GM recalls a further 8.45m cars

General Motors recalled another 8.45 million more vehicles yesterday — surpassing the record for US safety fixes by an carmaker in a calendar year, as chief executive Mary Barra steps up efforts to shed GM’s reputation for foot-dragging on defective parts.

The announcement came less than four hours after Kenneth Feinberg, the lawyer behind the 9/11 victim funds, finished announcing terms of a broad plan for GM to compensate victims of an earlier ignition recall of 2.59m small cars.

Those cars’ faults, linked to at least 13 deaths, ignited a crisis for the carmaker that’s led to a reorganisation of its engineering department, the departure of 15 people, testy US congressional hearings and a reexamination of past vehicles.

The majority of the latest recall (8.23m cars) are older models being recalled for unintended ignition-key rotation, including Chevrolet Malibus from model years 1997 to 2005 and Cadillac CTS cars from model years 2003 to 2014. Consumers have so far continued buying GM cars and trucks with little regard for the recalls, and the company’s stock has remained buoyant on signs that sales are holding up in the US.

GM’s US recall tally has risen to 25.7m, eclipsing Ford’s single-year record of 23.3m in 2001.

With 64.6m cars and trucks on US roads, according to Experian, GM is calling back the equivalent of 40% of its vehicles. In North America, it’s now recalled almost 29m vehicles.

“What’s more significant is: Is this the last really big one for a while?” David Whiston, an analyst with Morningstar said. “The fact that they made this announcement on the last day of the quarter makes me wonder if this is the final act of house cleaning.”

Barra last month signalled that more safety actions were coming in June and said additional recall-related charges could be material. GM said it expects to take a charge of as much as $1.2 billion (€730m) for recall-related repairs announced in the second quarter. It took a $1.3bn charge in the first quarter.

“We expect our redoubled efforts to be substantially completed by the end of the second quarter,” Barra told analysts during a conference call.

The volume of recalls in the first half of this year is still startling, said Karl Brauer, a senior analyst with Kelley Blue Book.

“It’s unprecedented,” Brauer said. “People are now wondering, where’s this going to end, how long is it going to take, how much is it going to cost?”