WASHINGTON — Federal regulators had ample information to identify the dangerous ignition defect in General Motors’ Chevrolet Cobalt and other cars as early as 2007, a House committee investigating the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has found.þþThe House report, obtained by The New York Times late Monday, details how investigators from the agency repeatedly discounted information that did not match their assumptions — at one point a staff member referred to their efforts as “beating a dead horse.” As a result, many of G.M.’s small cars, which had defective ignition switches that were prone to turn off and disable air bags, continued to crash, sometimes with fatal results.þþHouse Report on N.H.T.S.A.SEPT. 16, 2014 þþþKenneth R. Feinberg did not disclose the identities of the victims, the details of their claims or amount of monetary payment.þþGeneral Motors Defect Now Faulted in 19 DeathsSEPT. 15, 2014 þþþGeneral Motors’ Fuel Pump Recall Reveals Patchwork Approach to Auto SafetySEPT. 15, 2014 þþþDavid Friedman, N.H.T.S.A.’s acting head, indicated in a Senate hearing that he did not realize the agency could issue subpoenas.þþRegulator Slow to Respond to Deadly Vehicle DefectsSEPT. 14, 2014 þþ þMaking matters worse, some agency officials did not seem to understand the air bag technology at the heart of the case: At one point, the chief of the agency’s Defects Assessment Division wrote that he did not believe G.M.’s air bags were supposed to deploy when a driver was not wearing a seatbelt.þþþThe initial report by the House Energy and Commerce Committee is based on 15,000 pages of agency documents and dozens of interviews with its staff. It comes as a separate Senate committee is set to hold a hearing on Tuesday afternoon in which the agency’s acting administrator, David J. Friedman, will testify.þþ“It is tragic that the evidence was staring N.H.T.S.A. in the face and the agency didn’t identify the warnings,” said Representative Fred Upton, Republican of Michigan, the chairman of the committee. “N.H.T.S.A. exists not just to process what the company finds, but to dig deeper. They failed.”þþN.H.T.S.A. officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment late Monday.þþThe agency “had critical information in its possession which pointed to this defect,” the report states. “Whether the information was not understood, overlooked or lost in organizational stove-pipes, the agency’s failure to follow up on this information contributed to N.H.T.S.A.’s inability to identify this defect.”þþFor example, when lower-level staff members recommended an investigation into the Cobalt in 2007, an agency panel chose not to proceed. Even after a top-level official who had missed the meeting sent an email flagging the air bags’ failure to deploy in the Cobalt and Saturn Ion as something “we want to jump on and learn as much as we can quickly,” no re-examination or additional analysis was done.þþEven public scrutiny of the agency’s treatment of air bags did not seem to change minds within the safety agency about the Cobalt’s potential danger.þþIn late 2007, when The Kansas City Star published a series critical of the agency’s handling of air bag cases, the agency objected to the articles publicly but internally formed a special task force to examine frontal crashes. Charged with re-evaluating previous cases of air bag problems — a chance to finally catch the Cobalt problem, the House report recounts — one investigator instead wrote to superiors that it would be a waste of time.þþ“I think we are beating a dead horse,” the investigator wrote.þþWhat followed were even more missed opportunities by the agency, the House committee concluded. After 2007, the agency’s staff looking at consumer complaints “did not take any extra steps to monitor Cobalt and Ion claims in particular.”þþIn March 2008, the agency received a final version of what is known as a special crash investigation report for a Cobalt accident in Wisconsin from 2006. It stated that the ignition had been in “accessory” mode and that it could have been knocked by the driver’s leg or knee. It recommended that additional analysis was needed “to determine if in fact the air bag is capable of deploying when the ignition is switched from the ‘on’ position to the ‘accessory’ position.”þþNo such follow-up was done. The House report states an agency investigator who reviewed the Cobalt problems in 2007 and 2008 said he never saw that document until this year, two weeks after G.M. announced its first recall.þ
Source: NY Times
