GM bankruptcy shields them from liability over faulty ignition deaths and losses

http://www.latimes.com/business/autos/la-fi-hy-gm-ignition-bankruptcy-20150415-story.html

This is one of the more maddening things I've seen in 2015 (and that is saying a lot). The evidence is fairly clear that GM committed serious negligence and cover-up/fraud for years regarding their faulty ignition switches that were implicated in at least 84 deaths and who knows how many total accidents.

But since GM declared bankruptcy in 2009, a judge concluded that they can't be sued over this issue. This is because the post-bankruptcy "new GM" is a totally different entity than the one that was responsible for the fraud/deaths. I wonder if the bankruptcy was a calculated move then. Businesses probably are thinking, "Well if the shit gets bad, let's just press the reset button." The people you owe only get pennies on the dollar back, and you're not on the hook for any previous wrongdoing. Isn't that convenient. And let's not forget the billions in low-interest loans they got from the taxpayers.

GM has set up a fund to pay victims off in return for dropping civil lawsuits. But this whole debacle is the kind of thing you shut down companies over. Where is the trust, when GM has shown total disdain for the customer and government? Maybe Obama shouldn't brag that he saved Detroit.

We may owe Toyota an apology

http://www.insideline.com/toyota/driver-error-is-culprit-in-most-toyota-crashes-says-nhtsa.html

It's easy to bag on a strong foreign company dominating a very American industry (especially for politicians during a recession), but it looks like the real culprits for the acceleration safety problems were dumb-ass American drivers. Initial findings from the NHTSA investigation of 58 sudden-acceleration-associated Toyota crashes across the country showed ZERO evidence of electronics causing acceleration from vehicle data logs. In fact, in over 30 cases the vehicle log shows that the driver did not apply the brake, so in all likelihood their acceleration was due to a panic slam on the wrong pedal. With apparently no definitive evidence, Toyota was accused of sudden acceleration from electronics, floor mats, and sticky pedals. The company initially denied the claims, then acknowledged some design flaws, and issued big recalls to rectify the 3 risks. But in the government analysis, zero of the 58 crash cases were due to sticky pedals or electronics, and only one was due to the floor mat. Out of the millions of Toyotas being happily driven each day in the US and worldwide, there were only a small number of crashes, and funny how the acceleration accusations were only in our country, huh? NASA is currently helping to see if electromagnetic interference could have still caused electronic acceleration. Of course lawyers for greedy and blame-shifting plaintiffs suing Toyota are challenging these findings, but 58 is a pretty big sample size to me. What I'm ashamed of is how quickly the media took up the accusations as Biblical truth, and how I and most of the public believed them without proof.