General Motors approved ignition switches for cars that have been linked to 13 deaths, even though the parts did not appear to meet the company’s specifications, Delphi Automotive officials have told US congressional investigators.
In a memo released on Sunday by the House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee, documents provided by GM and a federal regulator provided “unsettling” information, according to Republican Representative Tim Murphy, who leads a subcommittee of the panel, Reuters reported.
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The news agency said the memo was released ahead of Tuesday’s testimony from GM chief executive Mary Barra who will appear at the committee’s first public hearing on the recalls. She is likely to be asked why it took GM so long to identify and address the ignition switch problem.
The information from Delphi officials was detailed in the memo, which is mainly a chronology of actions taken by GM and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration since the late 1990s and up to Friday (28 Marhc, 2014), when GM expanded its global recall of cars with defective ignition switches to 2.6m.
According to Reuters, Delphi told US congressional investigators last week that GM approved the original part in 2002 despite the fact it did not meet GM specifications.
Congressional investigators also want to know what led NHTSA, as long ago as 2007 and 2010, to determine that there was not a safety defect trend with airbags that were failing to deploy in Chevrolet Cobalts.
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By GlobalDataThe Energy and Commerce Committee reportedly said GM had submitted more than 200,000 documents on the ignition switches. The panel said the NHTSA submitted about 6,000 documents.
According to one entry of the chronology in the memo, officials of Delphi, which supplied the ignition switches for the recalled GM cars, told committee investigators that GM had approved the part, even though sample testing of the ignition switch torque was below the original specifications set by the automaker.
A committe aide told Reuters there were 60 specifications for the switch and it was not clear what the significance was of one specification being below standard. That is one of the questions the committee intends to ask in hearings.
GM knew as early as 2001 that it was facing problems with its ignition switch but no vehicle recalls were ordered until earlier this year.
Reuters said a February 2005 entry in the congressional committee’s chronology illustrates that engineers were grappling with what to do about the defective ignition switches.
“Engineers considered increasing or changing the ignition switch ‘torque effort,’ but were advised by the ignition switch engineer that it is ‘close to impossible to modify the present ignition switch’ as the switch is ‘very fragile and doing any further changes will lead to mechanical and/or electrical problems.'”
The committee’s memo concludes with a series of questions, which likely will dominate Tuesday’s hearing with Barra, the report said.
It was also not clear yet which GM engineer approved a revision to the ignition switch in 2006, and why the change did not lead to an earlier recall of older model cars to fix the problem, Reuters noted.
