DETROIT — The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is extending its oversight of General Motors’ safety practices for another year as part of a sweeping consent order signed in 2014 when the company issued a broad recall of cars for faulty ignition switches.
Paul Hemmersbaugh, chief counsel at NHTSA, said Tuesday that the agency unilaterally extended the order for a third and final year and that terms of the oversight won’t change. He was a panelist at Crain’s General & In-House Counsel Summit here on Tuesday.
GM, Hemmersbaugh said, thought it was appropriate to have another year of oversight.
“It isn’t that GM has done anything in particular that is to warrant this, it’s just that they think it’s productive, too, and so we’ve extended it for a year,” he said.
The order was prompted by GM’s recall of 2.6 million small cars with defective ignition switches that have been linked to more than 120 deaths and 275 injuries.
Under the 2014 deal with NHTSA, GM must provide a written list every month of all safety issues under review by the automaker’s investigators — often before the company decides whether to launch a recall.
