GM CEO Mary Barra Speculated To Become Next NHTSA Head

What could possibly go wrong?

GM CEO Mary Barra Speculated To Become Next NHTSA Head

• BY SEAN SZYMKOWSKI
• — APR 26, 2017

The position of National Highway Traffic Safety Administrator remains open as one of the numerous slots President Donald Trump has yet to fill. However, there’s already some speculation as to who may fill the vacancy.

The Detroit News reports General Motors CEO Mary Barra is speculated to possibly become the next head of the NHTSA. While purely speculations from insiders, it has raised alarms with advocacy groups who fear turning the agency over to an automotive executive could produce poor results.

“He has a penchant of appointing people who have been regulated and allowing them to dismantle agencies,” Rosemary Shahan, president of the Sacramento, Calif.-based Consumers for Auto Reliability and Safety group, said. “You have all these companies who have been under investigations for safety violations recently. I wouldn’t be surprised if he appointed somebody from one of them. It would be consistent with his other appointments.”

On Barra specifically, she said, “[The president] seems to be very friendly with her.”

Barra continues to serve on President Trump’s Strategic and Policy Forum, which houses a handful of business leaders to advise the president from the private sector. The White House and GM both declined to comment on the speculations.

Skeptics say if an auto executive were to be appointed to the position it would cause major conflicts of interest with the government organization and make for major deregulation in automotive safety. In fact, the same government organization continues to keep a watchful eye on GM to ensure safety standards are met.

The facts won’t be known until President Trump officially names his candidate, whenever that may be.

Read more: http://gmauthority.com/blog/2017/04/gm-ceo-mary-barra-speculated-to-become-next-nhtsa-head/#ixzz4fV5yOleY

Is there a reason....?

The article below, picked up by a 'local paper' pillories General Motors' Memo....so how come they ignored TOYOTA?

This is outdated and we'll never know the true numbers.....one study determined that only 13% of people ever file complaint....

General Motors was wrong concealing a failure that caused the deaths of 13 people...WHAT ABOUT TOYOTA?


Is TOYOTA writing General Motors' articles to excuse TOYOTA'S conduct?

Carmaker issues list of taboo terms

By DAVID UNDERCOFFLER

LOS ANGELES TIMES

May 21, 2014

 

 

Tony Cervone has some memorization ahead of him. There are 69 words that his new employer desperately wants to keep out of people's minds — words like "mutilating," "inferno" and "Kevorkianesque."

 

General Motors on Monday named Tony Cervone senior vice president of GM global communications, effective immediately. He will report to CEO Mary Barra and rejoins GM from Volkswagen where he served as executive vice president of group communications for Volkswagen Group of America.

 

Cervone starts immediately with the unenviable task of polishing the reputation of a brand that has been besieged by lawsuits, fines, government investigations and millions of recalls tied to faulty ignition switches connected to the deaths of at least 13 people.

 

The most recent chapter in this saga of woe for GM came Friday, when the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration fined the automaker $35 million — the maximum allowed — for waiting a decade after it first learned of the problem to actually issue the recalls.

 

Within the documents NHTSA released as part of the settlement was an internal presentation from 2008. In it, GM outlined 69 words or phrases it felt should be avoided in any discussion of the (then potential) recalls.

 

Dubbed Judgment Words, employees were warned, "These documents should not contain speculations, opinions, vague non descriptive words, or words with emotional connotations."

 

Reading like absurd answers from an "Addams Family" game of Mad-Libs, here's an alphabetical list of the no-no words:

 

Always, annihilate, apocalyptic, asphyxiating, bad, Band-Aid, big time, brakes like an 'X' car, cataclysmic, catastrophic, Challenger (the Space Shuttle that exploded in 1986, killing seven astronauts), chaotic, Cobain, condemns, Corvair-like, crippling, critical, dangerous, deathtrap, debilitating, decapitating, defect, defective, detonate, disemboweling, enfeebling, evil, eviscerated, explode, failed, failure, flawed, genocide, ghastly, grenade-like, grisly, gruesome, Hindenburg, hobbling, horrific, impaling, inferno, Kevorkianesque, lacerating, life-threatening, maiming, malicious, mangling, maniacal, mutilating, never, potentially-disfiguring, powder keg, problem, rolling sarcophagus, safety, safety-related, serious, spontaneous combustion, startling, suffocating, suicidal, terrifying, Titanic, tomblike, unstable, widow-maker, words or phrases with biblical connotations, and you're toast.

