THE GM IGNITION SWITCH

THE CLAIM

That General Motors knew for more than a decade that an ignition switch defect was disabling airbags in crashes, concealed it, and that the concealment was made possible by an engineer changing the part without changing its part number.

THE THEORY, AS ITS PROPONENTS TELL IT

The mechanism of concealment in this file is unusually specific and almost banal, which is what makes it instructive.

The switch could be knocked from run to accessory by a knee or the weight of a keyring. When that happened the engine cut out, power steering and brakes lost assistance, and critically the airbag system disarmed, because airbags do not deploy when the ignition is off. Crashes followed in which airbags did not fire.

In 2006 a GM engineer approved a redesign of the switch to increase the torque required. He did not change the part number. That single decision meant that later switches and earlier ones appeared identical in the records, which broke the ability of investigators inside and outside the company to see that anything had changed.

Internal documents also showed the company's own language rules, including a list of words employees were told not to use in writing about safety issues, among them defect, dangerous and safety-related.

WHAT IS KNOWN

The defect was identified in pre-production testing in 2001 and generated consumer complaints from 2003 onward.

The Valukas report, an internal investigation commissioned by GM and published in 2014, documented the failure in detail including the part number decision, and was unusually candid for a company-commissioned review.

GM entered a deferred prosecution agreement in 2015, paying $900 million and admitting it had concealed the defect from regulators. No individual was criminally charged.

A compensation fund administered by Kenneth Feinberg approved 124 death claims and hundreds of injury claims.

EVIDENCE FOR

• The unchanged part number, documented in the Valukas report, which is the concealment mechanism.
• Internal word-avoidance guidance for safety discussions.
• GM's own admission in the deferred prosecution agreement that it concealed the defect.
• 124 deaths accepted and compensated by the company's own fund.

EVIDENCE AGAINST (THE DELIBERATE CONSPIRACY READING)

• The Valukas report found institutional failure, siloed information and a culture of avoiding responsibility rather than a coordinated decision to conceal.
• The engineer who changed the part without renumbering it denied doing so under oath before documents established it, which reads more like individual self-protection than corporate strategy.
• No individual was charged, and prosecutors evidently did not believe they could prove knowing criminal conduct by a named person.

ASSESSMENT

Confirmed as concealment, by the company's own admission, and included because the mechanism is so ordinary. There was no meeting and no memo ordering a cover-up. There was a part number that did not change, a vocabulary list, and an organisation arranged so that nobody held all the pieces. That is how most of the corporate files in this cabinet actually work, and it is why OSA-126, where the deception was explicit code, is the exception rather than the rule.

WHAT WOULD CHANGE THE GRADE

• CONFIRMED by GM's own admission in a 2015 deferred prosecution agreement that it concealed the defect from regulators, with $900 million paid.
• The concealment mechanism is documented in the company's own Valukas report and is almost banal: an engineer redesigned the switch in 2006 and did not change the part number, so earlier and later parts looked identical in the records.
• Not established: a coordinated decision to conceal. The Valukas report found siloed information and avoidance of responsibility, and no individual was ever criminally charged.
• 124 death claims were approved by the company's own compensation fund.

FURTHER READING

• GM ignition switch recalls · Wikipedia
• Anton Valukas, Report to Board of Directors of General Motors Company (2014)
• US Department of Justice, deferred prosecution agreement with GM (2015)