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GM Owner Warned Feds About Deadly Defect — And Was Ignored For 9 Years

Relatives of people who died in GM vehicles linked to faulty ignitions gather on Capitol Hill. Photo: AP

The agency charged with spotting deadly defects in vehicles has spent the past decade ignoring consumer complaints, misunderstanding many that it chose to highlight, and burying other problems in a bureaucratic blizzard that leaves no one responsible but everyone in danger, according to a new report.

The report from the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Inspector General’s office, released today in the wake of the General Motors’ ignition problems last year, found that all too often, NHTSA took a “hear no, see no, speak no evil” approach to potential defects.

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GM’s failures to understand how millions of its own vehicles worked — and that turning the key off while a vehicle was in motion meant the air bags wouldn’t deploy — has now led to 474 reports of deaths linked to the problem and 3,868 injury claims. (GM has only “accepted” 117 death reports and 237 injury claims as ones it will pay to avoid lawsuits.) But the IG report shows that NHTSA missed several chances to spot the defect, and to this day can’t explain why it didn’t launch a recall probe because it didn’t keep records of such meetings.

NHTSA had complaints about GM vehicles with sloppy ignitions months after they hit the road. As early as June 2005, NHTSA had the problem spelled out in a letter sent from the owner of a brand-new Chevy Cobalt. She had taken her car to a dealer after a GM technical service bulletin about the issue, and a repair tech had been able to shut the car off repeatedly by simply hitting the key with his knee:

This is a safety/recall issue if there ever was one. Forget the bulletin. I have found the cause of the problem. Not suggested causes as listed in bulletin. The problem is the ignition turn switch is poorly installed. Even with the slightest touch, the car will shut off while in motion. I don’t have to list to you the safety problems that may happen, besides an accident or death…

Apparently she did, because NHTSA itself didn’t know.

NHTSA vacuums up two types of data in its search for problems; legally required reports from manufacturers, and consumer complaints. The IG says the agency regularly bumbled both; it never told automakers how to format their reports of lawsuits, consumer complaints and overseas recalls to highlight potential problems, and never punished those who filed late or not at all.

And as for consumer complaints? Imagine a doctor’s office where the receptionist looks at you for half a second and decides if you seem sick enough to see a nurse, and you have the gist of the NHTSA complaint system. Overworked screeners (they have to process an average of 330 complaints a day per worker) barely glance at most; those that do get flagged have to clear several internal hurdles all slanted against opening a probe. The Office of Defects Investigation works entirely case-by-case, with no set standards for what problem to pursue and inadequate statistical guidelines — and yet when it decided against investigating a defect, it treats those decisions as near-sacrosanct, so that screeners are discouraged from raising new evidence.

The result? In the GM case, NHTSA decided against probing the air-bag and ignition problems in 2007, and overlooked its own tests of crashed vehicles — despite more than 9,000 complaints related to the problem.

NHTSA’s new administrator, Mark Rosekind, has vowed to abide by the IG report’s decisions, and the Obama administration has asked Congress to more than triple the budget for the defect office. But the problems uncovered by the GM debacle go far beyond a bureaucracy; they’re a defect in the design of the agency itself. It’s hard to find safety problems that endanger lives if you don’t want to look, or listen, for them.