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Conspiracy of silence hid seat-back hazards: collapsing seat backs were a dangerous and outdated design, and GM knew it. Internal documents reveal why the automaker took so long to come up with a safer seat.

Article Excerpt
In 1999, Maria Allen was driving to work near Portland, Maine, when she lost control of her 1994 Chevrolet Lumina van on a patch of ice. The van slid off the road and struck a rock at the right rear quarter-panel and tire.

At the moment of impact, Allen's seat back collapsed and twisted inboard. Even though she was wearing a seat belt, Allen was thrown violently rearward and hit her head on the right side of the car as it moved inward. She suffered a huge fracture on the right side of her head and a large subdural hematoma with a midline shift of the brain.

After a long and intensive hospitalization, Allen returned home to her family, but her extensive brain injury left her incapable of caring for herself or returning to her life as she knew it before the accident.

Allen sued the automaker, General Motors. Company documents admitted into evidence at trial demonstrated how GM ignored the safety of its customers to prevent the disclosure of a well-known, long-term design flaw.

The story goes back decades. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, GM engineers renewed a 20-year-old internal examination of the safety of "yielding" front-seat backs designed to collapse within 100 milliseconds in rear-end or angled rear-end collisions at moderate speed.

Documents revealed that the automaker was well aware that the collapse of front seats under ordinary rear-end collisions at less than 20 mph would cause the seat's occupants--even when belted--to ramp up and out of the seats and strike either the occupants sitting behind them or some portion of the rear of the car. As early as the 1960s, GM engineers wrote that risks included the driver's loss of control of the vehicle, head and neck injury to front-seat occupants, and injury to back-seat occupants. (1)

In 1966, engineers for Oldsmobile--a GM subsidiary--found that survival depended on seat backs supporting passengers and remaining upright in rear-end collisions. (2) Researchers outside the corporation echoed these conclusions.

However, other GM engineers voiced concerns that stiffer seats--which at the time did not include head rests--would lead to an increase in connective-tissue neck injuries caused by whiplash. These engineers believed that because most rear-end collisions involve low-speed impacts, the strengthening of seat backs to prevent "controlled collapse" would dramatically increase the number of whiplash neck injuries.

It was the latter philosophy that prevailed through the 1980s. These researchers apparently believed that because connective-tissue injuries occurred more frequently than more serious injuries in rear-end crashes, they warranted more attention.

The U.S. manufacturers, including General Motors, Ford Motor Co., and Chrysler Corp., rationalized that frontseat back collapse in rear-end crash tests did not produce any significant differential motion between the dummy's head and neck, and therefore posed...

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