GM Approved a Fix for Its Fatal Ignition Switch in 2006. It Gave the New Part the Same Number as the Old One.

General Motors engineers knew by 2001 that an ignition switch used in cars including the Chevrolet Cobalt and Saturn Ion could rotate out of the "run" position from the weight of a keychain or a bump in the road, cutting engine power and disabling the airbags. GM did not notify federal regulators of a recall until February 7, 2014.

In between, GM's own supplier flagged the switch as failing the company's torque specification before it ever reached production, a test engineer documented the exact failure mode on a pre-production Cobalt, and in 2006 an engineer approved a redesigned part that fixed the problem — without giving it a new part number. The delay has since been linked to at least 124 deaths and 275 injuries, cost GM $900 million in a criminal settlement, and briefly turned the company's own 2009 bankruptcy into a shield against the victims of a defect it had not yet disclosed.

What GM Knew, and When

• 2001: GM engineers and supplier Delphi identify that the ignition switch's torque — the force needed to turn the key — falls below GM's own specification, making it prone to slipping out of "run" on its own, according to internal documents later reviewed by Reuters and disclosed in litigation.
• 2004: A GM engineer testing a pre-production Chevrolet Cobalt documents that a driver's knee can bump the key and shut off the ignition. GM considers design fixes and rejects them as too costly and too slow to implement before launch.
• 2005: GM opens an internal investigation into engine stalling in the Saturn Ion and closes it, concluding, per company documents cited in congressional testimony, that there was no acceptable business case for a fix.
• April 2006: GM engineer Ray DeGiorgio signs off on a stronger replacement switch from Delphi. A document later produced in litigation states DeGiorgio agreed "to implement change without changing GM p/n [part number]." DeGiorgio later testified under oath, repeatedly, that he did not recall approving the change — a position contradicted by his own signature on the document.
• 2007–2013: GM's product investigators review the stalling complaints multiple times, including in 2007, 2009, and 2012, without ordering a recall, even as outside crash investigators and plaintiffs' engineers begin linking the stalling to airbag non-deployment in fatal wrecks.
• February 7, 2014: GM notifies NHTSA it will recall 619,122 Chevrolet Cobalts and Pontiac G5s. The recall population grows within weeks to roughly 1.6 million vehicles, and by the end of 2014 to about 2.6 million vehicles worldwide.

The Switch That Kept Its Name

Ignition switches, like most auto parts, are tracked by part number, and a part number change is the standard way an automaker — and anyone downstream of it, including regulators, dealers, and crash investigators — knows a component has been altered. When GM's redesigned switch went into production in 2006, it replaced the defective part in new cars on the assembly line and, over time, in some cars serviced under warranty. Both versions carried the same part number.

The practical effect, as GM's own outside investigators and plaintiffs' lawyers later reconstructed it, was that no one — not NHTSA, not the plaintiffs' attorneys building product-liability cases, not GM's own engineers cross-referencing complaints against vehicle identification numbers — could tell from the part number alone which cars had gotten the old, defective switch and which had gotten the fix. That ambiguity persisted for roughly eight years, spanning multiple wrongful-death lawsuits GM settled or won without disclosing that a redesigned switch existed.

Whether the decision not to reissue the part number was intended to obscure the defect's history, as plaintiffs' attorneys argued, or was simply consistent with GM's informal engineering practices, as GM maintained, is disputed. What is not disputed, per the document produced in litigation, is that DeGiorgio approved the change and that no new part number was ever issued.

"Incompetence and Neglect"

After a wrongful-death lawsuit forced the part-number document into the open in early 2014, GM's newly installed CEO, Mary Barra, commissioned an internal investigation led by former federal prosecutor Anton Valukas. His 315-page report, delivered to Barra and released publicly on June 5, 2014, concluded that GM's decade-long failure to fix the switch stemmed from what Valukas called a "pattern of incompetence and neglect," not a coordinated cover-up.

