researcher hope the companionship will be backed up in their study to help children with cancer. thanks for watching al jazeera america. i'm del walters in new york. "inside story" is next. didn't take back the cars and warn the public. after 13 deaths later the gm recall is the inside story. >> hello, i'm ray suarez. general motors has issued a recall of more than 1.5 million older compact dollars. this news go much further than the occasional design flaw that

shows up. in the particular case of the chevy cobalt, reports came in a decade ago of a car that would shut down in the middle of a drive with occasionally disastrous results. general meters knew. and for some reason the cars were not recalled until last month. that meanings drawings, e-mails , they want to know what the company knew and when. they want n to know why this recall took a decade to happen. >> reporter: the national highway traffic administration may have known as early as 2007 about a faulty ignition problem in over

1 million general motors cars. that's according to the head joan claybrook, who has asked for a broken as it investigates gm. and gm may have known about the malfunction in 201 2004 but didt order a recall until last month. it includes various versions of the cobalt, the pontiac g 5 and solstice and the is a tur saturn ion and skies. with the cars engine, electronics and airbags could switch off involuntarily when the key jiggles. in 2005 conducting three special crash investigation noose why gm's new airbag airbags were not deploying, and there were six complaints logged in about the problem from as far back at 2007. they also met in 2007 to discuss

a crash involving an involuntary engine switch off. 31 crashes and 13 deaths are connected to the malfunction including one involving 15-year-old amy rademaker of wisconsin. >> these are our children. they just act like they don't matter. they may not have mattered to gm, but they matter to us. >> reporter: gm is conducting it's own internal investigation and questioning employees. the company's new ceo announced last week she'll be personally directing the recall. it's her first major test as leader of the company which went through bankruptcy restructuring in 2009. in a statement published wednesday, in addition to getting the information that they need, we're doing what we can now to insure our customer's safety and peace of mind. we want our customers to know

that today's gm is committed to fixing this problem in a manner that earns their trust. the u.s. department of transportation's mission i includes safety defects and motor vehicles. in the question of recall why didn't the government step in earlier given that the agency first investigated the problem back in 2007. the probe of gm is expected to continue for six months. if it finds that gm knew of the defect and did not report within the first five days the company could face a fine of $35 million. >> last year only one-third of all car recalls were initiated because of government initiation. the anatomy of a recall on this inside story taking a car back is a huge and costly undertaking

even without all the publicity and damage to the reputation of a brand and model. joining us for a look at general motors widely celebrated as company on a comeback trail and the ignition problem from then and now we have shawn cane president of safety research and strategies. and in santa monica , . and edit in chief for new roads media and contributor to automobile.com. how is this supposed to work ideally when something turns up that is wrong with a car, who tells who is what. >> the requirements are supposed to notify the administration. five days of knowing that defect.

unfortunately in this scenario we see there have been many markers in which literally years past that five days. >> so david, how do we tell the difference if a car company is supposed to report to ntsa between a bum part or one car that didn't come together properly, it was flawed coming off the line and a more systemic problem for an entire make for an entire year. >> you got right to it, ray. when the car company starts looking at a problem, and we know that in 2007 they were involved with ntsa in discussion it's a process to define something as a defect. what they're looking at at that time is the accident data. what caused the accident. what's all the information that they know about the consistents and what might have caused it. this investigation--now at the time clearly they didn't think

that the problem should be defined as a defect that needed prompted recall. that there were other factors that contributed to these crashes and deaths. and so it's a complicated process, and you come to an agreement with the government about defining it. what we're going to find out now in this investigation is there is going to be a paper trail going back to 2004, and we're going to find out who knew what when and what was done, what wasn't done, and why wasn't it done. >> jessica called well, you can easily see that there is several different assignments going on here. a company wants to protect it's reputation, protect its brand and protect the company. the customers and the shareholders when information starts to trickle in, and you know, this is just several dozen reports for a model that sold

