Why are you surprised by this? during a significant portion of this time frame, the US Government was one of the key shareholders in GM.

Do you think they would put their business partners in jail? Silly Amy, laws are for little people.

I'm interested to see how the VW scandal will shake out compared to this.

There's no way any VW exec can face criminal charges if GM gets to skate on this. Right?

Nice try JFP. But friends of Obama get a different deal than you or me. The US government was a key shareholder of GM and GM is equally involved in the Obama administration. VW, not so lucky.

"I'm guessing the execs on this didn't put their family members in those cars."

I'm betting they did. How many failures, out of how many millions of cars?

-----
Consistency alert!

Don't you insist that you can tell when a food product is produced correctly, and that you should be able to buy anything you want without inspection? That the market will correct misbehavior of a dairy vendor who doesn't do things right?

This is a car - just a plain ordinary car. You should be able to tell if there's something wrong with it and just buy another brand, right? There's no need whatsoever for quality controls and production standards for ignition switches, because they are used across several dozen models of car and their owners are smart enough to know when one goes wrong. Right?

No Federal penalties are therefore indicated. The market will penalize GM by the mechanism of customers going for Ford and Chrysler and Toyota instead.

"Don't you insist that you can tell when a food product is produced correctly,"

No, and I don't particularly like when people tell me what I did say -- when it's not what I said.

you should be able to buy anything you want without inspection

Yes, I should.

And let's be clear -- it's government and crony capitalism that are keeping these people out of jail.

I'm not interested in playing games of what you may or may not have said so I am just going to quote you directly:

http://www.advicegoddess.com/archives/2014/12/31/why_is_it_the_g.html

"Show me that you "know" that any of your food is safe. Believing that it is because the government "inspects" it is the real logical fallacy here.

And as I've written before, it is not in the interests of a business to poison people. People don't go into business for a day or a week, but to earn a consistent living."

Needless to say, Radwaste appears to be correct here in that there is some inconsistency in your stance when it comes to safety inspections for food versus safety inspections for automobiles.

You are calling it an "upshot" that the government will now have a federal monitor to oversee GM's safety efforts after you have explicitly stated that believing government safety inspections help us to "know" that something is safe amounts to a logical fallacy.

If it is indeed a logical fallacy then surely government safety oversight cannot be classified as an "upshot". (if you start to now argue about differences between "knowing" and an improved sense of safety that doesn't constitute a guarantee then i'm going to have to call bullshit on your previous argument with Radwaste where you were the only one talking about a perfect state of knowledge when the entire time they were talking about better odds of safety as opposed to a 100% guarantee)

Also... what happened to all this talk about it not being in businesses interests to disregard the safety of consumers?

Surely if you were correct this entire problem with faulty ignition systems should have been impossible. It is a parallel argument to assert that just like it isn't in the food industries business interest to poison people, it isn't in the automobile industries business interest to kill people via faulty car components.

And yet here we are... faulty ignition components and all.

Radwaste has told you this more times than I can count, but I will chime in as well and tell you that one of the proper roles of government is to regulate safe business practices to prevent cost cutting incentives that put profits above public health and safety.

In summary, you do appear to have an inconsistent way of approaching food safety and car safety in terms of governments proper role in regulating businesses.

Just a few points to note -

Amid all of this talk about 'faulty GM ignition switches', let's bear in mind what the 'fault' actually is - namely, that the switch can be moved too-easily from the 'run' position to the 'accessory' position. There's no standard for how easy or hard this should be to do. What generally happened here was that the driver had about 18# of cr*p hanging from the keyring, and they inserted the key in the ignition with the keyring tangled with the key in such a way that the weight of the cr&p on the keyring tended to turn it off. It's not a fault in the sense of a wheel that fell off or a braking system that fell apart - it's an operational characteristic that could be amplified by driver behaviors. Not trying to downplay the seriousness of the problem, merely that it's not as simple as the term 'faulty ignition switch' would suggest.

It is claimed that some number of deaths and injuries are 'associated with' the 'faulty ignition switch', but when you look closer, many of these 'associations' come down to little more than 'this person was injured in a car wreck, the car had one of the switches in question, and we can't tell whether or not it had anything to do with the crash.'

