I am elated that with RoboTech's knowledge and many hours of his time that he put into this we were able to get this resolved but more than a little perturbed that this is process that has to be followed to get an issue like this fixed.
GM clearly stated that the airbag would not deploy in the case of a crash if there was a fault in the system. If they were aware of this, and I can't see how this is news to GM, then why on earth was this whole process necessary???
for the rant, I feel better now...
While cost and risk management plays a huge role, I don't believe GM WANTS people to get hurt in their cars. I have not yet become so jaded as to believe monsters run GM. LOL
It comes down to frequency of failure and the culture inside GM when it comes to evaluating potential problems. I have worked for a manufacturer that went through a similar problem. So, story time...
I worked for a company that built RC Cars...HPI Racing. We had come out with a nitro powered 2wd truck called the Rush. Shortly after releasing it, we started hearing about people tearing up the plastic spur gears. With RC cars, gear mesh is critical and it is possible to get the mesh wrong which will result in a damaged gear. We had seen this issue with other cars before and it was a common user error with not just our cars, but RC cars in general.
The issue though seemed to be more pronounced with the Rush than in other cars...not a ton, but a little. Since HPI had limited experience with off road cars, the problem was seen more of user error. It took about a year to discover that the problem was with the chassis design. People would drive the truck, jump it, and have it land in the middle of the chassis rather than on the wheels on the lips of jumps. This would cause the chassis to bend lightly along a diagonal line across the chassis right between the spur gear and motor. This would open up the gear mesh and cause the damage.
Even so, the failure number was less than 5% of all vehicles sold. Thus while the failures were more common than in our other cars, it still wasn't super high and it took seeing this failure trend grow before we determined the issue and started working on a fix.
It came down to how big is the problem and how much will it cost to fix it? Is it really a major problem or not? For us, at first, the failure rate fell into acceptable limits but the problem grew it forced us to look deeper at the problem. The fact the issue continued while the cars were still under warranty helped.
GM, I feel, was in the same boat with our cars but on a more global scale. Take all the complaints received and add up the number of reported failures from those complaints and the failure rate still falls in at less than 5% of production numbers. The CTS, with the data provided by GM, showed a slightly higher failure rate but one that was very comparable to the Kappas. Because the CTS was built in far greater numbers though, the number of failures in the CTS was much higher and, when you couple this with the difference in how both cars accrued miles over time, it's easy to see that GM was getting A LOT more reports of sensor mat failures with the CTS than with the Kappa while both cars were under warranty.
This is where the GM culture comes into play. Since GM only looked at warranty...both factory and extended...repairs, the Kappas didn't look like they were suffering the number of failures as the CTS. The issue is, most Kappas ran out of their 3 year/36K mile warranty on years long before they ran out of miles. (as an example, my car had 44K miles on it 8 years after it entered warranty) Compared to the CTS's 4 year/50K mile warranty, the CTS had more time and miles to have the issue reveal itself than the Kappas. Because GM only looked at warranty data to determine a problem, they wouldn't catch the Kappa's problem since the issue doesn't really peak until 25K+ miles are on the car.
Thus I hope this (though seriously doubt) incident not only gives us a recall on this problem but also changes the GM culture when it comes to detecting potential safety issues. With GM under the watchful eye of the NHTSA now (because of the ignition switch issue) there may be some hope of GM and their NHTSA Watchdogs going over this issue.