 

The GM presentation then goes on to suggestion alternatives. Instead of "bad," how about saying "below specification"? Don't say defective, say "does not perform to design."

 

But this is the new GM. Included in Friday's $35-million settlement, the automaker agreed to improve employee training on how to handle recalls: "Such training will expressly disavow statements diluting the safety message in the nature of certain statements."

 

This means that if Cervone fails at mopping up GM's image, his bosses at the automaker will now have full reign to call him into their office and say "You're toast."

 

 

http://www.capecodonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20140521/BIZ/405210307/-1/NEWSLETTER100

 

 

The Center for Auto Safety offered the pdf from the DOJ Statement of Facts,  regarding the TOYOTA Settlement, well worth reading more for what's NOT included.


Excerpts:

51. On or about November 26, 2009, CQE-J issued a directive to engineers at

TOYOTA not to implement any design improvements for the North American market related to

floor mat entrapment in models other than the eight subject to the recall unless the subject model

was already undergoing a full model redesign. The justification offered for the directive was that

design changes would “most likely mislead the concerned authorities and consumers and such to

believe that we have admitted having defective vehicles.” (Emphasis in original).

52. On or about December 10, 2009, only after the floor mat entrapment recall

remedy had been fully negotiated with NHTSA and announced to the public, TOYOTA finally

issued to A-Pedal Company renewed pedal design change instructions to address sticky pedal in

newly produced vehicles in the United States. Whereas the single design change instruction that

had issued for the U.S. market on or about October 5, 2009 (and then been cancelled on or about

October 21, 2009) had called for a “major” change that would have entailed scrapping of old

parts, the new design change instructions were issued as “minor” changes – a designation that

entailed no part number change and allowed for use of old, defective parts until inventory was

exhausted. TOYOTA engineers decided to characterize the changes as minor to prevent their

detection by NHTSA. The newly issued design change instructions were to go into effect in or

about mid-January 2010, around the same time that TOYOTA would be implementing pedal

design changes for models encompassed by the floor mat entrapment recall.

 

53. At or about the same time that TOYOTA was issuing renewed design change

instructions to remedy sticky pedal in newly produced U.S. vehicles, CQE-J instructed TMS that

issuance of a “technical service bulletin” to Toyota dealers alerting them to the sticky pedal

problem and explaining how it should be remedied for vehicles in the field was “not permitted.”

Under NHTSA regulations, any such communication would have to have been disclosed to

NHTSA.

 

 

 

Look sincere and LIE!

 

 

 

65. TOYOTA made inaccurate statements during the course of an investigation

initiated by the United States Congress in or about late January 2010. Consistent with the talking

points described above, but contrary to certain internal documents that TOYOTA had itself

produced to Congress among thousands of other documents, TOYOTA repeated to Congress that it

became aware of sticky pedal in the United States in October 2009, when in fact it had been

investigating sticky pedal in the United States since no later than August 2009. 

OK! So TOYOTA lied about floor mats and accelerator pedals....where's the rest of TOYOTA'S LIES?

Where is the following included in the DOJ TOYOTA SETTLEMENT and why the cover up?

 "Toyota's killer firmware: Bad design and its consequences") what Mr. Barr concluded:

>  Toyota's electronic throttle control system (ETCS) source code is of unreasonable quality.
>  Toyota's source code is defective and contains bugs, including bugs that can cause unintended acceleration (UA)
>  Code-quality metrics predict presence of additional bugs.
>  Toyota's fail safes are defective and inadequate (referring to them as a 'house of cards' safety architecture).
>  Misbehaviours of Toyota's ETCS are a cause of UA.

 

From:

Government the "Toyota Way"

CLICK ON LINK TO READ THE REST