By early 2014, General Motors had climbed back from a government bailout and a 2009 bankruptcy, and things finally looked stable again. Mary Barra had just taken over as CEO, the first woman to run a major global automaker, and the company had spent years rebuilding trust with regulators and customers alike. Then a small ignition switch, sitting quietly in millions of Chevrolet Cobalts and Saturn Ions built a decade earlier, blew that recovery apart almost overnight.
The switch itself weighed next to nothing and cost pennies to make, yet it triggered a chain of recalls, lawsuits, congressional hearings, and a criminal settlement that would follow GM for years. Barra spent her first months in the job apologizing for a defect the company had known about since long before she ever sat in the CEO's chair.
A Switch That Could Turn Itself Off
GM engineer Ray DeGiorgio approved the ignition switch design in 2002, even after the supplier flagged that it fell short of GM's own torque specifications. The switch went into the Saturn Ion that same year and later spread to the Chevrolet Cobalt, Pontiac G5, Chevrolet HHR, Pontiac Solstice, and Saturn Sky. A light keychain or a hard bump in the road could turn the key just enough to slip it from the run position into accessory, cutting power to the steering and brakes and disabling the airbags entirely.
The first death tied to the flaw came in July 2005, when sixteen year old Amber Marie Rose died in a frontal crash after her Cobalt's ignition slipped out of position. GM engineers had already discussed fixing the switch that same year, and internal documents later cited before Congress showed the redesign would have added somewhere between fifty seven and ninety cents to the cost of each unit. GM decided against making the change, concluding it did not represent an acceptable business case.
More deaths followed over the next several years, though GM continued selling and servicing cars with the same known defect. Investigators later tied the switch to airbag failures in dozens of crashes, and lawyers representing victims' families began building cases that would eventually force the company's hand.
The Fix That Never Got A New Part Number
In April 2006, DeGiorgio quietly approved a redesigned switch with a longer detent plunger and a stronger spring, a change that solved the slipping problem almost entirely. Company protocol required that any redesigned part receive a new part number so it could be tracked, but DeGiorgio signed off on the change without doing so, an omission investigators later called a basic violation of engineering practice. The fix, as it turned out, cost GM nothing at all, since the improved part had already been in use on another vehicle program.
That missing part number buried the problem for years. Engineers and regulators trying to figure out why some Cobalts kept stalling while seemingly identical models did not had no clean way to trace which cars carried the older, weaker switch. DeGiorgio himself testified in a 2013 deposition tied to a Georgia wrongful death lawsuit that he did not recall ever approving the redesign, a claim that fell apart once a lawyer for the victim's family produced a signed authorization document with his name on it.
That discovery forced GM to finally admit publicly what its own engineers had known for years. Barra learned of the defect in December 2013, just weeks before officially stepping into the CEO role, and GM issued its first ignition switch recall in February 2014, covering roughly one point six million vehicles. The recall would eventually grow to 2.6 million cars worldwide.
Fifteen Firings, A $900 Million Fine, And A Reputation In Pieces
Barra testified before Congress twice that spring, apologizing directly to victims' families and admitting she did not yet know why the defect took a decade to surface publicly. In June 2014, GM released a 315 page internal investigation led by former federal prosecutor Anton Valukas, built from interviews with 230 employees and a review of 41 million documents. The report described a corporate culture prone to what investigators called silent nods and shrugs rather than action, and it led GM to dismiss fifteen employees, including DeGiorgio, along with disciplinary action against five others.
GM set up a victim compensation fund run by attorney Kenneth Feinberg, who initially offered families at least one million dollars per confirmed death with no announced cap. That fund eventually approved 124 deaths and 275 injuries as eligible for compensation, nearly ten times the thirteen deaths GM had publicly acknowledged when the crisis began, and paid out close to six hundred million dollars. By the end of 2014, GM had issued dozens of separate recalls covering roughly thirty million vehicles worldwide, part of a record year that saw the auto industry recall nearly sixty four million cars in the United States alone.
The financial reckoning arrived in September 2015, when GM agreed to a $900 million settlement with the Department of Justice over criminal charges tied to concealing the defect, alongside a separate $575 million settlement covering more than a thousand civil claims. Combined with recall repairs and the victim compensation fund, the total cost to GM ran past five billion dollars, all traced back to a switch that could have been fixed for less than a dollar a car.
