General Motors Co. engineering managers knew about ignition-switch problems on the 2005 Cobalt that could disable power steering, power brakes and air bags, but launched the car because they believed the vehicles could be safely coasted off the road after a stall, the Wall Street Journal reported today. The new details about how GM employees viewed the ignition switch problem in the years after the Cobalt's 2004 debut emerged from depositions taken in a lawsuit filed after one of the dozen fatal accidents GM has linked to the problem. In those accidents, air bags failed to deploy after ignition switches slipped out of the "on" position. GM last month recalled 1.6 million vehicles to fix the switches. "That is what happened, yes," Gary Altman, program engineering manager for the 2005 Cobalt, said when asked in a June 2013 deposition whether GM made "a business decision not to fix this problem" before the Cobalt was launched in 2004. Altman insisted the flaw didn't put drivers at risk even in those cases where air bags failed to deploy. He was responding to questions by an attorney representing the family of Brooke Melton, a Georgia woman killed in a crash of her Cobalt that suffered ignition failure while driving at about 55 miles an hour.
