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Delphi CEO to Join Mary Barra on Capitol Hill's Hot Seat

You might have heard of Delphi Automotive PLC before on the news. It's the automotive parts manufacturing company headquartered in the United Kingdom that became involved in an ongoing lawsuit against General Motors over the glitchy ignition switches fitted to a few million vehicles, including the Chevrolet Cobalt.
GM ignition switch 1 photo
Photo: GM
Those sub-standard ignition switches have been officially connected to vehicle accidents which concluded with 13 people fatally injured. According to General Motors Ignition Compensation Plan, each ignition switch death will be compensated with at least $1 million.

With so many deaths and so much money on the table, House and Senate members deemed necessary to summon Delphi CEO Rodney O'Neal to testify alongside General Motors CEO Mary Barra on July 17th, in front of the U.S. Senate Commerce Comitee's panel of bigwigs. Even though Delphi has cooperated with investigators and excused itself by following GM's design instructions, those faulty ignition switches took the lives of way too many people that trusted General Motors and Delphi. Sorry won't cut it considering the damage already done.

It's critical for the investigators to understand if General Motors forced Delphi to build that batch of glitchy switches with cost-cutting in mind or if it was Delphi's idea to design sub-standard switches that could be sold to the automaker for less money than a proper ignition switch. However, the mystery goes deeper than that considering that a GM engineer asked Delphi for a more robust design in 2006 without changing the part number.

Fingers crossed the July 17th hearing will bring us closer to the truth behind this ignition switch catastrophe.
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About the author: Mircea Panait
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After a 1:43 scale model of a Ferrari 250 GTO sparked Mircea's interest for cars when he was a kid, an early internship at Top Gear sealed his career path. He's most interested in muscle cars and American trucks, but he takes a passing interest in quirky kei cars as well.
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