Tom McCutcheon – Attorney at Law
On Monday, March 24, 2014, Joel Hamner and I filed suit against General Motors in one of the GM ignition recall cases.
The information that you need to have is that certain General Motors models have a safety issue with the ignition switch. This defect causes the car to turn off suddenly causing the car to be difficult to drive and to stop and turns off the airbags as well.
General Motors admits there is a defect and admits they know of 12 people who have died in accidents due to this defect. The National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA) indicates at least 303 deaths attributable to this defect. Sadly enough we know that Chevrolet issued technical service bulletins in early 2006 advising its service technicians that this switch be replaced. We know that General Motors internal documentation shows that GM knew as early as 2004 and admits now that they learned about the ignition problems during testing in 2001.
It costs about $5.00 and takes about five (5) minutes to fix this problem. GM recalled the vehicles on February 7, 2014 and added other vehicles to the recall February 24, 2014. Based on what we know, GM should have recalled the 2005 Cobalt no later than 2007 instead of waiting until 2014. The Secretary of Transportation has issued orders to General Motors asking for additional information, however we have copies of the technical service bulletins from February of 2006 and October of 2006 about repairing these defective ignitions.
The recall covers the 2005-2007 Chevrolet Cobalt; 2005-2007 Pontiac G5; 2006-2007 Chevrolet HHR; 2006-2007 Pontiac Solstice; 2003-2007 Saturn Ion and 2007 Saturn Sky vehicles. If you have one of these vehicles please take it in and have it repaired, they are dangerous without warning.
Buckle up and drive safely.
