DETROIT (AP) — The U.S. government’s highway safety
agency has opened a formal investigation into air bag failures in some
Chevrolet Impala full-size cars made by General Motors.
The
National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said Friday it began the
probe after receiving a petition from Donald Friedman of Xprts LLC, a
Santa Barbara, California, company that examines crashes.
Friedman
examined an April 2011 car crash in Hidalgo County, Texas, that
severely injured an elderly man named Roberto Martinez. His wife Aurora
was driving their 2008 Impala when it was hit by an SUV and forced into a
concrete highway divider and a fixed barrier in front of the car. The
passenger air bags didn’t deploy, and Roberto suffered permanent brain
injuries, according to a lawsuit filed by the couple against GM. He died
about 10 months later.
Friedman alleges that because Roberto
Martinez was bounced around during the incident, the weight sensor in
the passenger seat misread his weight and didn’t fire the air bag. The
air bag is supposed to inflate for anyone other than a child or small
adult.
The petition, filed last November, asked NHTSA to
investigate and recall the cars that use the same computer to sense a
passenger’s weight. It says GM used the same system in other models from
2004 through 2010. The inquiry covers about 320,000 Impalas from the
2007-2009 model years. Friedman says the cars should be recalled and the
computers reprogrammed.
A NHTSA spokeswoman said late Friday that Friedman’s petition had been granted and the agency had opened
an investigation.
NHTSA
said in documents that it will review all available data and take
appropriate action. But it said initial reviews found no defects.
"However, in an abundance of caution regarding the performance of air
bags in the nation’s fleet, NHTSA is looking further into this
allegation," the agency said in a statement issued Friday evening.
GM
may be getting greater scrutiny from NHTSA after the company admitted
knowing about a deadly ignition switch problem in some of its older
small cars for more than a decade, yet it didn’t recall them until this
year. Eventually the company recalled 2.6 million cars such as the
Chevrolet Cobalt for that problem. NHTSA fined GM the maximum $35
million for failing to disclose information in the case. Lawmakers have
said the agency should have spotted the problem years earlier and forced
a GM recall.
The Martinez case was settled out of court about two
years ago, said the couple’s attorney, Manuel Guerra. He would not
disclose the sum. Friedman was hired by Guerra to evaluate the case.
Friedman
said in an interview Friday that he filed the petition so the
government would address the problem in other vehicles. "It seemed to me
that it was an important thing to get in front of NHTSA and have the
other vehicles that could have had the same defect taken care of," he
said.
GM spokesman Alan Adler says the company will cooperate. He
said GM did its own review and decided not to take any action, although
he would not comment on the reasons for that decision.
A formal
investigation means NHTSA is assigning investigators and eventually will
determine if a safety defect exists. If there is a defect, the agency
will seek a recall.
Clarence Ditlow, head of the nonprofit Center
for Auto Safety and a frequent government critic, said the agency should
examine all fatal crashes involving the cars in which the air bags
didn’t deploy and determine why they didn’t.
Ditlow also said he fears that regulators may have missed a case with air bag problems similar to the
Cobalt.
The
Cobalt case touched off Justice Department and congressional
investigations and forced GM to do a companywide safety review that
brought 60 recalls affecting 29 million vehicles so far this year.