When I read this story, I thought of parallels to large complex software projects (of course). You could call a large software system that would take more effort fix than has been been spent to create it so far "totalled", like a badly crashed car. It happens (usually with government payroll systems it seems).
GM seems to have "totalled" their entire lineup of cars designed and produced over the last 20 years - the quality of their organization's work has been so low that it's not really possible for GM to find and fix all the serious problems on all the cars they've made. They would have to dissect all the parts from a sampling of cars of each year, since they can't even trust that the same part number is really the same in different years! It's probably cheaper to make a couple new car models, really make sure they're not defective, and provide everyone who still has a GM car with a replacement car. Cheaper, but maybe still not possible. "Good enough" massive recalls will have to do.
GM seems to have "totalled" their entire lineup of cars designed and produced over the last 20 years - the quality of their organization's work has been so low that it's not really possible for GM to find and fix all the serious problems on all the cars they've made. They would have to dissect all the parts from a sampling of cars of each year, since they can't even trust that the same part number is really the same in different years! It's probably cheaper to make a couple new car models, really make sure they're not defective, and provide everyone who still has a GM car with a replacement car. Cheaper, but maybe still not possible. "Good enough" massive recalls will have to do.