Members of the Senate were far tougher on General Motors CEO Mary Barra on Wednesday than their House counterparts had been just a day before. In her second day on Capitol Hill testifying about the carmaker’s failure to recall millions of vehicles despite knowing of a defective ignition switch that caused multiple deaths, Barra faced questions about what she personally knew about the problem, and whether the company’s follow-up, once the news became public, was sufficient.
In the previous day’s hearing, Barra repeatedly evaded questions by noting that an investigation was under way, and that the answers it uncovers will be made public.
Related: GM CEO’s Weak Testimony Doesn’t Satisfy Lawmakers
Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO), who chairs the Commerce, Science and Transportation panel’s subcommittee on Consumer Protection, latched on to the fact that last year, a GM employee had been confronted in a deposition with evidence that the company had made an effort to surreptitiously replace the defective switch in new model cars without alerting the public to the existence of a problem.
“What investigation began after that deposition?” McCaskill asked.
“That is part of the investigation--” Barra replied.
“So you don’t know whether or not anything happened?” McCaskill interrupted.
“I don’t have the complete facts to share with you today,” Barra finished.
Related: Did NHTSA Ignore Evidence of Unsafe GM Cars for Years?
“That is incredibly frustrating to me that you wouldn’t have a simple timeline of what happened once you got that knowledge,” McCaskill said. “So it went on for nine months. You had no idea, even though you are in the executive leadership of the company at the time. It was never discussed anywhere in your presence for nine months, even though this had occurred?”
“I became aware of the defect and the recall on January 31st,” Barra said.
Then, McCaskill noted that after GM announced the first recall on February 7, the attorney who deposed GM’s engineer wrote to NHTSA pointing out that there were four other GM car models made with the same ignition switch. GM responded six days later by recalling those cars as well. But the plaintiffs’ attorney filed yet another court motion claiming that recall remained incomplete, because defective switches had been used to repair an unknown number of additional vehicles. Four days later, GM further extended the recall.
Related: NHTSA Chief Will Blame GM for Long-Delayed Recall
“Is this the new GM Ms. Barra?” McCaskill asked. “Is this the new GM that takes a lawyer having to write NHTSA and a court pleading in court for you to finally recall all the cars that had been impacted by this defective switch?”
In her response, Barra said that the series of recall announcements was part of a process at GM, suggesting that it was independent of the complaints to NHTSA and the court filings.
“It’s just worrisome to me that it took three shots after nine months,” McCaskill said.
Barra found little relief when Nevada Sen. Dean Heller, the ranking Republican on the panel, took over the questioning.
Related: After a Dramatic Comeback, GM Crisis Takes the Company Down
Heller began by reminding Barra that GM officials had apparently known about the switch problems as much as a decade ago, and well before the company accepted a massive government bailout that left the U.S. Treasury, temporarily, as the company’s largest shareholder.
“From where I sit, it looks like GM was not forthcoming with the American people who bailed them out,” Heller said. “It looks like there were multiple moments where the company had conflicts of interests, either with initiating a recall at a time when GM was not financially sound or when the government owned 60 percent of the company….We need to know whether you believe the company acted in the best interests of the consumers who bought your cars and the U.S. taxpayers who bailed you out.”
Barra agreed that what happened was unacceptable, but tried to pin blame on the culture of the “old GM,” meaning the company as it was before it went bankrupt in 2009.
“The culture of the company at that time had more of a cost culture focus and I can tell you that we have done several things since the bankruptcy to create a new culture at General Motors to be focused on the customer,” she said.
Related: Lawmakers See Massive Breakdown at NHTSA Over GM Recalls
“Does that mean that in 2006, GM was more concerned with the bottom line than with recalling their vehicles?” Heller asked.
Barra deflected the question, acknowledging that while there may have been unacceptable decisions made in the past, the new company has removed consideration of costs from its decision to proceed with safety recalls.
“Let me ask you again,” said Heller. “If safety was not the highest priority in the past, is it fair to assume that GM only acts in the best interests of GM at all times? Was that true in 2006?”
Calling the question “very broad,” Barra again deflected, repeating that the company has changed its focus to be more committed to safety.
Related: GM Recalls an Additional 971,000 Cars
When it was her turn to question the witness, Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) expressed skepticism about Barra’s claim that she knew nothing about the ignition switch problem prior to becoming CEO in January. She rattled off a number of senior positions that Barra has held in the years since the problem was first discovered, forcing Barra to confirm that she had learned nothing about it while serving in each.
“You’re a really important person to this company,” Boxer said. “Something is very strange that such a top employee would know nothing.”
Boxer then directed a staff member to place a photograph of a wrecked GM car in front of Barra – noting that the parents of the young woman who died in the vehicle were sitting in the audience behind her.
Boxer gave a quick synopsis of the Ford Pinto scandal from the 1970s, in which the company knew of a dangerous problem with the gas tank but elected not to pursue a recall because of the cost.
Related: NHTSA Chief – GM Did Not Share Critical Information
“Ford decided it was cheaper for them to pay off the families of the dead than to fix the problem,” Boxer said. “Did you make that kind of calculation over at GM in this situation?”
“I did not,” Barra said.
“Do you know of anybody who did make it?”
“That is the purpose of the investigation-” Barra began.
“But you don’t know now,” Boxer interrupted. “You haven’t asked, and you don’t know.”
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