General Motors' independent fund set up to compensate victims of accidents caused by defective ignition switches revealed Thursday that it has offered nearly $595 million to surviving families to settle 399 eligible claims.
GM set up the fund in June 2014 due to increasing legal and political pressure for failing to reveal ignition defects in older cars for nearly a decade. An investigation determined that switches in older cars can slip out of the "run" position causing the engine to cut off.
The report, whose staff is led by compensation expert Kenneth Feinberg, said that 91 percent of those offers were accepted, which included all 124 death claims, and 16 of 18 serious injury claims, according to the Associated Press.
In total, the staff reviewed 4343 claims that had been filed after Aug. 1, 2014, only 399, or 9.2 percent, of those were deemed eligible. In determining whether a claim was eligible, the staff disregarded the victims' own actions while operating the vehicle and only looked to see if there was any evidence of the ignition switches malfunctioning.
Of those, GM was not legally required to pay one third, or 128 of the 399 claims approved, since they took place before the company went bankrupt in June 2009, according to Reuters.
With this recent development, costs related to the ignition switch scandal has cost GM more than $2 billion, including a $900 million settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice in September.
"We faced the ignition switch issue with integrity, dignity and clear determination to do the right thing both in the short and long term," GM spokesman Jim Cain said, describing the fund as "fair," "compassionate" and "non-adversarial" to crash victims and their families.
Even with all this over and done with, litigation over the faulty ignition switches is far from over. GM still faces 217 wrongful death and injury lawsuits, as well as 122 lawsuits which claim that the recalls reduced the value of the owners' cars.
