My son is not a statistic.

There is a notice on my fridge.  It is pinned there with a magnet right under the words "PARTS ARE NOT CURRENTLY AVAILABLE".  It has been there for over a month and every day there is growing fear that my son's 2007 Pontiac G5 could become a death sentence.

The letter (posted in full below) starts by essentially saying 'The government says we have to tell you about this' and then follows by minimizing the potential risks down to "... a partial loss of electrical power and turning off the engine".   There is also the very real risk of this fault also disabling power brakes, power steering, airbags, and this has been public knowledge for over a year.  Even worse, the fault was known to General Motors as early as 2005.  This particular defect is found in 2.6 Million vehicles in North America and has been linked to 13 known traffic fatalities.

The really tragic part of this whole thing is that those lives may have been saved if GM line management had listened to their own engineers who identified a simple fix for under a dollar a piece. As far back as 2005,  company engineers proposed solutions for the switch problem, but GM had concluded that none of those fixes represented "an acceptable business case."  The parts to fix the problem could have amounted to as little as $0.57 not including labour.

GM has obviously known about this problem for some time and they do have replacement parts that are available for only $30US, yet based on the recall notice tied to my son's car, "PARTS ARE CURRENTLY NOT AVAILABLE".  Yeah...

I would prefer that my son not become a statistic in a class action lawsuit.  It should never have come to this.  There are too many stories like this one and a common buyer for these vehicles are young adults.  General Motors knew about the problem and they ignored it, even after traffic deaths had been linked to the defect.  Parts are available, yet for some reason, they have not taken the time to ramp up production to fill these orders adequately, even though they have known about this problem for almost a decade.

Large companies like this have an even more important responsibility to their customer's safety and when they make a mistake, they should fix it.  When they knowingly ignore a potentially deadly defect, they should be punished appropriately.  The $1.3 Billion charge for recalls is a pin prick in their $37.4 Billion Q1 revenue.  As large as that number sounds, it is hardly punitive for a massive company like General Motors.  This is a $500 Billion Company so it is hard to imagine how any actual dollar amount could have any real impact.  More to the point, no dollar amount will ever make me trust them again or bring back the 13 lives that were lost to this incident.  This is one of those times when a corporation should not be able to shield it senior executives from the harm their decisions can result in.

Please help raise awareness and make GM get serious about actually resolving the problem they caused.