General Motors have been driven to find answers

Many parents of young motorists are asking questions about the death of their children after General Motors recalled models that were aimed at first-time drivers, write Jeff Green and Patrick Lee

WHEN Bill Trautwein offered to buy his daughter a car to drive to college, she went for the blue one — a used 2005 Chevrolet Cobalt that matched the colour on the Florida Gators uniform her big brother wore on the way to two national football championships.

Sarah Trautwein was driving the car on a June morning in 2009 when she left the road, struck a tree and died.

While her father says he assumed his daughter had fallen asleep at the wheel, General Motors’ recall of models including Sarah’s has made him reconsider: The ignition switches in these cars can be inadvertently clicked off, GM said last month, cutting power to the engine and airbags, steering, and brakes.

A driver would find herself behind a hard-to-muscle wheel of a coasting car, with suddenly stiffer brakes.

Sarah, then 19, probably wouldn’t have known what to do, he said. “She was a young driver. It would have probably freaked her out.”

Years after fatal accidents involving Cobalts, Saturn Ions and other recalled models, a grim picture is taking form. The recalled vehicles were predominantly entry-level cars marketed to first-time drivers.

“It’s a young person’s car,” said Bill Visnic, senior editor at auto website Edmunds.com and a veteran of over 20 years of test drives. “When you turn off the ignition and you lose power steering, especially, it’s a very panicky feeling.”

GM, in announcing its global recalls of 1.6m vehicles in February, linked the ignition flaws to 12 deaths. Hundreds of deaths have been reported to regulators in crashes of the recalled models in which airbags failed to deploy.

Now, plaintiffs’ attorneys are seeking to establish whether some of those deadly events may have started when an ignition key was rattled or bumped out of position. The prospective examples that are emerging span the US and include the old and the young, but strikingly the young.

A description of Sarah Trautwein’s accident appeared in a motion filed on March 24 by attorney Bob Hilliard in federal court in Corpus Christi, Texas. The motion, part of a lawsuit against GM for economic damages on behalf of two plaintiffs and a proposed group, listed eight possible victims of malfunctioning GMs — seven of whom were 25 or younger.

The fate of such drivers promises to come to the fore today as US senate and house committee members grill GM executives over why the company didn’t mount its recall sooner. Mary Barra, GM’s recently named chief executive and the mother of two teenagers, is due to testify.

Barra, who has apologised for GM’s delay, has said the events hit home with her as a mother. The families of several young people who died in crashes involving the recalled cars have said they plan to attend the hearings.

GM said last Friday that it is expanding its recall by 971,000 vehicles worldwide to cover 2008-2011 vehicles that were built with safe ignition switches but may have received faulty replacements, bringing the total to 2.59m recalled small cars. No deaths or injuries have been associated with the newly recalled models, it said.

On the same day, it instructed dealers to stop selling some 2013 and 2014 Chevrolet Cruze cars.

“We deeply regret the circumstances that led to the recall,” GM said last Thursday. “We have launched an internal review to give us an unvarnished report on what happened. We will hold ourselves accountable and improve our processes so our customers do not experience this again.”

GM has told regulators some employees knew of the faulty switches as early as 2001. In 2005, GM said drivers should be able to respond to a power loss in a Cobalt by restarting the engine in neutral and proceeding on their way.

For many drivers, it wasn’t so simple. In spring 2005, according to court documents, GM dealers started receiving complaints from owners whose Cobalts, Ions and other models were shutting down unexpectedly. Many came from parents who said their young drivers had brought their cars to a halt, often in the middle of a road. Others said their kids had crashed into ditches, snowbanks, or other cars.

The recalls raise a new round of questions for many parents.

“You can’t replace her. What can I do?” said Trautwein, a 53-year-old retired military pilot.

Referring to new lawsuits against GM, he said: “Money isn’t the object. But hopefully it stops someone else from dying.”

The recalled models emerged during a period of severe cost-cutting in the years before GM’s 2009 bankruptcy reorganisation. GM designed Cobalts and Ions to target first-time buyers, said Karl Brauer, senior analyst for Kelley Blue Book, a car information website. It priced them to compete with the Toyota Corolla and the Honda’s Civic.

“Their audience was aging,” he said. The antidote was to build “attractive, small, entry-level cars that younger people buy”.

