General Motors has agreed to pay $120 million to settle more claims that its deadly ignition-switch defect caused car owners economic harm, according to a settlement filing on Friday in New York City's U.S. District Court.
The settlement is barely 1 percent of what law firm Hagens Berman claimed it would reap for GM owners when it filed the class-action suit in 2014, shortly after GM's admission that year that its ignition switches caused vehicles to stall and disable all safety features, including airbags. The settlement names 216 plaintiffs who had owned some of the more than 2.6 million cars with the defective ignition switches, along with other GM cars recalled in 2014 for faulty power steering and side airbags that would not deploy in a crash, according to the filing.
It addresses economic harm due to resale, repairs, and other related losses due to the defect. It is unrelated to the $625 million settlement fund that GM initiated in 2014 to pay for 124 deaths and 275 injuries. It is also unrelated to a settlement in 2015 that paid $275 million for more than 1380 death and injury claims that were not part of the compensation fund.
