>> thank you, sir. >> but i've got to ask you this. you know there's been some discussion with regard to, you know, when you were here before. and there was discussion that you had in at the october fuel economy standards hearing regarding safety, focused on the impact of weight and mass reduction. you remember that? >> yes, sir. >> and i want to ask you this, do electric vehicle technologies have impact on weight and mass reduction of vehicles? >> no. >> so the discussion on safety at the october hearing was not directly relevant to the battery fires that occurred three weeks after a series of extreme tests, is that right? >> that is correct, sir. >> so the majority is attempting to conflate two separate issues. mr. strickland, how does the safety of electric vehicles compare to conventional fuel-based vehicles? >> there is no differential risk between those two systems. they have different attributes.

that have to be taken into account. but there's no different risk between electric vehicles and gasoline-powered vehicles. >> does the fire of a chevy volt, weeks following extreme crash testing in the nhtsa lab, justify the chairman's characterization of chevy volt as a quote fiery failure? >> no, absolutely not. it was an anomalous result that we were not expecting, and gm wasn't expecting, either. and we took a lot of time to figure out the root cause, which we did. and we feel that the remedy that gm has proposed would deal with those issues going forward. >> and so, we've got a situation -- i want you to understand how this stuff works, okay? because i've been around here a while, 16 years. there are some employees that are going to watch this at gm tonight, if they are not watching it right now.

and they care about this vehicle. they are people who if it were not for the good leadership of mr. ackerman and the help that they got from the government, would be out of a job. they take pride in this vehicle. we are having this discussion today, and i don't want the word going out. see, you could have collateral damage in these hearings. and the collateral damage could be that folk go out and said, i'm not going to buy a volt. they catch a little bit of information right. not going to buy a volt. so therefore, a car that is safe now -- it is safe, is that right? >> absolutely. you just released the report last friday? >> we closed our investigation last week, that's correct. >> i want to be clear they can

buy a volt and as you said -- you didn't say these words, but you would be comfortable with your wife, your children, everybody riding in it. is that right? >> absolutely. because, see, we run around here, we complain about jobs. and here we, we complain about what we're failing to do, but here we have used some of the best minds to create one of the best vehicles, one that is selling off the charts. we've got gm now leading the world and this hearing in and of itself could cause damage to all of that. so i don't want -- believe me, i want to make sure that the very is safe. that's why i want you to be clear. that safety should be all of our number one concern. and i know it's yours, but i also want the word to go out, i don't want this collateral damage, because that collateral damage is going to cause

somebody, a supplier in my district, perhaps, or a supplier in mr. jordan's district to perhaps have to close their doors. more importantly, it sends a message to hard-working americans, who are producing a great product, and a product that will allow gm to perhaps continue to lead the world with regard to sales of vehicles. and so, i just, you know, i want you to just go back, for one second. i've got one minute left. and give us, i don't want -- see, i don't want these -- what they are going to do, i've been around here a long time. they're going to keep hammering at you, that's what they're going to do. i could go to lunch and come back, they're still going to be beating up on you. they want to make a point.

and you know what? sometimes the point ain't even there. it's not there. it's now we want to make a point. i want you to use your next -- my 23 seconds that's left to assure us that although it may have appeared that the timeline may have appeared not to be all that we would want it to be, that it was. can you explain that to us again? >> mr. cummings, thank you so much for the opportunity. our work was independent. we have statutory obligation to protect the american public from unreasonable risk to safety caused by vehicle defects. our obligation is to make sure the american public gets home safely every time. it took us six months, in order to figure out not only whether the volt was involved, was specifically caused the fire and whether there was an imminent risk and if there was a defect that needed to be addressed. it took six months. a lot of engineers, not only in my agency but other agencies across government to do that.

