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"  In the wake of a scathing New York Times investigation published this past weekend, all hell is breaking loose over the General Motors recall of more than 1.6 million cars with faulty ignitions. We covered the scope of the mechanical failure earlier, a failure that can lead to your car turning off while you&amp;#039;re driving it, and what to do if your vehicle falls under the recall. But the fallout is just beginning. The Times piece says that 260 incidents of ignition failures were reported to GM and to the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA). Now both that federal agency and the carmaker are coming under heavy fire.  Congress Is Getting Involved Both the Senate and House of Representatives are holding committee hearings that involve not only General Motors but whether the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration failed to properly investigate both fatal and nonfatal accidents involving the ignition switch failures. NHTSA issued a statement saying that its investigations failed to find cause to issue a formal investigation. Instead, over the past decade the agency fired out multiple replies to concerned owners that went a lot like this one. NHTSA&amp;#039;s failure to act, and especially its failure to link the frequency of ignition faults to force a wider investigation, is going to come under heavy scrutiny from Congress. The Justice Department Is Getting Involved DOJ is focusing on GM and whether the company purposely misled NHTSA. If there&amp;#039;s any such evidence to support a case against the carmaker, this case could get far worse\u2014potentially as bad as the Firestone/Ford Explorer debacle in the late 1990s/early 2000s. Who Knew What, When? Earlier, PopMech reported that GM issued a technical service bulletin (TSB) way back in 2005 related to the ignition problem. But on March 4, no doubt under pressure from both houses of Congress and the Department of Justice, the lead legal council of NTSB fired off an exceedingly detailed, 27-page &amp;quot;Timeliness Query&amp;quot; to GM that includes the request for 107 very specific facts. Scroll down to page 18 of NHTSA&amp;#039;s letter to General Motors and you get to the government&amp;#039;s hunt for the smoking gun: whether GM knew of a potential solution for the ignition failure as far back as 2005 (or possibly 2004\u2014there are conflicting reports) but nixed implementing this solution and instead opted for the far cheaper (free) technical service bulletin. Now NHTSA wants to know the names of all staff involved in both the proposed repair and anyone involved in spiking the fix.  Even More Damning: The Repair Cost Is Tiny According to The Detroit News, auto analysts for J.P. Morgan and RBC Capital Markets have noted that the replacement-part costs will be as little as $2 to $5 each, and labor costs will be low as well because the repair is quite simple. It would not put GM in a good light if it turns out the company was stinting on these repairs, all the while knowing that the repairs themselves would cost so little. Liable for Deaths? It&amp;#039;s possible, because of GM&amp;#039;s bankruptcy restructuring, that the company would be shielded from wrongful death claims. According to CNN Money, GM&amp;#039;s restructuring allows the company (as well as Chrysler) to walk from all liability claims that predate 2009, when the carmaker emerged from insolvency. If a case involves a product sold before that date, then the suit goes against a shell corporation, not against GM, and the upshot has been not only to shield General Motors but also that most claimants have gotten very poor compensation. In the face of exceedingly bad PR, however, it seems highly unlikely GM would stick to this policy. The clouds grow only darker with each passing revelation about this recall. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/cars/a10261/the-gm-recall-scandal-who-knew-what-and-when-16585901/>