Most of the fines and penalties that GM is paying are doing precisely zip for the people who were actually hurt. They are being paid to the government for failing to follow procedure. The people who may have been hurt by these things are being compensated separately. The fines amount to little more than an added tax on GM - taken from customers and the shareholders. And it's also $900 million that GM cannot spend on product development and improvement, which might help prevent future issues like this - instead, it just goes down the government rathole.

Lots of talk here about how it is the government's job to 'regulate safe business practices to prevent cost-cutting incentives'. Fine talk. But no government regulation or oversight would have prevented this problem from occurring. Government regulation of auto design always results in significant cost increases to the consumer with negligible improvements in safety. Cases in point are things like ABS and airbags, both of which were forced on consumers at significant cost with promises of vast reductions in automobile deaths and injuries - the stats show that their benefits have been marginal at best. The next thing coming is rearview cameras, which consumers will be forced to buy at a cost which equates to hundreds of millions of $$$ per life saved.

Government regulation means forced expenditure by auto companies = forced taxation of consumers and stockholders, but without any regard to cost or trade-offs. No government regulation ever considers opportunity cost, things seen vs things not seen, or the law of unintended consequences. The GM 'faulty ignition switch' issue took place in a US auto industry that already had the heaviest level of government regulation of any auto industry in the world, and continued for a long period when the US government effectively owned GM and therefore had complete control over what they did. The 'faulty ignition switch' actually demonstrates the complete inability of government regulation to improve safety or eliminate problems, so it's hard to see how even more regulation will somehow improve things.

llater,

llamas

llamas,

I hope you don't mind, but I have a few questions for you because you make some claims that I think need additional backing/support:

1 - "The fines amount to little more than an added tax on GM - taken from customers and the shareholders."

If it has been determined that GM is materially responsible for certain actions that lead to the deaths of some of their customers, why should the owners of GM (i.e., the shareholders) be insulated from profit losses?

If you were to own a private business that was found responsible for injuring a customer then you would suffer personal financial losses as a result of your business being forced to pay fines/compensation by the court. Why should this be any different for the owners of a public company?

2 - "But no government regulation or oversight would have prevented this problem from occurring. Government regulation of auto design always results in significant cost increases to the consumer with negligible improvements in safety."

These 2 claims need much more support than just a simple assertion. I will even go so far as to state that claim #1 is pure speculation at best as you have no possible way of knowing what would or would not have resulted from additional oversight.

While it is certainly true that adding an extra ref to the field does not guarantee there will be fewer penalties, it does offer a very real possibility that fewer players will attempt to game the system knowing they have more eyes upon them. Why do we seem to understand this intuitively with sports but suddenly lose site of this when it comes to business?

You are also using works like "significant" and "negligible" in a very wishy washy way.

We really need hard numbers here to accurately assess what is going on.

For example, that you might consider a $500 additional cost to be "significant" and a ~5% reduction in fatal accidents to be "negligible" would be a matter of your personal opinion.

Someone else could look at those numbers and disagree with your classification of "significant" and "negligible". In fact, it is possible someone could look at those hypothetical numbers and conclude the exact opposite (i.e., that the increased cost is negligible and the increased safety is significant).

Can we please take this discussion out of the real of wishy washy subjective impression and discuss actual studies with regard to cost and safety?

What for example is the cost of an airbag system on a new car bought in 2015 and what are the quantifiable safety implications of that system?

Descriptive words like "significant" and "negligible" do not help without the added context of what those numbers actually are.

3 - "The 'faulty ignition switch' actually demonstrates the complete inability of government regulation to improve safety or eliminate problems, so it's hard to see how even more regulation will somehow improve things."

This is a poorly formed argument.

I will explain why using an analogy of the size of a fire department.

Imagine you have a city with a very small fire department and there is a significant problem with fire response times and the extent of property damage.

It would be fallacious to suggest that the failure of the current fire department to quickly extinguish fires constitutes proof that fire departments do not work and therefore it is difficult to see how providing funds for additional firefighters, firetrucks, hydrant infrastructure, etc... could possibly improve things.

That something appears ineffective at a particular level of investment could just as easily be attributed to a lack of sufficient investment as it could be to the ineffectiveness of the endeavor.

One way to test if something is effective or not is to actually see what the marginal improvement rate happens to be.