at no time was there any notion of any, any other part of government coming to me or commentating on my staff and saying that we should do nothing other than our job, and that's what we did. >> thank you very much. thank you, mr. chairman. >> i would point out, we're not trying to make a point, the point is the point. the timeline is the timeline, the facts are the facts and that's what the hearing is about. the hearing is not the problem, the problem is the problem. that's why we're having the hearing. >> the problem is the problem? >> we're here because a vehicle exploded and the timeline and this gentleman did not give information to the committee when he could have back in october. >> that's right, but the gentleman yield for a second? >> all i'm saying the facts are the facts. >> the facts are the facts. >> you're saying we swatting at things, we're appearing, we're trying, we're -- we've got our last questioner right now. >> well, i mean -- >> that's not what this hearing is about and that's not the points. >> come on, mr. chairman, come on, now. i've been around a long time. this hearing is not about safety.

this hearing is about -- this hearing is about an attack. >> no, it's not. >> okay. >> it's about getting to the facts. >> the lady from new york is recognized. the vice chair. >> thank you, mr. chairman. i unlike the ranking member, mr. cummings, i'm new here in washington. mr. strickland, thank you very much for being here. >> thank you. nice seeing you again. >> nice seeing you, too. we've had other conversations about other issues. but today i'd like to talk about -- and the ranking member brought it up -- trust, based on integrity or based on confidence. i'm concerned with your role and nhtsa's role. this is the battery, how one handles that and treats that, that really is kind of the

essence of what we're talking about for safety. i think we should all take this opportunity. we learn from mistakes. we learn from shortcomings. we look at situations that we debate like the way they worked out, and we figure out what we did wrong and we move on. so i think that's what a hearing like this is about. i guess my question to you is were the automobile safety engineers aware of the dangers posed by the lithium ion battery? >> at what point, madam manager? >> after the crash occurred on the 12th, may 12th, when the car sat after the crash. >> i understand, thank you. thank you, vice chairman, for clarifying that. we, the car was put through a normal new car assessment program side-impact test. when we finished with those particular tests and get the

results, the car, the hull, is then sold for salvage. that car was stored in the normal process in the yard. thinking that there was going to be no issues and it wasn't observed at all until those three weeks later on june 6th when the staff at mga came back and noticed the burnt holes that were discovered. no one had an expectation that the particular fire incident that happened on june 6 would be precipitated from the may 12th test. >> i guess that gets to the essence of my question. these batteries, when it was traumatized, when you had the crash test on may 12th, it then began to leak and there was evidence that there was a leaking orange fluid. and my concern is, is that this safety administrators didn't have the wherewithall or the knowledge that this leaking battery would cause a problem given that battery and the

energy behind it. and the dangers. and so my question to you is, why was that car stored with other cars? why wasn't that battery drained? why wasn't that handled, why wasn't it handled as if someone understood the dangers with regards to this lithium ion battery? >> our engineers and the test facility engineers actually know of the dangers and the issues regarding lithium ion in terms of how much energy they store. in all of the crash tests up until that particular point, the ones that were taken by the national highway traffic safety administration and my understanding of those undertaken by gm, there has never been an issue where post-crash there was actually a fire issue. so therefore, there was no protocol, either by national highway traffic safety administration or gm externally at that particular time, to deal with batteries post-crash. because this is a new technology and we are always learning, this

is something that, frankly, that we addressed and we looked at and we took the proper processes once we recognized that this could be an issue. >> and that, sir, with all due respect, is our concern or my concern. the fact that if it was a regular engine, you would have drained -- after an accident, you would have drained the gasoline out of the tank to avoi any. avoid any. and in this instance, the fact that the fire did occur, because the fluid wasn't drained, there were no protocols. therefore, there are no protocols given to gm, and that's a problem. because in this instance, without the protocols, without giving the protocols to gm, how do you inform them of what happened? and i mean that's the purpose of -- you do. and obviously this could happen, if it happened on the road, and you have a similar situation, so that's the concern. there were no protocols, gm wasn't informed. and it appears, we talked about appearance being reality, that

