The man who blew the whistle on GM Motors

America’s largest carmaker General Motors has been forced to recall 25.7m vehicles so far this year and is being sued after faults were linked to at least 13 deaths. Now it has emerged, the company may have been ignoring warnings for years. Tim Higgins and Nick Summers investigate.

It was close to 3am on June 6 when Courtland Kelley burst into his bedroom, startling his wife awake. General Motors (GM), America’s largest carmaker and Kelley’s employer for more than 30 years, had just released the results of an investigation into how a flawed ignition switch in the Chevrolet Cobalt could easily slip into the “off” position — cutting power, stalling the engine, and disabling airbags just when they’re needed most.

The part has been linked to at least 13 deaths and 54 crashes. GM chief executive officer Mary Barra, summoned before the US Congress in April to answer for the crisis, repeatedly declined to answer lawmakers’ questions before she had the company’s inquest in hand. Now it was out, and Kelley had stayed up to read all 325 pages on a laptop on the back porch of his rural home about 90 miles northwest of Detroit.

The Valukas Report, named for former US attorney Anton Valukas, who assembled it at GM’s request from interviews with 230 witnesses and 41 million documents, blamed a culture of complacency for the more than decade-long delay before the company recalled millions of faulty vehicles.

It described employees passing the buck and committees falling back on the ‘GM nod’ — when everyone in a meeting agrees that something should happen, and no one actually does it. On page 93, a GM safety inspector named Steven Oakley is quoted telling investigators that he was too afraid to insist on safety concerns with the Cobalt after seeing his predecessor “pushed out of the job for doing just that”.

Reading the passage, Kelley felt like he’d been punched in the gut. The predecessor Oakley was talking about was Kelley.

Kelley had sued GM in 2003, alleging that the company had dragged its feet addressing dangers in its cars and trucks. Even though he lost, Kelley thought that by blowing the whistle he’d done the right thing and paved the way for other GMers to speak up.

Now he saw that he’d had the opposite impact: His loss, and the way his career had stalled afterward, taught others at the company to stay quiet. “He stood in the doorway of our bedroom with a stunned look on his face,” Beth Kelley, his wife of 23 years, says. “Maybe we’re just extremely naive, but we really thought that since this all happened, that something good would come out of it.” Kelley declined to comment for this article, but his allegations are laid out in court records and depositions. A number of friends and family did speak for the record.

Kelley had been the head of a nationwide GM inspection programme and then the quality manager for the Cobalt’s predecessor, the Cavalier. He found flaws and reported them over and over, and repeatedly found his colleagues’ and supervisors’ responses wanting.

He thought they were more concerned with maintaining their bureaucracies and avoiding expensive recalls than with stopping the sale of dangerous cars. Eventually, Kelley threatened to take his concerns to the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

Frustrated with the limited scope of a recall of sport-utility vehicles in 2002, he sued GM under a Michigan whistleblower law. GM denied wrongdoing, and the case was dismissed on procedural grounds.

Kelley’s career went into hibernation; he was sent to work in another part of the company, and GM kept producing its cars.

Selling for around $16,000 (€11,765), Cobalts were popular with teenagers. The first death linked to its switch came in July 2005, when a Maryland 16-year-old, Amber Marie Rose, crashed her red ’05 into a tree. The airbag did not deploy. Although reports streamed into GM about moving stalls and disabled airbags for years, the company waited until February 13, 2014, to issue a recall.

Now GM professes contrition, promises change, and has ousted 15 individuals for misconduct or incompetence.

Announcing the Valukas findings to an audience of employees on June 5, Barra called the report “extremely thorough, brutally tough, and deeply troubling”. It describes a corporate bureaucracy fatally indifferent to mounting evidence its cars were killing people. “Although everyone had responsibility to fix the problem, nobody took responsibility.”

As bad as that sounds, Kelley’s story shows that the situation was worse — that GM’s problems went beyond diffuse inaction. Management wasn’t just distracted or confused; speaking up was actively discouraged.

Kelley is mild-mannered and 52, with a full head of white hair that makes him look older.