We know for a fact that workplace deaths and injuries have historically fallen in correlation with additional regulation and oversight. This is a fact so well supported it isn't in dispute and is also the reason why products from countries that do not regulate or oversee production has increased rates of workplace death and injury even today.

That these items are so strongly correlated in both time and space suggests that there is a greater likelihood that they are causally linked as opposed to it being a mere coincidence.

Businesses have proven time and time again that they will meet safety standards as dictated by the law and will rarely if even choose to go above and beyond those requirements. Therefore it is quite easy to see how additional oversight might improve things.

Is it a guarantee... not by a long shot... just like having a criminal justice system doesn't completely eliminate crime.

The fact that crime still exists is not evidence however that government has a complete inability to reduce criminal activity.

A bit of enlightenment:

""Don't you insist that you can tell when a food product is produced correctly,"

No, and I don't particularly like when people tell me what I did say -- when it's not what I said.

you should be able to buy anything you want without inspection

Yes, I should."

Get some logic, and notice that when you state that you should be able to buy anything you want without inspection, you assume 100% of the duty to determine if a thing is safe. You advertise that you can, in fact, control what you eat all by your lonesome. In short, that sentence says a lot more than you thought it did.

And to repeat myself: it is the requirement for a process, NOT the inspection of a final product, which provides the ONLY method capable of delivering a safe product, be it food or automobile: prevention.

""Don't you insist that you can tell when a food product is produced correctly"

Again -- I did not say this and resent that you say that it is what I say.

My position: If I wish to buy cheese that is unregulated by the government, it is none of the government's business.

I would never say I can "tell" when a food product is produced correctly. That's dishonest debating on your part, perhaps out of a desire to "win" the debate.

I am willing to assume the "risk" that, for example, my friends up mid-state with a goat farm are poisoning me with their unregulated cheese, and...oh yeah, that when I dinner at their house, that I will not die of food poisoning because a government regulator hasn't been around to look at their dinner.

P.S. Those salmonella-tainted jars of peanut butter were regulated.

What regulation often gives people is a false sense of security.

Artemis - I do not mind at all. Your points are well-taken.

1 - You wrote

'If you were to own a private business that was found responsible for injuring a customer then you would suffer personal financial losses as a result of your business being forced to pay fines/compensation by the court. Why should this be any different for the owners of a public company?'

and you are right. But you overlook the fact that GM is paying twice - once in actual compensation to those injured, and then this additional $900 million in 'fines' to the government, supposedly to teach them not to do it again.

2 - I agree, a lot of this discussion revolves around opinion. But one thing is for sure - despite massive existing government regulation, and the imposition of additional costs to consumers for very-specific functions like ABS, air bags, traction control, etc, etc, etc, the rate of deaths and injuries per million miles travelled in the US is not declining at anything-like the rate one would suppose based on the rosy promises of the regulators. For example, in the last 4 years, since ABS and airbags have become universal, it has been essentially flat. Where are the huge savings in lives and injuries we were promised?

You asked for math. I approve of this question. For example, there is some statistical analysis which actually shows that airbags, overall, do more harm than good

http://www.amstat.org/about/pdfs/whowantsairbags.pdf

and this analysis doesn't even consider the cost of airbags and what that money could have been spent on otherwise.

This analysis shows that seatbelts are far-more effective in reducing death and injury. And seatbelts cost far less than airbags do. But seatbelt use involves human agency.

3 - Your analogies with fire departments and crime are not really very applicable, because they ignore multiple issues of moral hazard and human agency.

For example, having more firemen and more fire equipment will not cause more fires to occur, or shift hazard from fire, to flood. But adding 'safety' equipment to automobiles by regulation does shift hazard - people drive differently when their vehicles are equipped with functions like ABS, FWD, traction control and airbags, which they have been assured make them 'safer'. Multiple studies have shown, for example, that ABS makes people drive faster, follow closer and brake later. This phenomenon, known as 'risk compensation', applies equally to all sorts of 'safety' devices and regulations. It's why, so often, these 'safety' improvements fail to provide the benefits promised.

4 - when you wrote

'We know for a fact that workplace deaths and injuries have historically fallen in correlation with additional regulation and oversight. This is a fact so well supported it isn't in dispute and is also the reason why products from countries that do not regulate or oversee production has increased rates of workplace death and injury even today.'