the administrators, the safety administrators didn't have the knowledge of this battery and the danger that this leaking fluid out of it could cause. and did cause this fire. so i believe i'm out of time and i yield back my time. >> actually i would like to respond to that. i'll be very brief. am i satisfied for the fact that what we, as an agency or with the manufactures do with the time and terms of post crash protocols for lithium batteries? no, that's why we addressed it. there was no reason to think that there was an issue with the protocols because of the processes we went through and are learning over the years with these systems. in battery intrusion, we've always known is a situation that we want to avoid. and in this particular situation an anomalous way, the battery was intruded upon and we discovered a list of events that we know we need to address lithium ion batteries post-crash, which is what we did with the national fire protection association and the

department of energy. so madam chairwoman, advice chairwoman, we absolutely want to make sure that we protect those people in post-crash. the second responders, the storage facilities, all those other things. but you know, let me be perfectly clear. we have been working on lithium ion high-voltage battery systems for several years. we began our work on safety protocols on a research plan in 2010 specifically. well before any of these issues came to the fore. because we recognized that there's always going to be learning going forward in how we deal with these safety systems. it's a priority and we take it our job very seriously. >> thank you. we want to get to the chairman of the full committee. we promise this will be your last five minutes because we want to get to mr. akerson before we have a vote. so the chairman of the committee, mr. isis is recognized. >> thank you, mr. chairman. perhaps going last gives me one advantage. administrator strickland, this is about safety, this is about government's role. this committee under republicans and democratic leaders, has taken on auto companies, and the transportation safety administration overall, we did

it under toyota and we did it in a very, very bipartisan fashion. so understand, you're here today, because my first hybrid electric car came with me to washington. the factory that blew up and left the world without enough lithium ion batteries occurred while i was still a ceo in the electronics industry. how dare you tell us you're still developing protocols, while the president is sitting in an electric car and it's not general motors' first electric car. it's not the first electric car that's been put on the road. so one of the reasons you're here today is you're behind the power curve. this vehicle's picture was not released until today. i've got to tell you, if you were against electric cars, if you were not trying to promote them, perhaps ahead of some of the expertise you have for safety, this picture would have been splashed 20 minutes after it burned.

the fact is, your administration is not up to speed to maintain safety in the electric age. now i grew up, like many people on both sides of the dais, seeing exposes of various trucks and cars, i won't name the brands, exploding on television. it's not new that you can have catastrophic events in the case of an event. of an accident. it's one of the reasons you have the test protocol. i'm deeply concerned today, about one major part of this. the most important part. you didn't know what you were doing, an anomaly happened. it happened when there were less than 400,000 volts out there, didn't it? didn't it? >> i don't know the state of particulars. >> well, i do. by july, there were less than 4,000. we'll have the ceo here in a moment. today, there are twice as many out there. you didn't even inform and deal with the problem, either to the public, or to the general

notes or to this committee, when people were here in front of this committee during the interviewing period until bloomberg media outed you. how do you answer the question of transparency, accountability and trust today? you said you'd put your mother, your grandmother, all of these people in a car you don't own. you put the president of the united states in the car. you put the secretary of transportation in the car. how dare you not have both the public and this committee know what you knew in a timely fashion? how do you answer that accusation, which is the safety charge that you guys screwed up on by keeping a secret? >> mr. chairman, i will point to the timeline, which is very detailed as to the work that was undertaken by the agency along with the department of energy and the department of defense. >> the car blew up three weeks after it was hit unexplained, right? part of the timeline. >> that's correct. >> three minutes after that three-week event, why was it that executives at general motors weren't flying in, well

informed? why is it that one of the hallmark projects of this administration, that higher-ups, including secretary lahood, including, if necessary, a briefing sent to someone that would try to get it to the president. why wasn't that important? >> gm was notified, as soon as we were notified on june 6th. and it's our responsibility to figure out what is wrong with the vehicle, at the point that we saw it, mr. chairman, we didn't know if the volt was at fault. we had to build from the ground up which vehicle was responsible or even if it was a vehicle. it could have been an arsonist, as far as we knew. once we isolated it to the volt, it took every moment, up until we were able to close the investigation, to do the engineering work for us to come to the decision on whether or not the volt posed an unreasonable risk to safety. until we have that agency decision made, it is irresponsible, frankly illegal for us to go forward and tell the american public that there is something wrong with a car when we don't know what it is or not. it took us that time to figure

