Government Motors' 15.6 million recalls is quite the record-breaker

If you think it's gratuitous that I'm still connecting GM's problems to the bailout and subsequent era of government ownership, you don't know enough about how the auto industry works - which is to say, it doesn't work so much as it plods.

The culture put in place by the Obama Administration did not leave the company when the government sold its shares. Culture change moves more slowly than a glacier in the auto industry. Besides, if you don't think it sounds like the Obama White House to ignore problems until they grow on a massive scale and then offer a litany of excuses and obfuscations, boy, I don't know what to tell you. From this morning's Detroit News (where I am also a columnist):

GM has stepped up the pace of its recall campaigns as it tries to show it is more responsive to safety concerns since it was learned that the company knew for years of problems with ignition switches in some vehicles. Several key safety officials at the automaker have left, retired or been moved to new positions. It has added 35 product investigators since the beginning of 2014 and is taking a look at all outstanding issues.

---

On Friday, GM paid a record-setting $35 million fine to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration for failing to recall in a timely fashion 2.6 million vehicles linked to 13 deaths due to the defective ignition switches. The automaker admitted it broke the law in the settlement that will require intensive monitoring and monthly meetings with NHTSA to discuss all pending safety issues over a three-year period. GM also is bracing for the fallout of an internal report into what went wrong over the course of the decade of delays in issuing the ignition-switch recalls. Two congressional committees plan to bring GM CEO Mary Barra back to testify for a second round of hearings. The Justice Department, Securities and Exchange Commission and at least one state attorney general are investigating. The White House declined to comment on whether the spate of GM recalls suggest the government didn’t exercise proper oversight during the nearly five years when it owned a significant stake in the automaker as part of the $49.5 billion bailout. “What’s absolutely important as a general principle is every automobile manufacturer — foreign or domestic — be held accountable when it comes to safety matters,” spokesman Jay Carney said Tuesday.

Fine. Hold them accountable. And exactly what form should the accountability take? When the government first took control of GM, Obama immediately fired then-CEO Rick Wagoner. And rightly so. It was one of the few unassailably correct decisions Obama has made. Wagoner had proven he was incapable of leading the company effectively and he needed to be replaced. But GM has not found a leader in the years since who proved up to the task. GM's priority since the bailout has been to provide political cover for the advocates of the bailout, which is why it has added plants, shifts and employees it really didn't need. It is also the reason it ramped up the production of Chevy Volts despite the lack of demand. Politicians held out the Volt as one of the primary rationales for bailing out the the company, so the factory needed to crank up Volt production to justify the politicians. And when a safety issue arose, GM showed the same instincts as the government: Try to cover it up if you possibly can so no one will criticize you. The culture of GM hasn't changed. It was only reaffirmed by the bailout, which sent the message that GM was not only too big to fail, but too important to be expected to change. This was as much about bailing out the UAW as anything else, and that's a vicious cycle. Union works its way into company. Union helps lead company to brink of obsolescence. Union gets bailed out by political allies. Union repeats process. Taxpayers lost $28 billion helping this company stay exactly the way it has always been. And politicians tell us it was a good investment. I hope you're happy with your return.