Paper Example on General Motors and the Ignition Switch Recalls

Introduction

General Motors (GM) is yet to shake off the extremely detrimental impact of the ignition switch saga that, according to various news agencies, may have caused as many as 100 deaths and many more injuries from crashes of GM vehicles. In the wake of these lawsuits and GM's struggle to salvage not only its credibility as a leader in the market but also its ability to keep a firm grip on the customer base, much discourse is elicited. Focus on who was responsible for the problem and if the legal issues raised by scores of the affected customers and the families of the deceased call for an in-depth analysis of the scenario and opens the floor for a proposition of recommendations for GM and other companies against such scenarios in the future. This essay advances and tries to prove the idea that the management and supervisory team at GM motors was responsible for the issue and proposes recommendations on how such a grave concern can be circumvented in the future.

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Who/What Was Responsible

In order to understand who was responsible for the problem, it is necessary to first explain it exhaustively in order to understand the nature and ramifications of the complication. First off, the complication is purely a production issue. The faulty switch and, therefore, the deaths and injuries resulting from it, were purely a result of poor engineering. The mistake could have been identified and corrected in 2003 when it first manifested via higher quality control standards. However, when the company finally issued the recall, the problem has been left simmering for a decade, the scale of the problem had been extended and its implications compounded many times over by the time GM Chief Executive Officer, Mary Barra was summoned before Congress in April 2014 (Higgins & Summers, 2014; Sanburn, 2014). It is reported that in 2006, the wreck of cobalt injured one person and caused two fatalities. This was only three years after the problem had occurred; the company waited for another eight years before recalls (Higgins & Summers, 2014). In full view of all the facts above, it is very warranted to point out that the customers of the company are completely innocent in the case and the fault of the entire problem rests on two main parties: the management of GM and the department of transport.

If the origin of the problem is anything to go by, then it needs no telling that GM failed to engineer a high-quality product as it was supposed to have done. By all means, the failure of the ignition switch can and should be defined first and most emphatically as a result of two things:

Subpar Engineering

The fact that such a life-threating problem could have gotten past GM is unforgivable given that the company was the biggest automobile manufacturer not just in the United States but the entire American region as well at the time when the complication emerged in 2003 (Weyant, 2018). Worse still, the corporation had boasted this position for well over half a century (Vlasic, 2016). The reason why GM should never have failed to see the problem is because it boasts the most sophisticated human resource and financial muscle for high-quality and large-scale production given its size, operational capabilities, and track record as pioneering automobile manufacturer (along with Ford Motors).

Inadequate Supervision, Testing, and Quality Control

In full view of all the facts in 1 above, it is virtually impossible to contest the view that the engineering problem rests wholly on the company's management and supervisors in the engineering wing and, in that regard, on the company itself in general. The fact that more rigorous test runs for the cars could have exposed the problem is unassailable, which means that even as the engineers who made them take the fall for underperformance, their superiors and supervisors in the quality control sectors should also be condemned for having failed to ensure safety where the engineers could not. The timeline for the problem according to Basu (2014) actually spanned 13 years and involved more than one generation of cars. The scholar writes that GM first noticed the issue in 2001 during the pre-production test of the Saturn Ion. The issue was superficially fixed by a Technician in 2003 who only replaced the key but did not run more intensive diagnostics for the car. In 2004, the problem was noticed in the Cobalt, the Saturn Ion's replacement. In 2005, the company rejected a proposal to fix the issue stating that it would take too long and would be too costly. In the same year, the company also rejected a proposal by an engineer to redesign its key head. In 2006, the first accident involving Cobalt was reported. General Motors would overlook the issue through its financial struggles and even file for bankruptcy in 2011 before recalling the cars, at which time as many as 124 deaths and 300 injuries had resulted (Basu, 2014; Hilliard Munroz, 2014). In taking the above courses of action, the company definitely put its corporate risk avoidance need above the pricelessness of its customers' lives (Viscusi, 2015).

The ministry of transport is fully responsible for having delayed its action on the company because it took a much longer time than it should have for the government institution to take correction action against the automotive giant. To be precise, it has been stated that a 2006 crash caused two deaths and one injury; it needs no telling that thorough investigation into this issue could have revealed it and warranted the recalls almost a decade earlier. Technically, the ministry of transport's sluggishness in dealing with the issue exhaustively may as well be the second-biggest reason for all the deaths caused by the faulty ignition switch from the time the cobalt crashed in 2006 to the time the company issued the recall in 2014 (Higgins & Summers, 2014; Basu, 2014). The sluggishness of the part of the company rendered it possible for the company to overlook the problem and perpetuate the manufacture and use of its subpar ignition switches up until the 2014 recall. In full view of these truths, the legislators and policy-makers are the second group of culprits and can be said to have aided GM engineers and leadership; albeit unknowingly, in perpetuating the injustice in focus.

