The 2015 Cadillac Escalade was recalled earlier this year because of an issue with the passenger-side front airbag. GM recommended that “occupants should not sit in the front passenger seat position” until the issue was fixed. 224 customers were affected. Image: General Motors
Recalls like the one GM is suffering through bring to mind fiery crashes, angry consumers, and publicity-seeking politicians. The reality is most recalls don’t stem from accidents and are settled pretty easily.
Cars have thousands of parts and things go wrong all the time—since the beginning of 2014, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has announced nearly 100 different recalls. There are rules in place to put things right. Here’s how that process works.
Drivers who find something wrong with their car can report it to NHSTA, whose technical experts take a look. If the agency receives enough reports (there’s no fixed number) about a particular problem, it takes action. That involves ordering the automaker to fix the problem safely, effectively, and for free.
Most recalls are spearheaded by automakers, which discover problems via customers, dealers, lawsuits, and their own inspections. Those defects don’t always affect safety. Sometimes a car just isn’t quite up to code for federal regulations or the automaker’s quality standards.
When an automaker initiates a recall, it’s required to notify NHTSA and file a public report airing all the dirty details, including how it discovered the problem, who is affected, and how it plans to fix things. That last bit usually means notifying customers and asking them bring their cars to dealerships for a free repair.
Because federal guidelines change slowly and old people still own cars, automakers must send those notifications as letters—in the mail!—to the registered owners of affected automobiles, then follow up with a postcard every three months for a year and a half to remind them to take care of the issue. GM can also send notifications through its cars’ OnStar vehicle diagnostics system and via a monthly “state-of-the-car” email that customers can choose to receive. If things are bad, dealerships and customer service folks may call owners to push them to come in for repairs.
GM spokesperson Alan Adler played down the fact that his employer has recalled some 7 million vehicles this year. “We’ve added 35 investigators to our product investigation group,” he explained. The company is catching more issues coming through the system and ultimately issuing more recalls to fix them. It’s not that there are more problems now, it’s just that GM is noticing more. Great!
“There are some things we could [have done] differently,” Adler said, but the company is aggressively looking to improve. “We’re running issues to ground very quickly,” he said. “We’re not going to wait around for stuff to develop.”
Adler broke down how a recall moves through a big company like GM: Potential product issues first undergo an Investigation Status Review—basically engineers talking to engineers. If a problem is discovered, the Field Performance Execution Team gets into the action. It brings representatives from different departments to determine the logistics of making repairs, like how to get parts that may have gone out of production years ago. (For the ignition switch recall, GM has two production lines running full time to build new switch assemblies and hopes to have enough parts to fix the affected vehicles by October.)
That data is passed to a Recommendation Group, which decides if it’s looking at a safety or customer service issue. From there, a safety recall moves to the Executive Field Action Decision Committee, with executives from departments including engineering, quality, powertrain, and manufacturing. It decides if there will be a recall, and how it will be classified. Once the collective mind is made up, GM has five business days to inform the NHTSA.
Then it hopes that all its customers get the repairs done.
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