The Four Unsolved Mysteries In GM’s $900 Million Defect Plea

With a pair of pen strokes, General Motors settled a plethora of legal charges on Thursday stemming from its fatal decision to build faulty ignition switches in millions of vehicles. The automaker will pay the U.S. government $900 million in a three-year deferred criminal prosecution, and also settled a class-action lawsuit with some 1,350 families victimized by crashes for $575 million.

GM executives again expressed contrition over the flaw, with CEO Mary Barra telling employees in Michigan “people were hurt and people died in our cars…We didn’t do our job and as part of our apology to the victims we promise to take responsibility for our actions.” And the settlement with federal prosecutors was smaller than some in the past—notably Toyota’s $1.2 billion plea over a similar defect cover-up—because GM had fully cooperated.

Yet victims and safety advocates both decried the deal as lacking, mainly because no individual GM executives have been charged so far. And despite the probes conducted by GM and the federal government, there are many unsolved questions. Here are the four most important ones:

How many people were killed or injured by GM’s defect?

GM’s independent administrator for the $675 million fund it set up for victims approved deals for a minimum of $1 million for 124 deaths, with varying amounts to 275 people injured in wrecks caused by ignition switches that randomly shut off engines and airbags. The list of affected cars–which range from compacts like the Chevy Cobalt to luxury SUVs like the Cadillac SRX–is available here.

But to win approval by administrator Kenneth Feinberg, the victims had to provide proof that the defect caused the accident in question. That’s a tough hurdle to clear when GM hid evidence of the defect for over a decade; most people don’t hold onto the steering columns of the vehicle that killed their loved ones. GM actually received 4,343 applications to the injury fund, alleging 474 deaths and 3,869 injuries. That only a quarter of the deaths and 7 percent of the injuries attributed to the defect were approved by GM doesn’t mean that the fund faced a wave of fraud and deceit. It means that 124 people is a minimum estimate of how many deaths were caused by the hidden defect, and that the real toll of the carnage is higher, and likely unknowable.

When did someone at GM first realize the defect was fatal?