House panel: Safety agency mishandled GM recall

WASHINGTON -- The agency responsible for safety on the nation's roads was years late in detecting a deadly problem with General Motors cars and lacks the expertise to oversee increasingly complex vehicles, congressional Republicans charged in a report Tuesday.

The report by a House committee's GOP majority raised questions about the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's ability to keep the public safe, and came as the Senate convened a hearing on the safety agency's shortcomings.

Safety regulators should have discovered GM's faulty ignition switches seven years before the company recalled 2.6 million cars to fix the deadly problem, the report concluded.

It also said the agency didn't understand how air bags worked, lacked accountability and failed to share information internally.

"As vehicle functions and safety systems become increasingly complex and interconnected, NHTSA needs to keep pace with these rapid advancements in technology," the report said. "As evidenced by the GM recall, this may be a greater challenge than even NHTSA understands."

At least 19 people died in crashes caused by the faulty switches in GM small cars such as the Chevrolet Cobalt. The company acknowledged knowing about the problem for at least a decade, but it didn't recall the cars until February. The delays left the problem on the roads, causing crashes that resulted in deaths and injuries. Lawmakers have said they expect the death toll to rise to near 100.

NHTSA has fined GM the maximum $35 million for failing to report information on the switches, but the panel found many of the bureaucratic snafus that plagued GM are present at NHTSA.

"While NHTSA now complains about GM's switch, it seems NHTSA was asleep at the switch too," Rep. Tim Murphy, R-Pa., said in a statement.

NHTSA blamed GM for the delays and said many problems cited by the committee were fixed in a 2011 review. GM, the agency said, hid information by fixing switches without changing the part numbers, causing the number of complaints about the switches to decline and skewing data.

The agency said it has a strong record of pursuing defects, influencing almost 1,300 recalls covering 95 million vehicles and parts in the last decade. NHTSA also said it's using sophisticated tools to search for defects and it has an improved complaint-tracking process. It's discussing with Congress the need for more investigators.

At the Senate hearing Tuesday, David Friedman, acting administrator of the NHTSA, took exception to an assertion by Sen. Dean Heller, R-Nev., that GM's failure to share key information with NHTSA was due to incompetence rather than intent.

"It wasn't simply incompetence on their part," Friedman said. "They were actively trying to hide the ball. NHTSA was working to find the ball."

Heller and Senate Democrat Claire McCaskill of Missouri called on the White House to name a permanent chief of NHTSA, saying it will be hard for an interim chief to lead reforms.

A key criticism in the House report was NHTSA defect investigators didn't understand until earlier this year after GM began recalling cars that an ignition switch defect that could cause the vehicle's power to shut off or move to the "accessory" position while the car was moving could prevent the airbag's from deploying.

"It is tragic that the evidence was staring NHTSA in the face and the agency didn't identify the warnings," Committee Chairman Fred Upton, R-Mich., said. "NHTSA exists not just to process what the company finds, but to dig deeper. They failed."

NHTSA received consumer complaints about the GM switches for years, but didn't order a recall investigation. Besides disabling the airbags, the faulty switches also could shut down key systems such as power steering and power brakes, causing crashes.

The House committee said a Wisconsin state trooper sent a report to NHTSA in 2007 about a crash that killed two teenage girls. The air bags failed to inflate, and the trooper traced the problem to ignition switches. The agency also commissioned two outside investigations that reached the same conclusion in that crash and another, yet no one at NHTSA connected the information.

NHTSA rejected a proposal to start an investigation, relying on a general consumer complaint trend that showed GM cars didn't stand out from comparable vehicles in number of complaints or reported defects, the report said.

Other findings by the House committee majority:

* An updated 2007 report on the Wisconsin crash for NHTSA by Indiana University included a reference to a GM service bulletin to dealers telling them the switches could unexpectedly shut off engines. Yet NHTSA investigators told the committee they didn't know about the bulletin until after the recall.

* NHTSA investigators didn't understand how advanced air bags worked, and instead based their assessment of GM's problems on outdated knowledge. "It was not until after GM announced a recall of these vehicles in February 2014 that NHTSA understood the connection between the ignition switch position and air bag deployment," the report said.

* Budget constraints have limited NHTSA's training. The lead air bag investigator assigned to the GM case didn't remember any paid training courses in the past six to eight years.

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Auto Writer Dee-Ann Durbin contributed with Krisher from Detroit. Follow Joan Lowy on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/AP--Joan -- Lowy