U.S. District Judge Nelva Gonzales Ramos said she had not had time to thoroughly read a new brief by the plaintiffs filed only shortly before the hearing. About 40 people listened to more than two hours of arguments and testimony.
A flawed ignition switch in Chevrolet Cobalts, Saturn Ions and other small cars allows the key to turn from the "run" position to the "accessory" position, causing the loss of power steering, power brakes and the airbags.
As of Friday, GM confirmed it has made more than 15,000 rental and loaner cars available to drivers who own the affected vehicles and are afraid to drive them. The recall repair is still on track to start the week of April 7.
GM has admitted to knowing the switches were defective for at least a decade, but didn't start recalling the vehicles until February. The Detroit automaker has linked the faulty ignition switch to 13 deaths and 32 crashes in the United States and Canada. Others, including the families of some victims, say there have been more.
On Wednesday, GM CEO Mary Barra told a Senate subcommittee that owners can continue safely using the cars if precautions are taken, such as just using only the ignition key with nothing attached.
On Friday, holding a steering wheel and ignition for the judge to see, plaintiffs' attorney Robert Hilliard described a defect that could occur at any time and was especially impacting young people because the cars were marketed to "newly-minted drivers."
"There is no safe way to drive this vehicle at all because of the unknown event that has to occur for the defect to show up," Hilliard said.
He pointed to the portion of GM's recall notice that said there was a! risk if "your vehicle experiences rough road conditions or other jarring or impact related events."
Hilliard scrolled through photographs of the victims projected onto a large screen in the courtroom and spoke of youth lost. He called witnesses who testified about accidents or close calls in their vehicles. One was Jesse Hernandez, 23, who survived a crash that killed his twin brother in a red 2007 Saturn Ion in April 2012. He said he had fallen asleep while his brother was driving. Their car hit a guardrail and flipped three times. The airbags did not deploy.
"He ended up dying in my arms moments later," Hernandez testified.
Laura Valle of Corpus Christi, said she did as instructed and removed everything except the key, but still suddenly lost power while driving to Wal-Mart in March.
"The car just died on me," Valle testified.
Hilliard implored the judge to force GM to do more. He would propose a "Do Not Drive" sticker that would be plastered on every vehicle until it was repaired.
But David Balser, a lawyer for GM, called the measure Hilliard was asking the judge to take "unprecedented." He said he knew of no court that had ordered such a move while a recall was underway. "It would cause mass confusion to GM's consumers," he said. "It would create chaos."
Balser also noted that the plaintiffs, Charles and Grace Silvas, had already stopped driving their Chevrolet Cobalt back in February. The Silvas did not testify Friday.
Furthermore, as individuals, Balser said the Silvas had no standing to get an injunction for the general public. He said at least 15 class actions lawsuits had already been filed against GM in relation to this issue.
"They do not need a mandatory injunction telling GM to tell them to park their car because they have already parked their car," Balser said. He said Hilliard only presented anecdotal evidence and no proof that the ignition defect was to blame in the incidents he cited.
GM's filing with the court included data ! from exte! nsive testing of some recalled calls at its proving grounds, showing that the automaker was unable to make the key move out of the run position.
However, Hilliard argued that the order was necessary because others were still driving the cars, making the roads dangerous for everyone.
GM is conducting an internal investigation that should be complete in 45 to 60 days. The Justice Department is pursuing a criminal investigation of how GM handled the recall.
Associated Press Writer Christopher Sherman wrote this report with some staff reporting contributed from USA TODAY.
