GM Doubles Safety Investigators in Wake of Recall

As part of a new emphasis on safety, General Motors has announced that 35 more product investigators will be added and its engineering division will be restructured into two organizations.

Following the recall of 2.6 million vehicles that has been related to 13 deaths, GM is more than doubling its number of product inspectors and vows "militaristic zeal" to halt safety issues, Edmunds.com reported.

GM is restructuring its global engineering group into two organizations: Global Product Integrity and Global Vehicle Components and Subsystems. The reorganization will make for a "fundamentally different way to go to market with our cars and our trucks," Mark Reuss, head of GM product development, told Edmunds in a conference call on Tuesday.

With the additional 35 product investigators, GM says the new team will total 55, The Associated Press reported. Under the restructuring, the product integrity part will oversee vehicle and engine engineering along with safety, and the vehicle components organization will overview parts engineering and development.

Reuss told Edmunds that adding more product investigators is in response to GM's continuing internal investigation into the recall.

"We're going to have a group of experts look at the problems that we're having on pre-production cars and they will categorize all of them," Ken Morris, the newly appointed GM vice president of Global Product Integrity, told Edmunds. "In this case, it would've been a safety issue and we would've flagged it immediately in pre-production."

GM is going through a shakeup following the recall of 2.6 million small cars related to ignition switch problems. The automaker, which has been under federal investigation in connection with the recall, recently announced that two employees were leaving the company. GM has been under fire as regulators and lawmakers wonder why the carmaker overlooked a fatal problem for so long.