The correlation is there - what you can't assess is the causation. After all, reductions in workplace deaths and injuries may just as well have been caused by the development of unions and the workplace improvements which they obtained by collective bargaining, or by the rise in tort litigation based on expanded principles of liability and causation. To assign all improvement to 'additional regulation and oversight' is simply unjustified.

I stand by what I said - more government regulation would not have caught or prevented the 'faulty ignition switch' problem, because it's an issue of human agency as well as of design intent. If teenage girls weren't in the habit of hanging 18# of cr*p on their keyrings, this 'problem' would never have risen above the noise threshold. Remember the Audi 5000 and 'unintended acceleration' - the horrible bogeyman lurking in the cruise-control system, that just cried out for government regulation? What was the real problem? Pedal misapplication - IOW, they were pressing the gas when they thought they were pressing the brake. How did Audi fix it? A pedal interlock, so you couldn't shift gears unless you were pressing on the brake pedal. Killed the problem stone-dead- so effectively, that the government subsequently mandated the pedal interlock on cars equipped with automatic transmission. Turns out, it had been going on for years, on all sorts of different cars - it's just that government regulators couldn't figure it out.

Fascinating. Discuss more.

llater,

llamas

Let me put another perspective on the issue. Part of the problem is: there is not a safety culture inside the automobile industry, like there is in the aviation industry. I'm sorry, I've seen the inside of it, and there's just not. There are groups of engineers, the SAE and so forth, but their opinions carry little sway with either management or (in the case of American producers) the UAW.

Why is that? It's got a lot to do with the way the two industries are regulated. In the aviation industry, the FAA knows full well that the industry is much bigger than it is, and that it can't possibly possess as much expertise on every subject as the industry as a whole does. What to do? Enlist industry in the cause. The FAA does a lot of things that puts more or less direct control of safety issues in the hands of industry people. It holds them repsonsible, while at the same time giving them leeway for how things are implemented.

You don't have that in the automobile industry. There, it is very much top down. NHTSA thinks of itself as being the world's leading experts on everything. They tell the automakers what to build and how to build it. The companies, for their part, get comfortable with the idea that safety is not something they have to put a lot of thought into because NHTSA will tell them what to do. Innovation is discouraged. Ther'e no scientific process and a lot of things are determined by politics -- the government wants to be see as "doing something", so it does something, whether effective or not. And yes, that adds a lot of cost and waste to automobile production. Consider the 5-MPH bumper debacle. The insurance industry held it out as something that would reduce repair costs, at a point in the 1970s when a lot of people were up in arms about the costs of body repairs. Did it work? No. Repair costs went up, because the bumper designs as specified by NTHSA didn't work particularly well, and repairing the mechanisms after a collision was an added expense. Yet NHTSA and the insurance industry were able to pat themselves on the back and have Washington fawn over them because they "did something". 5-MPH bumpers are still required on cars today and they probably add about $800 to the cost of a car.

The Toyota thing is enlightening. The charges against Toyota were complete bullshit; the event was a mass panic (the exact same thing had happened to Audi in the 1980s); the most dramatic tales of unintended acceleration were found to be untrue, and a series of tests done by NASA failed to find any way in which the car's design contributed to the problem. Yet Toyota had to pay protection money. It was government piracy. It had nothing to do with safety.

Screw the victims, there's a corporation to protect here!

"I'm guessing the execs on this didn't put their family members in those cars."

BTW, I recall that, in the independent report of the goings on at GM surrounding this issue, the so-called Jenner report, it's made clear that the engineering executive directly in charge of the ignition-switch issue, Ray DiGorgio, bought his college-age son a 2007 Cobalt to drive - so apparently, this issue wasn't quite so clear-cut back then. We do have to remember that we are looking at this in hindsight.

However, what Cousin Dave notes is quite correct - safety culture in the auto industry has been poisoned by massive over-interference by government regulators, same as the emissions and fuel-economy area. We're all paying for their insistence that they know best, chasing ever-decreasing benefits at ever-higher cost. No wonder the manufacturers end up cheating to try and build cars people will still want to buy.