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Jeff Kowalsky/Bloomberg via Getty Images General Motors' own engineers, along with newspaper auto writers, were talking about the ignition switch defect in several GM (GM) models almost a decade before the carmaker announced plans last month to recall 1.6 million vehicles. On June 19, 2005, the New York Times (NYT) reported that Chevrolet dealers were telling Cobalt owners to shed items from heavy key rings so they wouldn't bump the ignition into the off position. The reporter wrote that his own wife had knocked a Cobalt's steering column with her knee and found the engine "just went dead." GM, in a statement at the time, called that scenario rare. The Cleveland Plain Dealer newspaper scorned GM's response as a "knee-slapper." Meanwhile, as early as 2004, two GM engineers involved in the Cobalt said there had been discussions about how the model's engines could cut out when the keys were bumped. In 2005, a Chevy dealer said a customer brought one of the cars back to the dealership, too frightened to drive it. The almost decade-old discussions of the defects -- those voiced publicly as well as within GM -- are contained within more than 32,000 pages of documents and depositions gathered by Lance Cooper, a Georgia lawyer who argued that a Cobalt engine outage years later, in 2010, resulted in a crash that killed a Georgia pediatric nurse. Cobalt, Deaths Documents from the suit, reviewed by Bloomberg News, are coming to light in the weeks after GM recalled the Cobalt and some other small Chevrolet, Pontiac and Saturn vehicles from the 2003 to 2007 model years, that had been involved in accidents killing at least a dozen people. The documents are fueling curiosity over what GM executives could have known about the defect, and are likely to provide insight into GM's answers as it responds to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's request to answer, by April 3, 107 questions about its executives knowledge of the defective parts. GM quickly provided NHTSA a timeline of what its executives knew about the faulty ignition switches for the Cobalt and Pontiac G5. Wednesday, it provided a supplemental timeline for complaints it investigated on the Saturn Ion and the three other recalled U.S. models. GM's initial NHTSA timeline was consistent with dates in the Georgia lawsuit, including GM's acknowledgment that employees were aware of the situation in 2004. GM settled the suit with Cooper's clients for an undisclosed amount in September 2013. Tough Claim "It appears that the company did know about this problem. The question is why didn't they do something about it," said Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond who studied the recall of Toyotas (TM) tied to sudden acceleration. It will be increasingly difficult for GM to claim its high-level executives were unaware of an issue that appeared in the Times in 2005 and drew a formal media statement, he added. The Justice Department has also opened a probe into whether GM executives violated criminal or civil laws by failing to notify regulators, said people familiar with the action. U.S. House and Senate committees have said they will investigate. GM has said it is cooperating with the probes and has also opened its own internal investigation. GM has said it's sorry about the issue and that it is working to address it quickly. "The chronology shows that the process employed to examine this phenomenon was not as robust as it should have been," GM North America President Alan Batey said in a Feb. 25 statement. The documents GM filed Wednesday indicate the company got an early indication of the ignition-switch problems as it developed the Saturn Ion in 2001. It thought the problem was fixed. Then, in 2003, an engineer investigating a consumer complaint was able to replicate engine stalls while driving. GM ended up using the same switch in the Cobalt, the G5 and three other U.S. models. Redacted Passages The depositions in Cooper's lawsuit included several passages that were redacted as part of what Cooper's firm said was a protective order entered during the GM proceedings. Mark Hood, an engineering expert who was hired by Cooper to look at GM documents and reports, said two GM engineers who were deposed had long known about the ignition-switch issue. Gary Altman, who in his own deposition identified himself as the engineering manager for the 2005 Cobalt, and Ray DeGiorgio, who was the design release engineer for the Cobalt ignition switches, were aware of it as early as 2004, Hood said in the deposition. He testified that Altman experienced the failure when he bumped the ignition with his knee, and said there were meetings and discussion about the flaw prior to the sale of the vehicle in August of 2004. DeGiorgio said in his April 29 deposition that he shut off the ignition of a Cobalt while going about 25 mph in his neighborhood and was able to keep it under control. 