The “bombshell” moment of the whole decade-long Chevrolet Cobalt ignition-failure saga—for which General Motors has already set aside $1.1 billion, with far more costs possible—occurred on April 29, 2013, in a conference room at the Detroit airport Westin Hotel. A GM lawyer used the vivid term in an email direct from the room after a victim’s lawyer showed that the Cobalt’s ignition switch had been changed between 2005 and 2008.
It hardly sounds dramatic, but that simple fact, which GM’s own engineers had failed to unearth for years, was the missing piece in the puzzle of what had gone wrong with the Cobalt. It explained why airbags failed to deploy in some crashes, killing at least 13 people, and why those failures stopped after the 2007 model year. Now the company knew exactly where the problem was. And if you want to see the worst symptoms of a deeply dysfunctional corporate culture doing its damage, consider what happened next.
