General Motors CEO Mary Barra was grilled in a U.S. Senate hearing on Wednesday about a company switch engineer who denied knowing about changes to a part that he apparently signed off on.
In her second day of testimony, Barra was questioned by Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., a former prosecutor and chairwoman of the Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, USA TODAY reported.
McCaskill rebutted some of Barra's earlier testimony, saying the "New GM" was still guilty of delaying fixes to the problematic ignition switches that have been related to 31 accidents and 13 deaths.
"It might have been the Old GM that started sweeping this defect under the rug 10 years ago," said McCaskill, as reported by Reuters. "Even under the New GM banner, the company waited nine months to take action after being confronted with specific evidence of this egregious violation of public trust."
She cited a court deposition from April 2013 that involved a 2009 case where a Georgia woman was killed in a Chevrolet Cobalt. GM engineer Ray DeGiorgio told a lawyer during that deposition that he had never signed off on changes to the ignition despite GM documentation revealing that DeGiorgio did indeed approve the changes in April 2006.
GM knew about the faulty ignition switches, which can cut off the engine while the car is in motion and disable airbags, back in 2005 but decided not to fix them due to costs, said documents obtained by the U.S. House Committee on Energy and Commerce.
In her testimony on Wednesday, Barra said the company is leaving that mindset behind.
"If there is a defect identified, we go fix the vehicle...it's not acceptable to have a cost put on a safety issue," said Barra, as quoted by The Wall Street Journal's MarketWatch. "I think we in the past had more of a cost culture."
Along with the federal review, GM is doing an internal investigation to see why the ignition switch problem was overlooked for nearly a decade.
The carmaker has tapped high-profile attorney Kenneth Feinberg to advise GM on ways to compensate families of those injured or killed in accidents while in the recalled vehicles, CNNMoney reported.
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