After an accident that proved an air-bag defect, General Motors Co. (Nasdaq: GM) recalled 3.64 million vehicles in the U.S., including trucks, cars and sport-utility vehicles. The error could cause airbags and seat-belts to fail in crashes and the company ought to warn clients.
General Motors discovered a defect in the airbag system after investigating a May 17 crash. The company reported to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) the Chevrolet Silverado’s air bags failed to deploy and found it was due to errors in the computer software that controls the airbags and seatbelt pretensions. Apart from the Chevrolet Silverado’s accident, other three injuries were related to safety defect. The findings were published Friday at NHTSA website.
“The airbag controller contains a software defect that may prevent the deployment of frontal airbags and pretensions in certain rare circumstances when a crash is preceded by a particular event impacting vehicle dynamics,” said GM in a statement Friday.
Nevertheless, GM spokesman Tom Wilkinson stated that they consider the cars are safe to drive.
Vehicles included in the recall are Chevrolets, Buick, GMC and Cadillac models from 2014-17. Chevrolet Corvette, the Silverado, GMC Sierra pickups, Chevy’s Tahoe and Suburban SUVs are included on the list. People can check the official list on the NHTSA website or visit safecar.gov to check if their Vehicle Identification Number is part of the recall.
It was confirmed the error is not related to Takata Corp, the airbag company that provides airbag inflators. So far, more than 10 million inflators have been changed in the recall. Still, 69 million airbags need to be replaced. According to NHTSA, General Motors has only fixed 551 inflators, which is 0.17 percent of what they have to solve.
Bloomberg reports Ford Motor Co. had to cut its 2016 pretax profit forecast this week to about $10.2billion from at least $10.8 billion because of the recall, which is the largest in U.S. history.
GM curved 2.9 percent after it made public the airbag defect. It is the most significant fall since August 2.
A similar mistake happened in 2014 but involved the ignition-switch defect
After GM discovered an ignition-switch defect in 2014, more than 2.6 million vehicles had to be repaired by the company. The error resulted in more than 50 fatalities. General Motors changed its approach to spotting flaws and recalling cars after the 2014 case, and led to almost 30 million cars being recalled only that year.
Unfortunately for GM, their 2014-2017 products abroad have to be recalled as well, and the global recall almost reaches 4.3million vehicles.
Source: Bloomberg