The writer, a Los Angeles freelancer and former Detroit News business reporter, writes a blog, Starkman Approved.
By Eric Starkman
Kendra Blocker (Linkedin)
GM CEO Mary Barra has enjoyed an abundance of puff pieces over the years, but few are as egregious as the Detroit Free Press story published Monday laundering the automaker’s passenger safety record and recasting the company as a champion of seat belt usage.
GM as an advocate of passenger safety? The story has about as much credibility as an article praising President Trump for elevating respectful discourse on social media.
The Free Press introduces readers to Kendra Blocker, GM’s lead seat belt engineer and technical specialist, who has been featured in a recent media campaign urging increased seat belt use, particularly for passengers seated in the rear of vehicles. Blocker appeared on a local Atlanta television station before Thanksgiving, participated in an iHeart radio segment, and has made the podcast rounds.
This piece is not an indictment of Blocker. GM’s public relations team almost certainly put her forward, and she should not be blamed for the campaign. GM’s media handlers understand from long experience that many reporters covering the company function less as skeptics than as stenographers, faithfully publishing what the automaker serves up.
Seat belts save lives. That fact is beyond dispute. While it is commendable that Blocker is working to make seat belt reminders more prominent — or more annoying — in GM vehicles, the effort hardly qualifies as corporate heroism. GM is complying with a National Highway Traffic Safety Administration rule finalized in December 2024, a point the Free Press itself acknowledged.
The Freep’s GM seat belt framing omits some inconvenient history.
Automakers long understood the life-saving benefits of seat belts but resisted installing them for years. Seat belts became mandatory equipment only after Ralph Nader published his landmark 1965 book Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile. Nader exposed an industry that prioritized styling and profits over basic safety, prompting public outrage and congressional action that eventually led to the creation of today’s NHTSA.
When Barra assumed leadership of GM in 2014, she inherited the fallout from the company’s deadly ignition switch scandal, a defect linked to more than 100 deaths and hundreds of injuries. Investigations revealed GM knew about the problem for years and concealed it.
A congressional committee later released a 2011 internal email sent to Barra, then a senior product development executive, discussing whether the Saturn Ion should be included in an existing recall of Chevrolet Cobalts. Those vehicles were later recalled for the ignition switch defect, raising serious questions about what Barra knew and when.
Barra ultimately fired mid-level engineers with little real authority, offering them up as sacrificial lambs while senior leadership escaped accountability. Barra was widely praised by the media after vowing that safety would never again be compromised under her watch.
In 2020, GM agreed to spend more than $1 billion to recall and repair nearly six million pickup trucks and SUVs equipped with potentially dangerous Takata air bag inflators. GM had petitioned NHTSA four times beginning in 2016 to avoid the recall, insisting the inflators were safe based on testing and field performance.
Vehicle owners accused GM of once again putting profits ahead of safety. Worldwide, at least 27 people were killed by exploding Takata inflators, including 18 in the United States.
More recently, The Wall Street Journal reported that from 2015 to 2024, roughly 12 million vehicles were recalled for safety defects that could prevent air bags from deploying. Thirty-seven of those recalls involved some General Motors models, and about 2.6 million vehicles — roughly 22 percent — remain unrepaired.
A genuinely meaningful public safety campaign would focus on warning consumers about the dangers of ignoring air bag recalls. GM understandably prefers not to emphasize that message, as it would be costly and uncomfortable. Blocker is exceptionally well-qualified to speak on the issue, having previously led GM’s engineering team for air bags and sensors in the company’s occupant protection group.
GM’s safety issues also involved Cruise, the company’s shuttered autonomous vehicle subsidiary. In 2024, Cruise agreed to pay $500,000 to avoid federal criminal prosecution for filing a false report intended to mislead regulators about an accident involving one of its vehicles. Barra served as chair of Cruise’s board.
GM was also among the automakers that successfully fought off efforts by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to mandate a recall of tens of millions of air bag inflators made by ARC Automotive Inc., a global air bag manufacturer headquartered in Knoxville, Tennessee, with production facilities in the United States, Mexico, and China.
The NHTSA concluded that certain ARC inflators can rupture and send metal fragments into a vehicle cabin, posing an unreasonable risk of serious injury or death, and has linked such ruptures to multiple injuries and at least two fatalities. GM models account for a substantial share of the vehicles equipped with ARC air bags.
If GM truly wanted to lead on passenger safety, it could support Rep. Debbie Dingell’s Congressional efforts to mandate technology that detects drunk drivers and prevents impaired motorists from starting their vehicles. Then again, civil liberties and privacy rights groups, including the ACLU, have raised very legitimate concerns that such systems could create new forms of surveillance.
Those concerns carry particular weight given GM’s own record on data privacy.
GM is currently facing lawsuits by state attorneys general and class-action lawsuits for tracking customers’ driving behavior and selling that data to brokers, who in turn sold it to insurance companies. Some GM owners later experienced sharp insurance premium increases as a result.
Given GM’s history, the Detroit Free Press portraying General Motors as a paragon of passenger safety is not journalism. It is reputation laundering that may please GM’s PR department but does a profound disservice to the paper’s readers.
Starkman can be reached at eric@starkmanapproved.com Anonymity assured and protected.
