The Chevy Volt was the subject of congressional hearing Wednesday as a subcommittee of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee began hearings about the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's handling of the delayed crash-test battery fire experienced by one Chevy Volt during testing last year. At issue was whether General Motors received special treatment in the form of NHTSA silence about the test crash result, because 26% of GM stock is currently owned by the U.S. Government as a result of the bailout deal.
House committee members pressed GM and the NHTSA for some evidence that waiting until the single test result was confirmed as a real problem until it was publicly disclosed was somehow connected to White House secret White House intervention. General Motors Chairman and CEO Dan Akerson testified that GM had received no special treatment and "Although we loaded the Volt with state of the art safety features, we did not engineer it to become a political punching bag."
Akerson and the NHTSA expressly denied any White House influence or involvement in the timing or nature of any disclosures. NHTSA Administrator David Strickland told the committee that it would have been irresponsible and perhaps illegal for his agency to make a public statement without first taking steps to determine the cause of the fire and whether or not it presented a real world hazard.
GM has already announced a retrofit solution to make absolutely sure that no such fire ever occurs in a real world crash free of charge to all Volt owners. The rare circumstances in which the Volt fire occurred required a severe side impact with battery compartment intrusion and three weeks of waiting time after that during which the battery was not powered down and disconnected as recommended. Akerson commented that no customer was ever at imminent risk from the issue, at one point saying, "As one customer put it, if they couldn't cut him out of the vehicle in three weeks, he'd have bigger problems to worry about."
Akerson told committee members that he had, in fact, driven a Volt to the hearing. Strickland told the committee that not only did he believe that the Chevy Volt was safe, but that he would drive it with his mother, his wife, and his baby sister in the vehicle with him.
Demonstrating either a lack of research into the issue or political grandstanding, Ohio Representative Jim Jordan had to be corrected after incorrectly stating that the Volt had exploded.
At one point during the hearings which was sparsely covered by reporters, Elijah Cummings, the Representative from Maryland summed up the hearings in once succinct pronouncement. "Listen up press," he said, "the Volt is a safe vehicle."