US safety regulator imposes $7k daily fine over failure to inform defective ignition

The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has decided to impose a $7,000 a day fine until General Motors Co complies with addressing over one-third of their requests regarding the recall of its 2.59 million small cars. Bloomberg said that the vehicle recall was issued due to a defect that has links to 13 deaths. The regulator has set an April 3 deadline and will be waiting for the US automaker to fully answer questions on why it decided to wait for 13 long years to issue a vehicle recall.

Chief executive officer David E. Johnson of Strategic Vision LLC, a public relations and branding company based in Atlanta, told Bloomberg, "They can't get their stories straight. They promised to be transparent. It looks like they're hiding something now."

In a letter from NHTSA Chief Counsel O. Kevin Vincent addressed to general counsel Lucy Clark Dougherty of GM North America, he said that Gm has now racked up $28,000 in accrued fines.

In a March 4 order, Bloomberg said NHTSA has required GM to provide answers to questions on 107 points that would provide details of the company's extent of knowledge of the ignition-switch defect reportedly found on six Chevrolet, Pontiac and Saturn models that have been sold in the US. NHTSA also asked GM on what steps the automaker had taken to probe engineering concerns and consumer complaints about reports of vehicles stalling beginning 2005. Vincent had said that GM is aware that they have yet to comply with its order on April 4.

In an emailed statement, GM spokesman Greg Martin said the company has already produced 21,000 documents covering a decade-worth of information. He added, "We believe that NHTSA shares our desire to provide accurate and substantive responses. We will continue to provide responses and facts as soon as they become available and hope to go about this in a constructive manner."

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General Motors ignition defect recall, US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, General Motors Co

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