Mary Barra made history by working her way into Detroit's car-guy club and becoming the first female CEO of General Motors. Now can she fix the company?
Mary Barra, mother of two and the first female CEO of General Motors General Motors, sat silently while the parents of ten dead children unloaded their grief and anger on her. Some read prepared statements; others spoke off the cuff. One father unbuttoned his dress shirt to reveal his daughter's face on the T-shirt underneath. All were strangers but shared a tragic bond: Their loved ones died in a GM vehicle.
Renee Trautwein's daughter, Sarah, 19, completed only one semester at her dream college before her 2005 Chevrolet Cobalt hit a tree. The air bag didn't deploy. Doug Weigel's daughter, Natasha, 18, died in Wisconsin after the 2005 Cobalt she was riding in crashed into a ditch. Randal Rademaker's 15-year-old daughter, Amy, perished in the same crash. Susan Hayes' son, Ryan Quigley, 23, died in upstate New York when his 2007 Cobalt landed upside down in a shallow stream.
The similarities were eerie: Young drivers lost control; air bags failed to deploy; keys were in the "accessory" position; all were driving 2005 to 2007 Chevrolet Cobalts.
"I'm truly sorry for your loss," Barra, a dark-haired woman who bears more than a passing resemblance to actress Sally Field, said again and again, wiping her eye at one point during the nearly two-hour meeting at GM's Washington, D.C. office. The following day, Apr. 1, Barra would appear before a congressional subcommittee investigating why GM waited years to recall Cobalts and other vehicles that could lose power because of a faulty ignition switch; she met with the families at the request of their attorney, Robert Hilliard.
"I put myself in their shoes and thought they deserved to be heard," Barra told FORBES in late May, just days before the company was set to issue a report on what caused the ignition disaster–and what they planned to do to stop it from happening again. "It was very difficult for them, and I think they needed to know that General Motors cared and that we listened." (Read the full interview.)
Much as the families wanted to put a face on the statistics–at least 13 killed in 31 accidents–Barra, too, hoped to put a face on what she calls "the new General Motors," a company that has spent much of the past five years shedding a reputation for poor quality and mismanagement, not to mention the taint of a $50 billion taxpayer-financed bankruptcy.
Being the face of GM is not easy right now. Instead of celebrating her historic achievement as the first female CEO in a traditionally male-dominated industry, a feat that landed her at No. 7 on FORBES' 2014 list of the world's Most Powerful Women, Barra, 52, learned of the ignition recall on Jan. 31, just two weeks into her new job, and has been wrestling with it since. The original recall of 700,000 vehicles was announced on Feb. 7, and twice expanded, to a total of 2.4 million vehicles. Since then GM has stepped up its safety reviews and recalled some 13.6 million vehicles for everything from faulty tail lamps to potential seat belt malfunctions.
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