In 1983, he started at GM as a technician fresh out of community college. By 1988, he was working on what would become the company’s Global Delivery Survey, an audit of GM cars at rail yards across the US — a spot check of vehicles on the last leg of their journey to dealerships. Originally meant to find minor noises and rattles, the programme had begun to turn up more serious safety concerns.

The creator of the effort, Bill McAleer, considered Kelley his protégé and someone who shared his alarm at the problems they found over the next decade. “I’ve done all I can. I wanted more vehicles recalled. They shot me down”

“Bill and I looked at each other in amazement,” Kelley later recalled in a deposition, “that that kind of thing was happening, where the bolts on the front suspension fell out as we drove over the track. I thought that GM alarm bells would go off.”

They didn’t. McAleer, who thought no one at GM was taking his criticisms seriously, was taken off the audit; he sued the company seeking whistleblower protection.

GM denied the allegations, and a judge dismissed the case. With McAleer gone, Kelley grew even more concerned about the problems he was seeing, he said in a June 2000 deposition from McAleer’s lawsuit.

He indicated that the audit was picking up an average of two to three “significant safety defects” each month.

McAleer’s lawsuit claimed that as much as 1% of all vehicles manufactured by GM during the 1999 model year could be defective, or more than 30,000 North American cars and trucks.

One day in November 2001, Kelley came across a problem that would forever change him. Making inspections at a rail yard in Tampa, Florida, he found a Chevrolet TrailBlazer SUV leaking fuel. Kelley discovered that the fuel line had disconnected at the filter.

“They told me as they were driving it off the train, the vehicle quit,” Kelley recalled in a September 2003 deposition. “Fuel began spraying.” The next day, he began getting similar reports from around the country. He began pushing not only his supervisor but product investigators and GM’s legal department to act.

Kelley thought it was just a matter of time before someone was injured or killed.

Despite his concerns, he said, colleagues resisted contacting the US government.

Like his predecessor McAleer, Kelley was taken off the quality audit in 2002. He was transferred to a role as brand quality manager for the Chevrolet Cavalier and Pontiac Sunfire, compact cars that preceded the Cobalt. He was given an employee named Steven Oakley, who’d worked for GM since 1990, to handle the Sunfire.

They were the middlemen between dealers, who wanted to talk about problems with cars, and engineers, who would work with factories to address those issues — and it was in this role that Kelley began hearing that the TrailBlazer recall had not gone far enough.

Dealers complained that SUVs not covered by the recall were still leaking fuel. Kelley contacted one of GM’s field product investigators, employees who look into possible recall issues, and weeks later, contacted him again. He got a listless response. “’I’ve done all I can,” Kelley testified that the investigator told him. “I wanted more vehicles recalled. They shot me down.”

Kelley decided to escalate his campaign. In a June 17, 2002, memo addressed to his boss’s boss, Keith McKenzie, director of car brand quality, Kelley was direct. “It is my belief that General Motors is violating the law by not properly dealing with safety issues that are persistent and ongoing,” Kelley wrote.

“I have spent several years trying to work through the system at General Motors to address these concerns with a goal of protecting our customers and stockholders.” McKenzie could not be reached for comment.

McKenzie stonewalled, according to Kelley. Instead of dealing with the complaint, he said, McKenzie warned him about another GM employee who had raised safety-related complaints and how it had derailed his career, the court filings show.

Kelley agreed to tone down his memo, resubmitting a version that said GM was “not properly dealing with certain safety issues.”

He again gave the company 60 days to address them or he’d go to “the proper law enforcement agencies”.

At home in Owosso, Kelley wrestled with taking his concerns public. After putting their kids to bed, Kelley and his wife would sit at their kitchen table and talk late into the night.

Beth Kelley says: “He would say: ‘What do you think I should do?’ and: ‘Do you want to do this?’” she says now. “If he felt strongly enough that people could potentially die from the safety issue, then I didn’t have any doubt in my mind that we needed to do it.” On January 9, 2003, he filed suit against GM.

Kelley’s allegations — which predated the ignition switch problems — made a small splash; Beth remembers the news crawling across CNN’s ticker. What little momentum there was faded as the challenges of fighting the giant that is GM became apparent.

GM argued for a judge to dismiss the case because Kelley did not have standing as a whistleblower — the law required such a person to prove he had suffered for his actions, and Kelley still had a job with the company and was getting the same pay and benefits.

