I imagine that it may have been somewhat simple for GM to implement a system to prevent this, but from another perspective I also can conceive that such a syste

I imagine that it may have been somewhat simple for GM to implement a system to prevent this, but from another perspective I also can conceive that such a system might effect GM's bottom line negatively. If having engineers cut corners on their own (likely with the encouragement of management) saves money, incompetent upper managers might pad their bonuses with these little cut corners(an out of spec switch here, a faulty connection there). Normally this just means small problems for consumers down the line, this time it just ended up killing people. So who gets blamed? The guy at the bottom? I'm not buying it.