G.M. Spots an Airbag Problem and Moves Quickly to Respond

[GUCCI™]

Concerns about automobile airbags lately have focused on ones that deploy too explosively or even spontaneously.

This week, General Motors announced a major recall over the opposite problem: airbags that, in rare instances, might not deploy when they are supposed to.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration put a notice on its website on Thursday that the company would recall 4.3 million vehicles worldwide — including 3.6 million in the United States — to fix the problem, which has been linked to at least one death and three injuries.

The company formally announced the recall on Friday, and said the fix involved a quick software modification that could be done by dealers. Customers do not need to receive a recall notice first to have the upgrade done. G.M. did not say how much the recall could cost.

More notable may be how quickly G.M. and the government responded to the problem once the company became aware of it in mid-May.

G.M. wasn’t always so quick to remedy potential safety defects. It took a dozen years and at least 124 deaths before the company began to resolve a problem with an ignition switch that could cause cars to switch off while on the road, rendering their airbags inoperable.

Eventually, G.M. paid $900 million to settle a federal criminal investigation related to the faulty ignition switches, set aside $575 million for a fund to compensate victims of switch-related crashes, and recalled 2.6 million cars.

“I think G.M. learned its lesson from the ignition switch and changed its behavior,” Michelle Krebs, an analyst with the research site Autotrader.com, said on Friday.

The sequence of events in the new G.M. recall and the relatively quick resolution is in contrast to the safety administration’s dealings with the electric carmaker Tesla. That company also became aware in May of a fatality involving one of its vehicles; a man was killed when his Tesla Model S crashed while the car’s Autopilot system was engaged.

The safety agency is still investigating whether any faults in Autopilot were responsible. Tesla has so far stood by its technology, although an updated version of Autopilot is expected to be part of a software update the company has said will come soon.

G.M.’s safety engineers in May learned that one of its vehicles, from the 2014 model year, was involved in a crash in which the airbags failed to deploy. An investigation ensued and by last month, engineers had traced the problem to an electronic motion sensor that, under certain circumstances, can prevent airbags from inflating in a crash.

The automaker on Friday said the electronics flaw was related to one fatality and other accidents that resulted in three injuries.

How Tesla is responding to the accident involving Autopilot is less clear. Its chief executive, Elon Musk, said recently via Twitter that improvements to Autopilot are coming, but the company has released no details, and has not said whether any modifications will force drivers to remain more focused on the road than the current version suggests.

On Friday, a Tesla spokeswoman, Alexis Georgeson, described the coming changes as a “big update” and said the new Autopilot software would be released “in the coming weeks.”

Tesla says that even the current version of Autopilot is safe as long as drivers follow instructions and in-car warnings to keep their hands on the steering wheel and their eyes on the road.

But the safety administration is looking into whether the fatal Tesla crash involved a safety defect. Ms. Georgeson said Tesla recently delivered a large batch of data that had been requested by the agency.

How Tesla and G.M. responded to the separate incidents illustrates a contrast between traditional automakers and their long and sometimes painful histories of dealing with safety defects, and Tesla, the Silicon Valley upstart, with its heavy reliance on new technology and a determination to reinvent the way the car business operates.

“There’s a huge difference between the two companies,” Ms. Krebs said. “Tesla hasn’t been hammered by a major safety investigation and been fined. It’s a young company and hasn’t had a lot bad happen.”

Spurred by G.M.’s ignition-switch crisis, Mary T. Barra, G.M.’s chief executive, revamped the way the company handles safety complaints, with the goal of preventing them from getting lost in the global automaker’s vast bureaucracy.

All employees are now encouraged to report any safety concerns to a group of about 30 engineers located at the G.M. Technical Center in Warren, Mich. Reports can be made anonymously.

This system, called Speak Up For Safety, is how the company learned about the 2014 fatality, according to a G.M. report to the safety administration. A G.M. investigator then retrieved data from the vehicle involved and contacted Delphi Automotive, the supplier of the module that detects when a crash is occurring and sets off the airbags.

G.M. and Delphi reviewed data from other vehicles suspected of similar airbag problems and determined the module had a fault: Sometimes it would run a diagnostic test of itself, and during the testing period it became incapable of deploying the airbags.

By August G.M. and Delphi were testing new software that fixed the problem, and on Aug. 31 safety executives at G.M. made the decision to issue the recall.

“The system worked the way it was supposed to,” Tom Wilkinson, a G.M. spokesman, said on Friday.

Correction: September 13, 2016 
An article on Saturday about the worldwide recall of 4.3 million General Motors vehicles to correct a software error that could prevent airbags from deploying in an accident misstated, in some editions, the details of a crash of a G.M. vehicle in which airbags failed to deploy. The crash, which G.M. safety engineers learned about in May, involved a 2014 model; the crash did not happen in 2014, and it did not result in a fatality. The article also misstated, in some editions, what G.M. said its airbag recall would cost. The $550 million figure in the article was an estimate of the cost of a separate recall involving Takata airbags; it was not an estimate of the cost of the new airbag recall.