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General Motors CEO Provides Few Details In Appearance Before Congress

It was only two months ago that Mary Barra, freshly crowned as the new General Motors chief executive officer, visited Washington DC as an esteemed guest of First Lady Michelle Obama for the State of the Union address. On Tuesday, Barra returned to the Capitol under more strained circumstances. For more than two contentious hours, she took questions from members of a House of Representatives subcommittee investigating General Motors years-long delay in initiating a recall of millions of vehicles that contained a defect that has killed at least 13 people. Why did GM accept faulty ignition switches that were below the company's set specfications? Why did GM learn about the problem in 2001 yet take no action until 2014? Will GM compensate victims' families even though the company's bankruptcy may limit its liability? Those were a few of the questions members of the House Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee asked. Few concrete answers were forthcoming. For her part, Barra sidestepped most of the questions, saying she wouldn't have information needed to answer them until an internal review is completed. David Friedman, the administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, testified after Barra. The biggest news that emerged from the hearing was that General Motors has retained attorney Kenneth Feinberg to advise the company on its civil and legal responsibilities. He has made a career of resolving disputes and serving in a 'fixer' role, serving as the chief of the federal government's September 11th Victim Compensation Fund, as an administrator of compensation fund for victims of the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster and a similar fund for victims of the Boston Marathon bombing. Barra, who has been GM's CEO since January but been with the company since 1980, expects to meet with Feinberg on Friday, and have a concrete plan within the next 30-60 days. Yet Barra would not say for certain Tuesday that GM would compensate the victims at all. Despite repeated questions from Rep. Diana DeGette (D-Colo.), Barra did not outline the company's intentions. "I assume GM is hiring (Feinberg) to help identify the size of claims and then compensate the victims? Is that right," DeGette asked. "Is GM willing to put together some kind of a compensation fund for these victims that Mr. Feinberg will then administer?" "We've hired him to help assess the situation," Barra replied. "So really, there's no money involved at this point," DeGette asked.

Race Recap: Rolex 24 at Daytona was fast and feisty

Let the record show that victory at the 2015 Rolex 24 at Daytona went to the No. 02 Chip Ganassi Racing with Felix Sabates Target/Ford EcoBoost Riley DP driven by Verizon IndyCar drivers Scott Dixon and Tony Kanaan and NASCAR drivers Jamie McMurray and Kyle Larson. The winner did 740 laps to cover 2,634.3 miles in 24 hours and 57.667 seconds. That's a statement to this year's pace in spite of 18 cautions, two more than last year: the Michael Shank Racing Ligier got pole with a time of 1:39.194, slower than last year's pole time of 1:38.270; however, the winning car last year only did 695 laps. The fight for top honors was shaved to a four-car battle over the first third of the event. The No. 02 Ganassi car took the lead on the first lap, swapping it well into the night with the No. 01 Ganassi car, the No. 10 Wayne Taylor Racing Corvette DP, and the defending champion No. 5 Action Express Corvette DP, all of them staying within about 20 seconds of one another. The Action Express car had a fuel connector come loose and lost three laps getting towed back to the pits to have it reattached, but was back in the lead 18 hours in. The No. 01 Ganassi car dropped out with recurring clutch problems 22 hours in, retiring not long after. A race-within-the-race is where the concluding action happened, a seven minute, 30-second dash from the end of the last caution to the checkered flag. During the penultimate pit stops with an hour to go, Dixon was in second place followed Jordan Taylor in the Wayne Taylor Racing DP into the pits but beat him out, taking the lead. The Action Express car was in third. In the last pit stops of the race, Dixon gained even more time, getting a four-second advantage over Taylor. Then a full-course caution came out twenty minutes before the finish when a Prototype Challenge car hit the wall and caught fire, bunching up the field. That closed the pits, but the Wayne Taylor Racing car had to pit during that yellow because of a miscalculation of driver time. No driver can be behind the wheel for more than four hours in a six-hour period but Jordan Taylor was going to go over, so he came in to swap out for brother Ricky. That cost the team any chance of second place, since they took an additional drive-through penalty for entering closed pits. When the track went green again, Sebastien Bourdais in the Action Express car stayed all over Dixon for the final five laps but couldn't get around him.

BMW, Hyundai score big in JD Power's first Tech Experience Index

While automakers are quick to brag about winning a JD Power Initial Quality Study award, the reality, as we've pointed out before, is that these ratings are somewhat misleading, since IQS doesn't necessarily distinguish genuine quality issues. JD Power's new Tech Experience Index aims to solve that problem. The new metric takes the same 90-day approach as IQS but focuses exclusively on technology – collision protection, comfort and convenience, driving assistance, entertainment and connectivity, navigation, and smartphone mirroring. It splits the industry up into just seven segments, based loosely on size, which is why the Chevrolet Camaro is in the same division (mid-size) as Kia Sorento and the Mercedes-Benz GLE-Class is in the same segment as the Hyundai Genesis (mid-size premium). It makes for some screwy bedfellows, to be sure. Still, splitting tech experience away from initial quality should allow customers to make more informed and intelligent decisions when buying new vehicles. In the inaugural study, respondents listed BMW and Hyundai as the big winners, with two segment awards – the 2 Series for small premium and the 4 Series for compact premium, and the Genesis for mid-size premium and Tucson for small segment. The Chevrolet Camaro (midsize), Kia Forte (compact), and Nissan Maxima (large) scored individual wins. Ford also had a surprising hit with the Lincoln MKC, which ranked third in the compact premium segment behind the 4 Series and Lexus IS. This is a coup for the Blue Oval, whose woeful MyFord Touch systems made the brand a victim of the IQS' flaws in the early 2010s. But Ford and other automakers might not want to celebrate just yet. According to JD Power, there's still a lot of room for improvement – navigation systems were the lowest-rated piece of tech in the study. Instead, customers repeatedly saluted collision-avoidance and safety systems, giving the category the best marks of the study and listing blind-spot monitoring and backup cameras as two must-have features – 96 percent of respondents said they wanted those two systems in their next vehicle. But this isn't really a surprise. Implementation of safety systems from brand to brand is similar, and they don't require any input from users, unlike navigation and infotainment systems which are frustratingly deep.