The great ramifications of the recall and the ensuing lawsuits are, in all fairness, befitting of both the company and the policy-makers (Derousseau, 2014). Policy-makers and legislators have suffered considerable damage to their reputation and lost public faith in their capabilities in the wake of the outcry that started in 2016 and was still very loud two years later, yet their trouble is nothing compared to the much GM has had to endure thus far. According to Vlasic (2016), as of 2016, GM had spent well over $2 billion settling claims, 124 of which were death cases. In addition, the company has spent an appreciable amount of money paying fines to the departments of Transportation and Justice up until now. Vlasic (2016) further points out that even though the company seemed to have turned the tide of the issue by winning three lawsuits in a row by April 2016 and settling many disputes before they got to court, there is no telling how detrimental the impact of the faulty switch problem is and GM will be tottering from the blow for many years to come on both the financial and reputational fronts (Cronin & Feely, 2016). The greater concern then becomes how the company can ensure that it completely circumvents this condition in the future.

General Motors' Changes to Avoid Further Complications

The changes that need to be implemented by the company to avoid this problem in the future rest heavily on the origin of the problem as defined by the news outlets and, more importantly, the company itself on the 6th of June 2014 (Higgins & Summers, 2014). Essentially, the company's quality control should be improved immensely and kept airtight; given the cause of the problem, this is the fundamental change that needs to be made. However, there are issues in the management and supervisory wings of the entity as well that contributed to the festering of the problem and that must also be reviewed (Gavett, 2014). In this regard, the following two changes need to be implemented by the company:

Improving the Human Resource in the Manufacture and Engineering Section

It has been stated and reiterated that the source of the problem was in the manufacturing section. Attention must be paid to the fact that the issue at hand could only have escaped the eye of a keen chief engineer if the individual was either too taxed to notice or too busy to counter-check the problem. Arguably, the issue could have started with an underqualified engineer or a team of engineers according to Basu (2014). The scholar exemplifies this fact when she states that in 2003, an engineer "fixed" the ignition issue by replacing a key instead of running exhaustive diagnostics for the car. Therefore, General Motors need to be keen in recruiting keener and more thorough engineers to ensure that such shallow application of fate-defining skill is not repeated.

Revising the Supervisory and Workflow Management Infrastructure

The role of the chief engineers and other supervisors in the incidence cannot be overlooked. Attention paid to the rejection of proposals given by engineers as outlined above reveals that the management did not care enough for investigation and validation of proposals by engineers. There is a need for the company to come up with better policing for the teams involved in liaising with engineers to achieve the best possible quality. Only then can GM be sure that quality control procedures are airtight on both the processing line and the supervision/production management levels.

The two propositions above are both very important, yet it is clear to see that while the second one is optional, the first one is not. GM needs to ensure that its manufacturing is flawless because this is the foundation of credibility if it makes good products or its incapability in scenarios like the 2014 recall. The ability of the corporation to hire and maintain a premium unit of engineers for the manufacturing line is, by all means, the most essential element of its manufacturing capabilities and, ultimately, its well-standing in the public and legislative eye.

Recommendations for Policy-Makers and Regulators

As stated in the first section of this essay, the policy-makers and regulators had a big part to play in each of the deaths that resulted from the incompetence of GM's manufacturing. To that effect, every single legislative unit within the ministry of transport as well as the policy-makers, that is, the Congress, have a role to play in fortifying the future customers of both GM and other automobile companies against the recurrence of such a horrendous occurrence. In that regard, the following recommendations are in order.

Speedy Action in Accident Investigation

As of 2005, both Congress and the ministry of transport were aware of GM's faulty product; the company released a service bulletin in December 2005 announcing the problem but did not solve it. The two governing bodies should have taken action immediately. They did not do so even after the double fatality of a Cobalt crash six months later. In future, it is necessary for Congress and the ministry of transport as well as its bureau of standards to ensure that they speedily take action in such cases not only to avoid deaths but to also scare possible complacent corporations into ensuring that their performance is up to par on every single front that matters.

Categorical and Severe Punishment of Subpar and/or Life-Threatening Production

GM's punishment by the relevant authorities is quite lenie...