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Detroit: General Motors Co., which has recalled about 20 million cars and trucks in North America this year, added 428,111 more US vehicles to that tally, including its redesigned full-sized pickups and large sport-utility vehicles. GM said it needs to recalibrate software that controls the gears to fix the four-wheel drive on 392,459 pickups and SUVs, including the Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra pickups from 2014 and 2015 model years and the 2015 Chevy Tahoe and Suburban. The effected models can switch into neutral on their own, the automaker said on Friday in an e-mailed statement. If this occurs while...

There are plenty of smartphone apps that make it easier to flirt and set up dates with strangers, but GM has an ace up its sleeve that may trump all of them. No, the car manufacturer isn’t muscling its way into the dating game – at least not directly. But its China R&D team has developed an Android app that lets a driver scan a license plate in order to start texting the owner of that car. The romantic implications of DiDi Plate, a prototype app debuted earlier this month at the Telematics Detroit 2014 conference, are obvious enough, even...

The unsparing and harshly critical report from attorney Anton Valukas' investigation into General Motors, which held its annual shareholders meeting Tuesday morning, finds an array of culprits behind the company's ignition switch crisis. It cites a lack of urgency in the culture and, as GM CEO Mary Barra described it, "a pattern of incompetence." It blames an unwillingness of those in the know to reconsider their conclusions, and a dizzying number of committees with little clear accountability. The report also makes several references to the role corporate speak played in the wrongdoing. Typically, we think of corporate speak as trivialities...

(Reuters) - A new lawsuit says General Motors Co should compensate millions of car and truck owners for lost resale value, potentially exceeding $10 billion, because a slew of recalls and a deadly delay in recalling cars with defective ignition switches has damaged its brand. According to a complaint filed on Wednesday with the federal court in Riverside, California, GM hurt customers by concealing known defects and valuing cost-cutting over safety, leading to roughly 40 recalls covering more than 20 million vehicles this year alone. It said this has caused a variety of late-model vehicles to lose roughly $500 to...

House lawmakers told General Motors CEO Mary Barra on Wednesday that they were not satisfied with her company’s own probe into the slow recall of defective, deadly vehicles. "I want to be clear today that our investigation does continue,” Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton (R-Mich.), said. Barra was returning to Capitol Hill for the first time since releasing an internal review that found GM had a pattern of " incompetence and neglect " that led to its failure to recall more than two million defective cars made from the mid-2000’s until earlier this year. GM fired 15 people...

A Texas woman who became a convicted felon for causing a 2004 car crash that killed her fiancé has learned that General Motors (GM) counts the accident as one of 13 deaths it blames on its defective ignition switches. Candice Anderson was driving her 2004 Saturn Ion in Canton, Texas, with her fiancé Mikale Erickson in November 2004 when she lost control of the vehicle and crashed. Mr. Erickson, the father of two small children, was killed. Ms. Anderson was thrown through the windshield and barely survived the crash herself. The vehicle’s airbags never deployed. Police could find no causes...

U.S. Rep. Diana DeGette wants General Motors to explain how it plans to fix what’s been described as a lax corporate culture and how the company plans to compensate victims of crashes tied to faulty ignition switches. The Colorado Democrat on Monday outlined questions she’ll pose to new GM CEO Mary Barra during a congressional hearing Wednesday. DeGette, the ranking member of the House committee investigating GM’s recall of 2.6 million small cars, noted a company-commissioned report released this month that showed “the GM corporate culture was so siloed that they were unable to catch some of the safety problems...

Well, it looks like New GM is not much different than Old GM when it comes to addressing serious safety issues on its vehicles. The Associated Press reports that General Motors CEO, Mary Barra, claims that GM has not turned up any other major safety issues. I guess Ms. Barra feels that two tons of steel traveling at high speeds with brake lines that can burst at any moment is nothing to be concerned about. The continued denial by GM that there is no safety issue with their trucks that are prone to brake line corrosion proves that the...

DETROIT — To the legal department at General Motors, secrecy ruled. Employees were discouraged from taking notes in meetings. Workers’ emails were examined once a year for sensitive information that might be used against the company. G.M. lawyers even kept their knowledge of fatal accidents related to a defective ignition switch from their own boss, the company’s general counsel, Michael P. Millikin. An internal investigation released on Thursday into the company’s failure to recall millions of defective small cars found no evidence of a cover-up. But interviews with victims, their lawyers and current and former G.M. employees, as well as...