over 800,000 units, how do you figure out how to protect who, when, and what you're dealing with here? >> yes, that is the challenging part for any car company. i think you think about cars and all the parts that they have, especially all the new electronics nowadays. to figure out what's going to go wrong. at one point it's very challenging. also, is there enough evidence to think that this is a bigger problem than a few isolated cases. i think that's the hard part of this whole process, and obviously is the crux of what we're seeing today with these recalls. >> shawn, how do you tell the difference between customer misuse and a design flaw? >> that's an interesting question. what they like to do is put this back on the customer. but if you going back in the timeline this problem emerged before the vehicle was even put

in production. gm's own test drivers had problems with the car shutting off. they tried to refocus on inadvertent accuations by the driver' knee or key ring. they have an ignition switch that makes it easy for a driver to activate or deactivate the ignition switch. they did not have enough tourk i torquein the cylinder to hold te keys. but for the civil litigation none of these pieces of information find their way into the public domain. and but for that we probably wouldn't end up with this recall. >> david, isn't there a lot of down side risk in trying to lay this all on the customer? >> absolutely because one of the things that i suspect in in

covering a lot of recalls over the years we're not going to find a broad conspiracy of gm to protect itself and not admit to a problem. what i suspect we're going to find is lousy judgment on the part of a couple of mid-level people, and also at ntsa at the time they didn't take in the information properly at gm people didn't relay or express enough concern about a part off the line. gm, i have t to tell you from covering it for decades gm was, a place with lousy processes. good ideas went to die in the mid ranks of the company. i think it has come back from those times, but we are talking about a period of time when their processes are not great, and where good judgment often died in the good ranks of the company.

>> so jessica, this announcement has been made. the investigation has begun. a very senior and experienced lawyer and prosecutor has been brought to lead up the investigation. how does this trickle in. if someone is shopping for a car or an used car, how does a member of the public come across what we now know about the background not only of the cobalt, but the hhr, the ion, and some discontinued models. >> this is over 1 million vehicles that are effected, a lot of which are here in the united states. a lot of them are older but on the used markets. you know, customers are curious. they hear the story on the 6:00 news or on this program, something related to, when they hear the word deaths people take the word recall more seriously.

as we've seen in the past few years there has been a lot of recall news starting with toyota back in 2010. i think sometimes consumers tune out recall news. what we see now, i think if there is something as serious as you hear the word death or fire, people take a bit more notice. for those customers out there interested in these cars or perhaps sometimes in the future interested in these cars they want to know what is being done to fix it, and well, this ca will this car that i buy today one day be fixed? >> we're going to take a short break. when we come back we'll talk more about the relationship between ntsa, which is supposed to be protecting the driving public, and the auto industry that it keeps an eye on. this is inside story.

>> welcome back to inside story. i'm ray suarez. general motors is recalling more than 1 million cars for ignition switch problems. the national traffic safety administration is deciding whether or not gm acted quickly enough . today gm said it has hired an attorney to head the investigation. david, two-thirds of the recall have been precipitated by the automaker themselves, and a third by the automaker watchdog. is this a relationship that is working? >> i think it does work over time. i've covered a lot of recalls,

and i find this to be an agency to be pretty effective, and certainly does not-- not to kowtow to the automakers. it's also not unlike when you have retired generals going to work for defense contractors. you often see people leaving nts ntsa the department of transportation after they want to leave the public sector and want to go in the private sector going to work for the automakers and the companies that that agency oversees. lo and behold, their job is to manage the process that the company has with the regulator that they just left. so there is some of that, but i have to say by and large. it's been an effective agency over the decade.

>> shawn, do you agree, an effective agency? >> no, i take a little bit different point of view than david, and my point of view is that they're not very effective. this is an agency that has been broken for a number of years. i see that as someone who is interacting with the agency and monitoring the activities very closely. what is troubling is the processes that are broken within the enforcement division at ntsa ntsa. the division that has issued several reports within the enforcement division. they are really not following practices in procedures in ways that lead them to be as effective as they should and could be. what we're seeing now in light of this general motors issue are the optics of enforcement rather than proactive enforcement in use and management of the

limited tools that they have. let's be real. this is a government agency. they're outgunned, outmaneuvered, outspent by the industry. that's always going to be the case. knowing that there has to be effective practices and procedures that need to be followed to ensure that the industry is doing what they should be doing. what we see is a constant break down because there aren't processes and procedures and they've resisted taking those procedures on despite multiple criticisms. >> jessica, where you do you come down on this? you have to strike a balance. there are millions of new cars sold every year. scores of millions already on the road. is this tension between a federal agency and industry set at the right level? are they catching what they need to catch? >> you know-- >> let me-- >> let me give jessica is shot, and then i'll come back to you, david.

