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Just How Much Did GM's Mary Barra Know About Defects?

April 12, 2014, 7:31 AM

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Mary Barra

General Motors is learning painful lessons in public relations.

What's certain is: The company needs to be truthful and it needs to get out as much information as it can. Any good public relations expert will tell you, get out as much info as possible or investigators and the media will keep digging and you'll turn a few bad stories into dozens and dozens of bad ones. Tell a fib, and you lose credibility.

Bill Vlasic and Hilary Stout of The New York Times report that new documents raise questions about how much GM's new CEO Mary Barra knew and when did she know it?

Last month,  Barra told a U.S. House committee she became aware of a serious safety issue with the Chevrolet Cobalt in December, two months before the company announced a recall that would eventually cover 2.6 million cars, The Times reports.

The Times writes:

But an email contained among 700 pages of internal G.M. documents released on Friday by the same House committee raises questions of whether she knew more about safety problems with the Cobalt.

The correspondence shows that as a G.M. vice president in 2011, Ms. Barra was alerted to widening problems with power steering in the Cobalt and other models, an indication that she was made aware of safety problems in those cars earlier than she had suggested.

The documents, released by the House Energy and Commerce Committee, detail years of deliberations inside G.M. over a dangerous flaw in the ignition switch of small cars that the company did not disclose to the public until this year.

--- Allan Lengel


Read more:  The New York Times


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