Video of press conference at source. General Motors has dismissed 15 employees and disciplined five others in the wake of an internal investigation into the company's handling of defective ignition switches, which lead to at least 13 fatalities. GM CEO Mary Barra says the personnel worked in several areas including engineering, legal and public policy, and that a disproportionate number of them were senior executives or higher. Barra described the conclusions of the investigation as “extremely thorough, brutally tough, and deeply troubling.” Barra says that the report found no conspiracy to cover up facts or trade-off between safety and cost,...

(Reuters) - General Motors on Tuesday apologized to families of accident victims who have been notified to bring in cars for replacement of defective ignition switches. "We are deeply sorry to those families who received a recall notice," said GM spokesman Greg Martin in response to questions from Reuters. GM has recalled 2.6 million of its most popular models to replace a defective switch that it has linked to 13 fatalities. Some families who lost loved ones in fatal crashes have complained that GM should not have sent them notices to bring in cars for repairs. Terri DiBattista, who lost...

(Reuters) - At least 74 people have died in General Motors cars in accidents with some key similarities to those that GM has linked to 13 deaths involving defective ignition switches, a Reuters analysis of government fatal-crash data has determined. Such accidents also occurred at a higher rate in the GM cars than in top competitors’ models, the analysis showed. Reuters searched the Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS), a national database of crash information submitted by local law-enforcement agencies, for single-car frontal collisions where no front air bags deployed and the driver or front-seat passenger was killed. The news agency...

According to recent reports, GM just recalled another 2.4 million vehicles this week, bringing the total number of recalled GM vehicles this year to a record 13.6 million. USA Today got right to the point when it asked, “Are there any GM cars that haven’t been recalled?” ... GM knew about serious problems with the ignition switch for years, going back to at least 2007. At that time, GM had hard data from multiple crashes showing that some of its ignition switches had failed to function properly. The U.S. government officially bailed out the automaker in December of 2008. Throughout...

GM (GM, Fortune 500) has raised the number of frontal-impact crashes linked to the problem ignitions to 47 from 32, according to company spokesman Greg Martin. Because of the flawed ignition, key rings holding more than one key could cause the ignition to suddenly switch to the off position. That can lead to a loss of power -- locking the steering wheel and interrupting airbags from deploying in an accident. GM says the number of deaths tied to front impact crashes stemming from this defect remains at 13. On Friday, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reportedly said the number...

DETROIT — As General Motors faces a number of continuing investigations into its handling of a vehicle safety defect linked to 13 deaths, its legal department has become a focus of a broad internal inquiry into how the company handled the issue, according to two people with knowledge of the investigation. Even as G.M. acknowledged that it knew about the defect for more than a decade, it has insisted that work on the ignition problem was limited to a handful of midlevel employees. But a review of internal documents, emails and interviews paint a different picture, showing that high-ranking officials,...

For the first time, General Motors Co. could have an official of the United Auto Workers union on its board of directors. UAW Vice President Joe Ashton was nominated to a board seat controlled by a UAW trust fund that pays retiree health care bills. He plans to retire from his union post in June. The move, which would be considered common in Europe, is a first for General Motors, and a sign of how the relationship between the company and the union has changed in the past decade. Before that, the UAW battled with the company over wages, benefits...

… Toyota Motor Corp. said Wednesday that it sold 2.583 million vehicles in the January-March period, ahead of Detroit-based GM at 2.42 million and Volkswagen of Germany at 2.4 million. The Japanese automaker’s first quarter sales rose by more than 6 percent from the same period the previous year. GM’s sales grew 2 percent, while Volkswagen’s added nearly 6 percent. …

The president of General Motors said Sunday that the company and local partners are boosting production capacity for GM-brand vehicles in China to 5 million. Speaking at the Beijing auto show, Dan Ammann said the company also expects sales of its Cadillac luxury cars to double to 100,000 next year. General Motors Co. and its Chinese partners are in the midst of what the company has said is a $12 billion investment program through 2017. …

General Motors revealed in court filings late Tuesday that it will soon ask a federal bankruptcy judge to shield the company from legal claims for conduct that occurred before its 2009 bankruptcy. The automaker’s strategy is in a motion filed in a Corpus Christi, Texas, federal court case, and in other cases across the nation that involve the defective ignition switches that have led GM to recall 2.6 million small cars. The motion asks U.S. District Judge Nelva Gonzales Ramos to delay action on the lawsuit until the bankruptcy court rules and other federal courts decide if the case should...