"Jayhawk Jake" (jayhawkjake)
12/10/2015 at 21:05 • Filed to: None
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"Jayhawk Jake" (jayhawkjake)
12/10/2015 at 21:05 • Filed to: None | 10
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GM accepted 124 wrongful death claims related to ignition-gate.
Reports say they rejected 90% of claims.
Assume all claims were equal to one death. That’s 1240 deaths.
GM recalled 29 million cars in the fallout. A lot of these were ignition switch recalls, but not all. Let’s just say about a third of them were ignition switch related.
So 10 million cars had faulty parts that led to 1240 deaths.
That means that if you owned a car with a faulty switch you had a 1:8100 chance (rounded up) of being killed in an accident due to the ignition switch.
According to the National Safety Council your odds of dying in a car accident are 1:112.
That means even with my extremely conservative calculations you were 72 times more likely to be killed in a car accident not related to the ignition switch than you were to be killed by GM.
What happened to those involved was a tragedy, sure, but there are much bigger problems with automotive safety than negligence by a manufacturer. For instance, the National Safety Council estimates that 1 in 4 accidents involve cell phone use.
I’m not saying there shouldn’t be consequences for GM, but cries for criminal action and shutting the companies doors seem a bit extreme when you put the tragedy into perspective.
MM54
> Jayhawk Jake
12/10/2015 at 21:08 |
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Every time I see someone bitching about this, I’m going to just send them to this article now. Thank you.
bob and john
> Jayhawk Jake
12/10/2015 at 21:16 |
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I do agree with this, but I’m also curious to see the numbers on non leathal crashs where the person came off worse then if they had a working car..
eg: tommy crashes. air bag doesnt deploy. but he breaks 6 rips because of failure of airbag.
but those are almost impossible to come up with, so meh,
DoYouEvenShift
> Jayhawk Jake
12/10/2015 at 21:22 |
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People on cell phones piss me off. 1 in 4, thats funny, thats about the number of people I see staring at their phones everyday on my commute.
Then theres the ones that are on the phone, smoking, and chowing down on some shitty fast food breakfast. Geez, how bad do you want to kill yourself.
DasWauto
> Jayhawk Jake
12/10/2015 at 21:25 |
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Those NSC odds imply a fatality is likely in 1 out of every 113 car accidents. The number you came up with has no relevance to that. What you need to look at is those possible 1240 deaths when compared to the total number accidents of the relevant cars. If that number of accidents is less than 140120, then you were more likely to be killed in an accident in one of said cars than that stated average.
That said, I feel like the 1:112 number is off in the first place so there’s not a whole lot to learn here. Same goes for the conservative estimate that that many of those deaths could be attributed to the ignition switch.
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Jayhawk Jake
> DasWauto
12/10/2015 at 21:32 |
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There were about 550,000 fatalities in the US between 2000 and 2013, the recall started in 2013. 0.2% of fatalities would have been caused by a faulty ignition switch. That’s a very small percent.
There are many ways to look at the numbers, but I feel fairly confident that the ignition switch did not cause a grossly significant number of fatalities. Anything more than zero is less than ideal, but it’s not like GM was committing a mass execution of their owners as some reactions would lead you to believe.
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Jayhawk Jake
> DoYouEvenShift
12/10/2015 at 21:33 |
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I’ve personally come very close to being hit as a pedestrian by people playing with their phones. It’s disgusting.
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Jayhawk Jake
> bob and john
12/10/2015 at 21:36 |
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I would be curious to see more details of the individual claims against GM. There was some press that a few of the early reported cases involved drunk drivers without seatbelts, but that’s certainly not all cases.
I also wonder what exactly contributed to the deaths. Was it entirely the failure of airbags to deploy, or was it the failure of the driver to react to the loss of power steering that led to the crash that caused their death?
Not trying to victim blame, but if you want to affect change in response to the tragedy you should make sure you do it properly. Perhaps driver training is to blame more so than mechanical fault?
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DasWauto
> Jayhawk Jake
12/10/2015 at 21:49 |
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Again, that’s a fairly irrelevant number to compare to. The thing to look at is whether the number of deaths in the affected vehicles is disproportionate to established averages.
I’m not opining on right or wrong, just stating that your comparisons are not really valid. While I say your defence of GM isn’t correctly reasoned, I agree that the attacks of those who villanize them isn’t either.
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Jayhawk Jake
> DasWauto
12/10/2015 at 21:55 |
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That’s ultimately the point I’m making though, isn’t it?
You can’t draw conclusions from broad numbers like people wish to. It would be very hard to determine how much more dangerous a GM product is than a Ford or Honda product based on this case.
Calling for the shutting of GM over 124 deaths over a 15 year period is a bit silly when ~30-40,000 people are killed in automobile accidents per year in the United States. There are bigger fish to fry than a poorly designed part.
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DasWauto
> Jayhawk Jake
12/10/2015 at 22:06 |
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It might be what you are saying now but the initial post uses the same flawed logic in an attempt to skew opinion the other way. Making the point that people’s justification for hating on GM is wrong by using the same logic doesn’t really make you any better, does it?
While I agree that in the grand scheme these deaths are somewhat insignificant, I don’t agree that a poorly designed part that stayed in production through corporate failings should be brushed aside, bigger fish to fry or not. GM needs to own up to that (as they are) and make structural changes to prevent similar things from slipping through in the future (as them seem to be doing, hopefully). Same goes for VW/dieselgate, FCA and its recall woes, etc, etc.
People who make wholly damning arguments and people who defend claiming insignificance are both wrong. These problems will be dealt with rationally and hopefully we will all be better off for it.