DETROIT (June 10, 2014) — General Motors Co.'s investigation into its mishandling of a fatal defect spreads blame among dozens of employees at various levels, but it bluntly says the problem began — and remained unfixed for years — largely because of a "single engineer.”
The report condemns GM's infamously slow-moving bureaucracy and lack of individual accountability, while also explaining how one relatively low-level employee can precipitate a crisis that now threatens to cost the auto maker billions of dollars.
The engineer, Ray DeGiorgio, who has been fired by GM, approved an ignition switch that he knew to be flimsy, secretly authorized changing it years later, then “misled” coworkers who were looking into crashes and customer complaints, the inquiry found. Mr. DeGiorgio, a 23-year GM veteran, is mentioned 207 times in the 325-page report by former federal prosecutor Anton Valukas, including in the very first sentence.
He is one of 15 employees dismissed by GM over what CEO Mary Barra last week called a “pattern of misconduct and incompetence.” Mr. DeGiorgio's poor judgment, subpar engineering work and apparently dreadful memory are directly blamed for “catastrophic results,” including 13 deaths that GM has linked to failures of a switch he designed with little oversight.
Ironically, Mr. DeGiorgio also may have saved some lives by ultimately fixing the part he had once called “the switch from hell.” But the way he did so also delayed detection of the defect, as deaths and injuries in Chevrolet Cobalts and Saturn Ions continued to mount.
“He actually changed the ignition switch to solve the problem in later model years of the Cobalt, but failed to document it, told no one, and claimed to remember nothing about the change,” Mr. Valukas wrote. The report says Mr. DeGiorgio made a “deliberate” decision to keep the part number unchanged, “an act that violated GM's policies and which would throw GM investigators off the track for years.”
Mr. DeGiorgio, who was suspended with pay for two months before being fired, hasn't spoken publicly since the recall and couldn't be reached for comment last week.
The Valukas report says there is “no question” that Mr. DeGiorgio, the switch's design release engineer since 1999, knew it fell short of GM's specifications when he approved it in 2002. Mr. DeGiorgio, 61, told investigators who interviewed him in March and over two days in May that he didn't realize it was a safety risk because it worked without incident during testing.
There's no evidence that anyone else knew the switch was out-of-spec at the time, the report says; neither did Mr. DeGiorgio divulge that fact when issues with the part were brought to his attention multiple times, even when directly asked.
‘Personal embarrassment'
Instead, Mr. DeGiorgio was consumed by a problem in which cars with the switch were failing to start in cold weather — something the report says was “a personal embarrassment to Mr. DeGiorgio.”
While working on a fix for that issue, he also began discussing options for increasing the torque with employees at Delphi Automotive, which manufactured the switch in Mexico. He ended up signing off in April 2006 on a new design that Delphi had created five years earlier.
The work order he created for the redesign listed an electrical change to fix the failure-to-start problem but not the stronger spring and plunger that created more torque. Moreover, the report says Mr. DeGiorgio repeatedly told coworkers in 2009 and later that there had been no change that affected the torque in the switch.
