When General Motors recalled 2.6 million Chevrolet Cobalts, Saturn Ions and other small cars worldwide for faulty ignition switches in 2014, it had the daunting task of figuring out where they were, given that most were old enough to have already changed hands several times. Then it had to persuade the owners to go to a dealership for the repair.
But four years later, 92 percent of the cars that GM believes still exist outside a junkyard have been fixed globally, as have 96 percent of those in the U.S.
Though that's short of CEO Mary Barra's stated 100 percent goal, it's considerably higher than the average repair rate for automotive recalls — and far better than most campaigns involving vehicles that were out of production. GM employees still are trying to chase down the roughly 170,000 holdouts, even though enough time has passed since the recall that the company no longer has to show regulators that it's making progress.
"It's really down to pick-and-shovel work — checking individual VINs to determine: Is the vehicle even still on the road?" said Tom Wilkinson, a GM spokesman.
The effort isn't limited to the ignition switch recall, which four years ago spurred GM and other automakers to dig through latent case files for safety risks that got buried by corporate bureaucracy, missteps or indifference. GM alone issued nearly 27 million recall notices in the U.S. in 2014, when the auto industry shattered its previous record with more than 50 million vehicles recalled.
As of last month, about two-thirds of the U.S. vehicles GM recalled in 2014 have been repaired, according to data provided by the automaker for its 20 largest recalls that year. (Automakers have to file progress reports on recall repairs for at least six quarters, but GM updated the percentages at the request of Automotive News.)
That compares with an average of about 75 percent for all U.S. recalls, according to regulators at NHTSA.
Five of the 20 GM recalls, such as oil cooler fittings on about half a million 2014-15 full-size pickups and SUVs, have repair rates of more than 98 percent. But some have rates well below average, even after excluding vehicles GM has written off as scrapped because they've disappeared from state registration databases. For the largest recall of 2014, covering faulty ignitions on 5.9 million Chevy, Pontiac and Oldsmobile cars going as far back as the 1997 model year, just 46 percent have been fixed.
The result is that, despite GM's exhaustive efforts, millions of vehicles recalled in the grim aftermath of its ignition switch crisis remain unfixed even now. While that's not surprising, it shows that the potential danger posed by defects can linger long after a recall, with repair campaigns reducing the risk to the public but never eliminating it completely.
Death in a pond