it out. there was never a notion of us not being transparent, mr. chairman, we were doing our jobs. >> i hear you, i don't believe you. the fact is, today, coming to this hearing, why weren't these pictures released? i'm sorry, that's an embarrassment. but what part of transparency gives you an obligation to be forward-looking? it's great that everyone still promoting the volt. i go to every c.e.s. show and every show and i see all kinds of special cup holder battery chargers in the volt. i see all kinds of nice things. the fact is that the american public wasn't interested in buying the car in large quantity even with incentives. now we have a safety question, and it's not a safety question about the volt. it's about trust of your agency. can we trust you in this and every other area, to not be selective and, basically, overly cautious? this was a new automobile, something catastrophic happened.

and you're telling me it took months to get to where you had a confidence level that, quote, you had a problem? it sounds to me like you had to make sure that you could absolutely explain this as an anomaly to save the whole reputation of the volt and electric cars, and you started off saying we've got to prove that this is safe and we're not going to stop until we fully proved it and documented it. you certainly had concerns. i'm going to share one thing in closing. i was an automobile parts manufacturer. i had a recall. i've been down the road of anomaly, along with circuit at the time, i was -- and you can always say that because they are no longer around to complain one way or the other. but the fact is, we were under the scrutiny from a national level from the moment the agency was informed. under the scrutiny. ultimately, we did a recall on something where there was no problem in the vehicle. but we explained in-depth how

somebody could make a mistake on installation on a limited number of cars. i'm very familiar with how fast you can act, even if you don't know all the facts, but you know something bad happened. now, with the chairman's indulgence, please, you've got the last word. >> mr. chairman, the national highway traffic safety administration is not in the reputation business, we're in the safety business. i'm not concerned about the reputation of any manufacturer if they put a product out there that poses an unreasonable risk to safety. we work independently to prove that every single day. i appreciate your comparison with your experience with circuit city and your company. but we have a statutory obligation under the safety act that we have to fulfill. before we move forward and pressing a manufacturer for mandatory recall. it would be improper for us to do anything different than that process. so it is a very careful and deliberate process. i wish it could be instantaneous. it takes technical work, engineering work and a lot of science to be able to figure that out to a point of

certainty. and those six months, it took every second for my engineers at nhtsa to be able to come back to that conclusion and give us the information for an agency decision and a recommendation to the secretary of transportation. so we are as transparent an agency as we find in government. we have a database which is built with tens of thousands of complaints every single year of vehicle defects. we work very hard. we've reduced fatalities in america on traffic crashes by 25% since 2006. we take every single crash that injures or kills someone with the highest level of sincerity and severity. and mr. chairman i appreciate the opportunity to explain to you. >> mr. chairman, working with your subcommittee, i would ask that we continue the process of verifying what has just been said. essentially, how often it takes six months when there's a known catastrophic event. thank you, mr. chairman. >> thank you. >> administrator, we want to

thank you for your time. we want to get to our next witness as quickly as we can. if the staff would quickly get ready for panel two, we want to get mr. ackerson started. because we're going to have a vote sometime in the next half an hour and we want the testimony in time for questioning of our second witness. thank you, administrator. we're pleased to have mr. dan akerson, the ceo of general motors with us. you know the routine here, we've got to do the swearing in real quick and you get your five