Most of the big gains still to be had in auto safety are in the areas of driver behaviors - but the government doesn't want to alienate the voters by regulating those, so they just keep demanding more and more technology to try and address the basic idiocy of the average driver. Like airbags, which have very little advantage over a properly-designed-and-used seat belt system. NASCAR cars don't have airbags. I'm not suggesting that every car should have 5-point Simpsons installed, but maybe if we could get the 25% of drivers aged 16-24 who don't wear the standard seat belt to just buckle up, we might see some serious reductions in death and injuries, and the marginal cost would > 0.

The other major area for improvement is roadway design, and here you have a typical bureaucratic turf war between NHTSA (vehicles and people) and DoT (roads and things), plus many roads are designed and constructed by the states. This is one area where government standardization might be a big benefit, and there's lots to learn from European countries where the thinking is more-advanced in these areas.

llater,

llamas

A big part of the problem is that we still don't really know a whole lot about what specifically causes injuries and deaths in crashes, nor do we know a lot about the root cause of crashes. State investigations are a joke; it doesn't go beyond determining which party to assign fault to, for the ticket revenue and to make the insurance companies happy. The National Transportation Safety Board is pretty good, but it only investigates when a common carrier is involved. We've got lots of test and simulation tools, but validating them against real-world crashes is difficult.

+1 Cousin Dave.

But to build on what you said - the auto makers are in perhaps the worst position to know what goes on in real-world crashes. All they know, they get from lawsuits and customer complaints. A channel which is by its nature adversarial is the worst possible way to gain knowledge.

The people who really are in a position to know this are NHTSA, because they gather and analyze this data. They are uniquely positioned to recognize trends in injury and loss nationwide.

So why didn't they recognize and follow up on the GM ignition switch issue? They had the same data that GM did, in fact, they had a lot more data than GM did.

Mark my words, this will end up with a new requirement that there be an interlock that you have to activate to turn the ignition key from the 'run' position? Who remembers those silly-ass Ford interlocks from the 80s, where you had to depress a lever to remove the ignition key? Let's just hope that push-button start and keyless entry become universal before we get that nonsense back.

llater,

llamas

I'll add that part of the reason the situation got this way is because the people who pushed for federal regulation of auto safety in the 1960s and '70s weren't really concerned about safety at all. They wanted to use it as a wedge to make automobiles so expensive that the middle class would no longer be able to afford them. Auto environmental regulation was the same way. It really pissed the activists off in the '80s when computerized ignition systems came along and made it possible to actually meet environmental standards that they had assumed were impossible. Remember, in the '90s, auto makers were selling "50-state" cars that met environmental standards in all states including California. But then the CARB activists fixed that.

The middle class having the ability to travel when and where they want really pisses leftists off.

You got that right Cousin Dave. I've seen a number of left wingers saying if you can't afford a Tesla Model S (a >$50K car) then you should just take the bus. Otherwise you are destroying the environment for all the important people.

"I am willing to assume the "risk" that, for example, my friends up mid-state with a goat farm are poisoning me with their unregulated cheese, and...oh yeah, that when I dinner at their house, that I will not die of food poisoning because a government regulator hasn't been around to look at their dinner."

You are one hardheaded lady. I find it amazing that you claim this is a fact-based, science-based blog and continually miss correlation here!

A FARM is a COMMERCIAL VENTURE with no personal ties to you. There's no promise, explicit or implied, that anyone in charge of controlling the process has your safety in mind.

You cannot accept the risk for others, either. "They meant well", or "they're good people" doesn't produce good goat cheese.

You essentially take the stance that it would be completely OK to let a dog food company kill Aida because then we would know not to buy more dog food from them.

That's what you're arguing for.

And you're really nuts for making the dinner citation: your friends bought foods subject to inspection (which I must remind you again, includes the entire production process, not ust the finished product!) -- and people still are sickened and killed by storing and preparing food improperly after purchase.

Here's an airplane. We stopped doing inspections on it because that was expensive. Wanna fly?

"I'll add that part of the reason the situation got this way is because the people who pushed for federal regulation of auto safety in the 1960s and '70s weren't really concerned about safety at all. They wanted to use it as a wedge to make automobiles so expensive that the middle class would no longer be able to afford them. Auto environmental regulation was the same way."

I'm guessing you and your lungs were never in LA during that period.

Go ahead. Tell me you want to be in the '59.