Regulators Are Faulted in Defects at General Motors
Source: NYTimes
By AARON M. KESSLER
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.
The House report was obtained by The New York Times on the eve of a hearing Tuesday by a Senate panel that will examine the operations of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and question its administrator, David J. Friedman.
The report 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.
Making 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 agencys 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.
FULL story at link.
Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/16/business/regulators-are-faulted-in-defects-at-general-motors.html?action=click&contentCollection=Business%20Day®ion=Footer&module=MoreInSection&pgtype=article
groundloop
(11,519 posts)This GOPer reasoning is so totally fucked up I just can't believe it. Every single chance they get GOPers attack and cut safety regulations, claiming that industry can police itself. Yet when industry doesn't adequately police itself they point to the fact that regulators didn't do a good enough job. DUHHHHHHH !!!!!!!
I'll add that this would be a good opportunity for those of us with GOPer Representatives to write them (citing this report) and demand that they increase the budget for safety regulators.