The report documented a corporate culture in which committees reviewed the stalling problem repeatedly across nearly a decade without anyone taking ownership of a fix. Barra told Valukas's investigators the phenomenon had an in-house name, the "GM nod" — everyone in a meeting nods in agreement on a course of action, then leaves the room and does nothing. Employees reportedly also had a name for a companion gesture, the "GM salute," a crossed-arm point toward someone else in the room, indicating the problem was theirs to solve.

GM fired 15 employees, including engineers and senior executives, and disciplined five others as a result of the Valukas report's findings. None was DeGiorgio, who left GM's employ during the subsequent litigation.

Paying for It

The financial reckoning arrived in stages. In May 2014, NHTSA fined GM $35 million — at the time the maximum civil penalty available under federal law — for failing to report the defect within the legally required five-day window.

On September 17, 2015, GM entered into a deferred prosecution agreement with the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York, forfeiting $900 million and admitting to a criminal charge of wire fraud and a scheme to conceal a deadly safety defect from NHTSA. Under the agreement, GM avoided a criminal conviction: prosecutors agreed to drop the charges after three years if the company cooperated with an independent monitor. No individual GM employee was criminally charged.

Separately, GM set up a victim compensation fund administered by attorney Kenneth Feinberg, who had previously run compensation programs for the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund and the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill. The fund operated outside the litigation system, evaluating claims against a defined set of eligibility criteria rather than a jury. It closed in August 2015 having approved 399 of 4,343 claims filed, paying out $594.5 million and reaching a final count of 124 deaths and 275 injuries attributed to the defect — nearly ten times the 13 deaths GM had publicly acknowledged when the recall began in February 2014.

The Bankruptcy That Almost Made It Moot

GM's exposure to ignition-switch lawsuits collided with an unrelated piece of corporate history: its 2009 Chapter 11 bankruptcy, engineered with federal assistance during the financial crisis. Under the terms of that reorganization, the newly formed "New GM" acquired the old company's assets "free and clear" of most liabilities belonging to "Old GM," including product-liability claims tied to vehicles built before the sale.

GM initially argued in bankruptcy court that the 2009 order shielded New GM from ignition-switch lawsuits over cars sold before the bankruptcy — cars that, per the Valukas report's own timeline, GM's engineers already knew contained the defective switch. In July 2016, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled that the shield did not apply to claims from plaintiffs who had no way to know about the defect and object during the 2009 proceedings, because GM had not disclosed it. GM appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which declined to hear the case in April 2017, leaving the Second Circuit's ruling — and GM's exposure to the pre-bankruptcy claims — in place.

By the time GM told federal regulators in February 2014, the fix wasn't new. It had been sitting in GM's own supply chain since April 2006, installed under the same part number as the switch it replaced, in cars GM kept selling and insuring against lawsuits for eight more years — because the paperwork gave no one a way to tell which cars had gotten it.

Filed from public reporting:

• NPR — Timeline: A History Of GM's Ignition Switch Defect
• CBC News — GM recalls 780,000 cars in North America
• NBC News — Document Shows GM Engineer Approved Ignition Switch Change
• NBC News — Document: GM Engineer OK'd No New Part Number in Ignition Switch Fix
• Forbes — "The GM Nod" And Other Cultural Flaws Exposed By The Ignition Defect Report
• CBS News — GM Chief Says No Cover-Up In Delayed Recall
• The Detroit News — U.S. Details $900M GM Ignition Settlement
• U.S. DOT Office of Inspector General — General Motors Agrees to Deferred Prosecution Agreement and a $900 Million Forfeiture
• The Detroit News — GM Ignition Fund Completes Review With 124 Deaths
• CBC News — GM's Final Ignition Switch Tally Is 124 Dead, 275 Hurt
• Insurance Journal — Court Removes GM Bankruptcy Shield on Ignition Switch Claims
• Insurance Journal — Supreme Court Rejects GM Use of Bankruptcy to Block Ignition Lawsuits