and Commerce
Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, read from an e-mail
exchange between GM employees and those at Delphi, which made the
switch. One said that the Cobalt is "blowing up in their face in regards
to the car turning off."
Murphy asked why, if the problem was so big, GM didn't replace all of them in cars already on the road.
"Clearly there were a lot of things happening" at that time, Barra said.
In
his prepared remarks, David Friedman, head of the National Highway
Traffic Safety Administration, pointed the finger at GM, saying the
automaker had information last decade that could have led to a recall,
but shared it only last month.
Rep. Henry
Waxman, D-Calif., said that House Energy and Commerce Committee staff
members found 133 warranty claims filed with GM over 10 years detailing
customer complaints of sudden engine stalling when they drove over a
bump or brushed keys with their knees.
The claims were filed between June 2003 and June 2012.
Waxman
said that because GM didn't undertake a simple fix when it learned of
the problem, "at least a dozen people have died in defective GM
vehicles."
Some current GM car owners and
relatives of those who died in crashes were also in Washington seeking
answers. The group attended the hearing after holding a news conference
demanding action against GM and stiffer legislation.
Owners
of the recalled cars can ask dealers for a loaner vehicle while waiting
for the replacement part. Barra said GM has provided more than 13,000
loaners.