30,000 Deaths Greg Martin, a GM spokesman, declined to comment on the depositions or make any of the executives named in them available for comment. While a dozen deaths over a decade is noteworthy in any context, about 30,000 people die as a result of auto accidents each year in the U.S., according to NHTSA. Automakers in the U.S. have recalled more than 38 million vehicles through 1,217 recalls in the past two years, according to NHTSA records. Brian Stouffer, a GM engineer who took over the investigation of the ignition issue in 2011, said in a deposition for Cooper last year that he looked through GM's database and for the 500,000 or so Cobalt models. He said he was able to find about 100 complaints that seemed to meet the criteria. "I have 100 complaints for that, which is a very, very low complaint rate," he said in the deposition. Never Again The first press account cited in Cooper's depositions was a May 26, 2005, review of the 2005 Cobalt appearing in the Daily Item of Sunbury, Pa. "Unplanned engine shutdowns happened four times during a hard-driving test last week," reviewer Gary Heller wrote. "I never encountered anything like this in 37 years of driving and I hope I never do again." The next month in the New York Times, auto reviewer Jeff Sabatini described his wife's misadventure. "During my time with the Cobalt, I encountered the problem once, or rather, my wife did," he wrote in a follow-up article to his review of a Cobalt. "She was driving on a freeway when the car "just went dead,'' in her words. She recalled bumping her knee against the steering column just before the car shut off. She was able to coast to the shoulder of the road, where, once parked, the car started and behaved normally." 'Rare Cases' Sabatini included a comment from a GM spokesman, Alan Adler. "In rare cases when a combination of factors is present, a Chevrolet Cobalt driver can cut power to the engine by inadvertently bumping the ignition key to the accessory or off position while the car is running," Adler said in the article. "Service advisers are telling customers they can virtually eliminate this possibility by taking several steps, including removing nonessential material from their key rings." Writing a week later in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Chris Jenson quoted from the full GM statement issued following Sabatini's story. "The Cobalt is still controllable" when engine power is cut, the statement read. "The engine can be restarted after shifting to neutral." Wrote Jensen: "So, if you're whisking along at 65 mph or trying to pull across an intersection and the engine stops, that's what you do. Only a gutless ninny would worry about such a problem. Real men are not afraid of temporary reductions in forward momentum." Adler declined a request to make additional comments beyond those GM has offered on the recall. Frightened Owner Cooper also deposed Victor Hakim, identified as working in a GM department that studies how vehicles perform in the field. He testified about 90 incidents in which customers from Alabama to New York brought cars that had been stalling into dealerships. As part of his deposition, Hakim reviewed those statements, including one from a New Jersey service manager who said an owner brought her car to the dealership in April 2005. "This woman is scared to death of this vehicle," the service manager said in a copy of the report read into the deposition. "She takes care of her grandchildren and she is afraid one day she is going to be riding around with them and kill them." Hakim said in the deposition that several GM employees had noted issues with the ignition placement in Saturn Ion models, which are also part of the recall. Tall Employee "On several occasions I inadvertently turned the ignition key off with my knee while driving down the road," a GM employee said in a Feb. 19, 2004, report read as part of the deposition. "For a tall person, the location of the ignition key should be moved to a place that will not inadvertently be switched to the off position." GM described the issue in a so-called technical service bulletin -- a notice to dealers about a potential vehicle issue and a fix that stops short of a recall -- in December 2005. The automaker said the bulletin, which is described in several depositions and in the timeline GM provided to NHTSA, resulted in repairs for 474 customers. In some of the cases Hakim discussed, customers weren't informed of the potential fix, according to the deposition. The interviews with GM engineers show the company knew it had a problem and a solution, Cooper said. "They know the system is defective. People under ordinary driving conditions are having keys turn off. But they decide they're going to say it's safe by blaming the problem on the driver," he said. Detent Plunger In 2013, Cooper won a two-year fight to get access to company documents and learned, he said, that the switch had been changed. Engineers he hired to examine ignition switches discovered that starting in 2006, some cars had incorporated a replacement switch. The switch, while bearing the same part number as the old part, had a bigger and stronger spring than the one pulled from the car of the Georgia pediatric nurse, Brooke Melton. When shown a 2008 ignition switch for a Cobalt that had a design change in a part called a "detent plunger" from what was in the 2005 switch, DeGirogio, the engineer, said no one at GM had approved the change, as far as he knew. "I was not aware of the detent plunger switch change," he said in his April 29, 2013, deposition. "We certainly did not approve a detent plunger design change."
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