Not their finest hour: General Motors

We didn’t know where to look, between 2009 and 2011. It was like watching a tennis rally in Arthur Ashe stadium, necks snapping left to right to left as the world spectated GM’s pleading bailout on one side and Toyota’s unintended acceleration blunders on the other.

And then the public as usual forgot about all the begging and excuse making and moved on to the next thing, airbags and diesel. No harm done. And yet, when you say unintended acceleration, word association still makes you spring up ‘Toyota!’ almost involuntarily. This isn’t entirely fair considering that basically unintended acceleration has been around since the accelerator.

Toyota recalled 10 million vehicles in an attempt to quell the noise, and suddenly the unintentions stopped. But back in the Seventies, GM had an even bigger fiasco on its hands that the Americans tried desperately to sweep under the carpet before capitulating and recalling over six million cars for unintended acceleration. And they didn’t even do it for safety’s sake, but rather only took action after media and public backlash got too uncomfortable for the bottom line.

The fault lay in Chevrolet engine mounts. By the late Sixties, America’s road governing body the NHTSA already had plenty of instances of accidents in Chevy vehicles due to unintended acceleration. For half a decade GM fitted defective engine mounts causing twist that could put stress on the throttle cable and accelerate the vehicle unintentionally. Could, and did. Both the Detroit giant and the NHTSA kept quiet about it for years despite GM knowing of the flaw since 1958, and it wasn’t until 1971 that GM reluctantly issued a recall of 6.5 million Chevys to fix the engine mounts and quell the bad publicity.