>> my point of view, they're not catching the issue-- >> go ahead, jessica. >> as someone who has looked at the ntsa records, because it is all public records, it's a lot of information. for anyone who thinks there is a problem for their vehicles, there is a lot of information. there is a lot of stuff that they're processing. i'm not sure of their policies and procedures internally there, but i know they're dealing with information that is not always perfect that creates a lot of challenges. there is always going to be that natural tension between the automaker and the regulation session. >> david, you wanted to jump in there. >> some years there are more cars recalled than there are sold. we're selling 16 million cars a year, and often there are more cars than that because of the work of the automakers and the agency does. and you cited those statistics as two-thirds of the recalls are

generated by the automakers themselves, which shows that they are, you know, good actors for the most part. i just want to say, shawn's organization does great work, but shawn 's organization feeds plaintiff lawyers in this cases there is a whole industry out there that sometimes works for the good, and sometimes i've seen it abused. they try to catch the automaker in every little thing in order to get a settlement out of it. >> being an expert witness does not preclude being an expert guest on inside story. let me get a response from shawn. >> first of all, i'm not an expert witness. we research and investigate the facts that often under lie these cases. that's what we're doing whether it's for plaintiffs or industry. what i would say is our job is specifically we are getting into the weeds, we dig into the details of the ntsa record, what

is there and what's not there. it's particularly troubling when you see records that are incomplete, missing data, missing documents, vehicles that are not included in recall that should, trickle in later. death and destruction that follow that. that's what we're seeing here. this is the criticisms that we see from the ig's office, and this is an agency that is under staffed and under manned. what we see again is the optics of an agency that is trying to look like it's doing its job now. that said, as we look at the 107 question interrogatory, that should have been proactively. it took civil litigation to u unearth this problem. with little known this recall likely would not have happened without the settlement of a

29-year-old who died, brook nelson, and the attorney who spent years battling general motors to look at their documents and get them to acknowledge that they knew about this ignition switch problem, and they knew it was going to cause death and injury. that's what is really troubling. that's information that was also at the disposal of ntsa. >> david, what about that, in this case there was a company that was reluctant to even believe the intelligence that was coming in from the buying public to conclude that they had a problem. >> again, i will absolutely agree with shawn that these government agencies are underfunded. we're living in an age where regulation is a dirty word when clearly it shouldn't be. in this case one of the things again as i said earlier in the program it's not--my experience is that it's not so much a conspiracy on the part of the

company, okay, with the company made up of individuals. so what this investigation i expect to find out is that there were some individuals probably in the middle ranks that either didn't bark loud enough or misinterpreted or mishandled information that was coming from early testing on these things because i've seen that happen. i've seen it happen in many recalls and investigations over the years where it wasn't something that went all the way up to the ceo. it was something that died in the middle ranks with people whose judgments rightfully being questioned about how they read and handled the information that was given to them. and mary bara the ceo, she has been in there for just a couple of months, and appears to be handling it right. she's going behind the scenes, she's taking personal command of the situation.

>> david is with us from detroit. when we come back we'll continue that conversation of the new gm ceo. we'll talk about what the company has to do going forward. whether this is a stumble on the road to recovery. this is inside story.

welcome to al jazeera america. i'm dell. these are the stories we are following for you. a powerful u.s. senator accusing the cia of criminal activity around a congressional investigation, and the cia is fighting back. day four of the search for that missing malaysian airliner. investigators remain baffled >> ukraine's ousted president saying he is still in charge, plus -- >> if you go through this site as you have seen