Soon after the cars hit the market, GM’s dealers began receiving complaints about unintentional shut-offs, including at least 16 from parents. A Colorado woman told a dealership that her 19-year-old son’s Cobalt stalled as he entered an off-ramp at 110kph, sending him crashing into a ditch. He hit his head and lived. A father in Kentucky said his 18-year-old daughter guided her Cobalt to a stop, once in the middle of the road, after three separate stalls.

The complaints, from March 2005 through April 2009, were among 90 dealer accounts that were read into a deposition in a wrongful-death lawsuit in Georgia that GM settled in September.

“Customer states how the car shut off on daughter at 90kph yesterday. Customer states now scared to put her daughter in the car,” said an Ohio dealer’s summary read into the deposition. Another, from a Georgia mother who complained of stalls: “Customer is begging for a new car. She is too afraid the car will do it again while her daughter drives it.”

GM countered concerns by asking dealers to tell customers to take heavy items from their key rings, lest the extra weight turn the key. Several engineers deposed in the Georgia lawsuit testified that even if these models’ brakes and steering lost power, the cars could be manoeuvred.

“The Cobalt is still controllable” if it loses power inadvertently, Alan Adler, a GM spokesman, said in a 2005 statement issued after two newspaper car reviewers reported unexpected shutdowns.

“The engine can be restarted after shifting to neutral.”

The recall also marks a further erosion of GM’s plan to use the Cobalt and Ion to capture lifelong customers. Young buyers haven’t yet established many brand loyalties, said Alan Baum, a car analyst&. “These people are up for grabs,

and if you give them a reason not to buy your models, you could end up losing them.”

In 2005, the Cobalt was deemed the “most buzz-worthy” among 49 new nameplate car launches by 19-to 28-year-olds, according to an online survey at the time.

Heather Heaster turned 16 that year, and her dad told her she could pick out a car. Her parents, loyal to GM cars, wanted Heather to buy a Chevrolet, according to Heather and her mother, Gwenda Heaster.

Heather picked out a bright red 2005 Cobalt with a sunroof. She had it about a month, she said, when it stalled at dusk on a two-lane road near the family’s home in Crawley, West Virginia.

“You saw the speedometer and the fuel gauge and they all just went to zero,” Heather recalled. “I couldn’t turn my wheel because the power steering cut out. And the brakes, I went to stop, and you couldn’t push them in. Luckily, when it happened, there was a place to pull off.”

A mechanic at the local dealership blamed her heavy key chain, she said, for torquing the key out of position. She removed a little cloth boot, a decorative eagle and a lanyard, she said. The stalls continued. The dealership eventually gave her a 2006 model that she said didn’t stall.

The Heaster family’s experience was among those read into the deposition in the Georgia wrongful death suit. Reminded of it all almost a decade later, Heather, now a 25-year-old dental student at West Virginia University, said she wouldn’t buy a Chevy again given what she’s learned of GM’s handling of the situation.

“Now it’s too late. People have lost their lives over this,” she said.

The latest wave of probes and lawsuits against GM will help explore what separated Heather Heaster’s experience from the final drive of Sarah Trautwein.

Her mother, Renee, is working with Hilliard on the case. She declined to comment until Hilliard’s Texas firm receives information it has requested from police about the ignition switch’s final position in the daughter’s car, according to the firm. Police confirmed that the airbag did not deploy in Trautwein’s crash, Gomez said.

Among the young drivers featured in Hilliard’s filing last week is Michael Sharkey, who had owned his used 2006 Chevy Cobalt for about two weeks in June 2012 when it veered off State Route 22 near Dresden, New York, crashed into a rock wall, and burst into flames. Sharkey, badly burned, crawled from the car and died at the scene.

The 21-year-old had saved up his money and borrowed more from his dad to buy the Chevy when a Toyota model he was considering wasn’t available, said his mother, Cherie Sharkey. A 6ft 2in football and baseball player, Michael was a careful driver, his mother recalled: He would yell at her, she said, for not using her turn signals or for answering her phone while driving.

At the time of the crash, there were no indications that Michael had used drugs or alcohol, she said. No one knew what had happened. Now she, too, is concerned the crash may be linked to the GM recall.

“You expect your vehicle to be safe,” Cherie Sharkey said. “It’s not like he was doing anything stupid, and that is so wrong.”