No worries, government has all the answers. Government Knew about GM Ignition Issue – News – Road & Track.
Perhaps, then, the answer to America’s latest auto safety crisis does not lie in simply throwing more money at the NHTSA, which clearly needs a better monitoring mandate before it can even hope to efficiently spend more tax money protecting consumers. In fact, the answer may not lie in regulation at all, but in a strong criminal law enforcement regime that targets the individuals responsible for defects that lead to injury and death. By creating new criminal penalties for auto safety malfeasance, along with strong incentives for whistleblowing, lawmakers could force individual employees to hold their companies responsible for design defects—or face the consequences. After all, the problem at GM seems to have stemmed from a lack of individual responsibility within a broader deficit in corporate responsibility.
The first line of responsibility for the public’s safety lies with the engineers and executives who design and build the cars … just as individual motorists are the first line in terms of their personal safety. Only when they individually face penalties that are nearly as harsh as those consumers face at the hands of their defects will they truly take safety as seriously as we do.
Ethics and responsibility.