minutes and we'll go from there. so if you would raise your right hand. do you solemnly swear or affirm that the testimony you're about to give is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth? let the record show that the witness answered in the affirmative. i know you were here for the first panel. you get five minutes. we're pretty lenient with that time as you saw. so go right ahead and we'll get to questioning and hopefully get this done before we have to go to the vote. >> turn on the mike, if you would there. and then just pull it close. you should have the red light there. >> good morning, thank you. chairman jordan, ranking members, cummings and kucinich. i welcome the opportunity to testify today, and stand behind a car that all of us at general motors are proud of. please allow me to start with some volt history. gm unveiled the volt concept at

the january 2007 detroit auto show. in june of 2008, the old gm's board of directors approved the volt project for production. well before the bankruptcy and the infusion of government funds. the battery story goes back much farther in the early 1990s, with gm's extensive work on the ev 1. drawing on that experience, we engineered the volt to be a winner on the road, and in customers' hearts. today i'm proud to say, that the volt is performing exactly as we engineered it. in its first year, the volt garnered the triple crown of industry awards. "motor trend" car of the year, "automobile magazine"'s automobile of the year and north american car of the year. volt is among the safest cars on the road. earning five stars for occupant safety, and a top safety pick with the insurance institute for highway safety.

in 93% of volt owners report the highest customer satisfaction with their car, more than any other vehicle and the highest-ever recorded in the industry. beyond the accolades, the volt's importance to gm and our country's long-term prospects is far-reaching. we engineered the volt to be the only ev that you can drive across town, across the country without fear of being stranded when the battery is drained. you can go 35 miles, and in some cases much more, on a single charge. which is for 80% of american drivers, their total driving range. after that, a small gas engine extends your range to 375 miles, roughly. before you have to recharge or refill. but the volt, but if volt, if the volt message boards are any indication, there's some real one-upsmanship going on out there. customers are reporting going months and thousands of miles

without stopping once at a gas pump. no other ev can do this or generate that much passion with its drivers. we engineered the volt to give drivers a choice. to use energy produced in the united states, rather than from oil from places that may not always put america's best interests first. we engineered the volt to show the world what great vehicles we make at general motors. unfortunately, there's one thing we did not engineer -- although we loaded the volt with state-of-the-art safety features, we did not engineer the volt to be a political punching bag. and sadly, that's what it has become. for all the loose talk about fires, we are here today because tests by regulators resulted in a battery fire under lab conditions. that no driver would experience in the real world.

in fact, volt customers have driven over 25 million miles without a similar single incident. in one test, the fire took, occurred seven days after a simulated crash. and in another, it took three weeks after the test. not three minutes, not three hours, not three days. three weeks. based on those test results, did we think there was an imminent safety risk? no. or as one customer put it -- if they couldn't cut them out of a vehicle in two or three weeks, he had a bigger problem to worry about. however, given those test results, gm had a choice in how it would react. it was an easy call. we put our customers first. we moved fast, with great transparency to engineer

a solution. we contacted every volt owner and offered them a loaner car until the issue was settled. and if that wasn't enough, we offered to buy the car back. we assembled a team of engineers who worked nonstop to develop a modest enhancement to the battery system to address the issue. we'll begin adding that enhancement on the production line and in customer cars in a few weeks. and in doing so, we took a five-star-rated vehicle and made it even safer. nonetheless, these events have cast an undeserved, damaging light on a promising new technology. that we're exporting around the world right from detroit. as "the wall street journal" wrote in its volt review, we should suspend our rancor and savor a little american pride. a bunch of midwestern engineers in bad haircuts and cheap wristwatches just out-engineered every other car company on the planet.

the volt is safe, it's a marvelous machine. it represents so much about what is right about general motors and, frankly, about american ingenuity in manufacturing. i look forward to taking your questions. thank you. >> thank you, mr. akerson. we, we appreciate you being with us today. and we appreciate the fact in your testimony you talk about you contacted every volt owner and frankly the response you took when this was -- when this was brought to the public's attention. in your opinion, mr. akerson, should, should nhtsa have known to drain the battery once -- when they conducted this test and they subjected it to a crash and took it out on in lot and let it sit there, shouldn't they have known that they needed to drain the battery? >> i can only speak for general