A faulty GM ignition switch was tied to 124 compensated deaths and a recall of nearly 30 million cars

General Motors approved a torque specification of 10 to 20 newton-centimeters for the ignition switch installed in the Chevrolet Cobalt and Pontiac G5, the resistance needed to keep a driver’s key from rotating out of the run position on its own. The switches that actually shipped tested under 10 newton-centimeters, soft enough that a loaded keychain or a bump from a driver’s knee could turn the key toward accessory mode while the car was moving, cutting power steering, power brakes and the airbags in the same instant. General Motors eventually recalled nearly 30 million vehicles worldwide over that gap between the number it approved and the number that left the factory, and compensated families for 124 deaths tied to the defect.

A Switch Machined Below GM’s Own Blueprint

The part itself was small: a switch buried in the steering column that determines whether the engine, airbags and power assist are drawing current. The supplier’s switch measured below the required threshold from the day it was approved in 2002, and General Motors later changed the internal spring and detent plunger without assigning the part a new number, letting two versions of the same switch circulate in the fleet under identical part numbers and making the defect difficult to trace back to a single production run.

GM’s own engineering standard required a torque of between 10 newton-centimeters and 20 newton-centimeters to hold the key in place, a spec chosen so that ordinary road vibration and a heavy keyring would not be enough to bump it out of run. When the switch slipped to accessory mode anyway, the driver lost power steering and power brakes first, and the same electrical fault also shut off the sensor array that decides whether to fire the airbags in a crash.

Executives Who Knew and a Decade of Silence

Records that surfaced later in litigation showed engineers and lawyers inside General Motors were aware of the switch problem by 2005, nearly a decade before the recall reached dealers in February 2014. Internal discussions weighed a fix estimated at 57 cents per switch against the cost and disruption of retooling, and the company chose not to make the change, according to the internal investigation General Motors later commissioned from attorney Anton Valukas.

The person who did the most to force the record into the open was not a regulator. Lance Cooper, a Marietta, Georgia, attorney representing a driver’s family in a wrongful-death lawsuit, deposed GM engineers and pried loose thousands of internal documents connecting the switch defect to years of customer complaints and warranty claims. Sean Kane, president of the vehicle-safety research firm Safety Research and Strategies, said Cooper had single-handedly set the stage for the recall by building the paper trail regulators had missed.

Washington’s Price for the Cover-Up

The Department of Justice concluded that General Motors had concealed the defect from its own regulator for close to two years after it knew the switch was dangerous. In a September 2015 deferred-prosecution agreement, the company admitted to a scheme to conceal material facts from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and to wire fraud, and it forfeited $900 million to the United States as part of the settlement. Then-U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said General Motors “failed to disclose a deadly safety defect to the public and its regulator,” language the agreement built directly into the criminal charges.

FBI Assistant Director-in-Charge Diego Rodriguez put it more bluntly, saying General Motors “concealed a safety defect from consumers and regulators, which put drivers at risk.” No individual GM executive faced criminal charges in the settlement; the deferred-prosecution agreement applied to the corporation alone, and it was set to be dismissed after three years if the company met the agreement’s terms.

124 Names on a List a Lawsuit Forced Open

Separate from the criminal case, General Motors set up a victim compensation fund run by attorney Kenneth Feinberg, using looser eligibility rules than a lawsuit would require so more families with a plausible claim could be paid without going to court. When the fund finished reviewing claims in mid-2015, it had approved compensation for 124 deaths linked to the switch, along with hundreds of injury claims, and General Motors ultimately paid out roughly $600 million to survivors and victims’ families.

Barra, who had become chief executive only weeks before the recall began, testified before Congress in April 2014 and told lawmakers General Motors was conducting a full and complete investigation into why the fix had taken so long. That investigation, and the criminal case that followed it, closed with corporate forfeitures and a compensation fund but no ignition-switch engineer or executive facing charges for a defect the company’s own records show it had identified nearly a decade before the first recall notice went out.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

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