Biography | Mary Barra — Room 2123 Where She Faced the Ignition Hearing

People treat a Detroit safety scandal as a press conference at the Renaissance Center.

The first public accounting sat in a House hearing room.

On 1 April 2014, at 2 p.m., Mary Barra took the oath in Room 2123 of the Rayburn House Office Building at 45 Independence Avenue SW.

The House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations titled the session The GM Ignition Switch Recall: Why Did It Take So Long?

She had been chief executive for seventy-six days.

The panel was asking why a weak ignition switch in Chevrolet Cobalts, Saturn Ions, and related cars had been left in the fleet for more than a decade.

At the date of the hearing the company had already recalled about 2.6 million vehicles.

Contemporaneous coverage tied the defect to at least thirteen deaths.

The later compensation tallies and the Valukas internal report were not yet public.

Barra told the members she could not yet explain the delay and that an internal investigation would have to answer it.

She called the company's past handling unacceptable.

David Friedman, acting administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, testified the same afternoon.

The next morning she repeated the appearance before a Senate Commerce subcommittee in Russell 253.

That second room is a separate pin.

This one is the Rayburn chamber that held the first oath.

The marble building opened in 1965 and still houses Energy and Commerce hearing rooms on the Independence Avenue side.

A visitor can stand at the public entrance.

The committee dais is not a tourist stop.

Barra is a living executive.

This memory marks a dated public hearing in a federal office building, not a present workplace and not a private house.

Photo: Rayburn House Office Building from the Capitol dome, RebelAt, CC BY 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons.

Portrait: Mary Barra, 13 August 2014, U.S. Department of State, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.