During a deposition, GM’s outside lawyer, Peter Kellett, pressed Kelley to admit that raising concerns about trucks wasn’t part of his job description, as an inspector of cars.

Kelley’s lawsuit didn’t get far. Court records show that his attorney didn’t appear at a hearing in April 2004, and the case was closed without a response from his lawyer. A later motion to reconsider was denied. Kelley’s lawyer, Rose Goff, became sick around this time, eventually dying of cancer.

The Kelleys, who had spent more than $20,000 on legal fees, received a payment covering most of the cost from their lawyer’s insurance company because of the handling of the case, Beth says.

Courtland Kelley sank into depression. His dark brown hair turned snow-white in the span of a year. Van Alstine, a neighbour, who is also Kelley’s doctor, said: “I clearly saw him age drastically.” Beth encouraged him to leave GM. He stayed for his family, she says. “He would always say, ‘You know, if I stay this amount of time, I’ll get my retirement’,” she says.

At GM, Kelley has been floating from position to position, says McAleer, who was laid off from GM in 2004 and keeps in close contact. “He still has a job — he doesn’t have a career,” he says. “He has no possibility of a promotion.”

As Kelley’s lawsuit petered out in 2004, GM was replacing the Cavalier with the Cobalt. Models produced from 2005 to 2007 contained the ignition switch that could easily slip out of the “on” position at the touch of a driver’s knee or simply from bumps in the road. Airbags failed to deploy in dozens of accidents.

Amy Breen, 42, an Ohio pre-school teacher, was killed in a 2007 crash, even though she was wearing her seatbelt. Marie Sachse, 81, died when her Saturn Ion, which used the Cobalt’s ignition switch, left the road and struck a tree in Missouri in 2009.

In June 2013, Dany Dubuc-Marquis, 23, of Quebec, lost control of his Cobalt and was pronounced dead at the scene. At GM, the mounting evidence caused little alarm. “Throughout the entire 11-year odyssey, there was no demonstrated sense of urgency, right to the very end,” Valukas, the former US attorney, wrote in his report.

It is impossible to know what might have happened differently if Kelley had remained an inspector of GM’s small cars as it moved from Cavalier to Cobalt. He was replaced by his employee, Oakley, who in March 2005 reviewed a memo from a GM engineer on the Cobalt ignition.

Interviewed three times by Valukas’s team, Oakley told investigators that he felt pressure to describe something as a convenience issue rather than a safety problem, and cited Kelley’s ordeal. GM declined to make Oakley available for comment.

Yet in one indirect way, Oakley tried to rouse concern. In a draft of a service bulletin to dealers, he included the term “stall,” a “hot” word known to attract attention. Had it actually gone out to car sellers, federal regulators would have most likely seen it.

But as they had with Kelley three years before, GM’s product investigators tamped down the response, striking the language. It was one of the many occasions in which GM engineers failed to link the ignition switch position and disabled airbags, Valukas concluded. From beginning to end, the story of the Cobalt is one of numerous failures leading to tragic results for many,” he wrote.

With the report out, CEO Barra was set to return to the US House for more questions on June 18. While she has described the Valukas inquiry as thorough, she has also attempted to limit its implications. “In this case with these vehicles, we didn’t do our job,” Barra said in the June 5 employee town hall.

Lawmakers may want to ask her whether the account of Courtland Kelley suggests the company’s problems go deeper.

On Monday, GM recalled another 8.45 million more vehicles, bringing to 25.7 million the total recalled so far this year — a record for any car company.

In response to questions from Bloomberg, GM issued a statement on June 17: “We are going to reexamine Mr Kelley’s employment claims as well as the safety concerns that he has, and that’s part of our redoubled effort to ensure customer safety.”

A week after her appalled husband woke her up in the middle of the night, Beth Kelley is sitting in her tidy kitchen, as her son, who’s changed his mind about becoming an engineer after watching his father’s tribulations, hovers nearby. Is sheIs Beth Kelley surprised that more whistleblowers didn’t emerge at GM?

She laughs. “I’m surprised there aren’t more people who stand up for what they believe,” she says. “But am I surprised that they wouldn’t go against GeneralMotors? I suppose not.”