By Mike Spector And Christina Rogers 

Chrysler conducted a "thorough review" of older Jeeps and the design of their fuel tanks is "not a safety defect," the chief executive of Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV testified in a wrongful-death lawsuit over a 4-year-old boy killed in a fiery rear-end Jeep crash in 2012.

Lawyers for the boy's family, which alleges Chrysler was responsible for his wrongful death, played a videotaped deposition of Fiat Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne for a jury late Tuesday afternoon. Chrysler, the Jeep's manufacturer, is now called FCA US LLC.

The trial, which began earlier in the day in a Georgia courtroom, comes in the wake of a record number of vehicle recalls in the U.S. last year and public investigations into defective ignition switches in General Motors Co. vehicles and rupture-prone air bags made by Takata Corp. of Japan. The Georgia case could draw new attention to fuel tanks installed behind the rear axle in older Jeeps that federal regulators have tied to 51 deaths.

The company says the SUVs in question are safe and that it agreed in 2013 to recall 1.56 million of them and inspect other Jeeps to assuage customer concerns, and not as an admission of wrongdoing. The company currently is installing trailer hitches on the backs of the Jeeps designed to give them more protection in lower-speed collisions.

Mr. Marchionne in his deposition noted he is "not an engineer" and several times said he has "no way of knowing" whether more recent Jeep models with fuel tanks located in front of the rear axle are safer than the older SUVs, according to a video feed of the proceedings provided by Courtroom View Network.

When asked about the testimony of a Chrysler engineer, he said: "I don't know who he is." His preparation for the deposition was a 2 1/2 hour meeting with lawyers at FCA's Auburn Hills, Mich., headquarters, he said. The trial adjourned early Tuesday evening, with the playing of Mr. Marchionne's deposition expected to continue Wednesday.

Fiat Chrysler has avoided the kind of recall scrutiny received by GM and Takata. Both the latter companies have spent heavily on dealing with their safety problems, and have faced U.S. Justice Department inquiries, fines from regulators and hearings on Capitol Hill.

Federal regulators have raised concerns about the pace of the Jeep trailer-hitch installations, but have stopped short of asking Chrysler to designate the vehicles as defective.

Mr. Marchionne's testimony renews scrutiny of Chrysler's tussles with regulators over millions of older Jeep models whose fuel tanks were installed behind the rear axle. The government, when originally requesting a recall, concluded that the tanks are vulnerable to igniting in rear-end crashes.

The auto maker initially resisted a June 2013 request by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to recall 2.7 million Jeep Grand Cherokee and Liberty SUVs from model years 1993 to 2007. It took a meeting between Mr. Marchionne and two top auto-safety regulators for the auto maker to begin dealing with the Jeeps.

The parents of the 4-year-old boy, Remi Walden, sued Chrysler after their 1999 Grand Cherokee burst into flames in a rear-end collision while stopped and waiting for traffic to clear in March 2012, according to court records.

The vehicle was among the Jeeps the auto maker agreed to inspect as part of a "customer satisfaction campaign," in lieu of a recall.

A Fiat Chrysler spokesman said the Jeep was rear-ended by a pickup truck in a "violent, high-energy crash caused by a negligent driver."

After a Chrysler official contacted then-NHTSA head David Strickland in early June 2013, a meeting was set between Messrs. Marchionne and Strickland and then-U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, according to emails reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

"The meeting would only be with the Secretary and I, no other staff, as Sergio wanted," Mr. Strickland wrote in an email to Chrysler's Jody Trapasso on June 7, 2013.

A Fiat Chrysler spokesman said Mr. Marchionne communicated only that he would attend the meeting alone.

After the meeting, both sides eventually agreed to the limited recall, service campaign and trailer-hitch solution. Regulators agreed to the deal in part because they weren't certain they would prevail if they ordered a recall and Chrysler decided to challenge it in court, said a person close to the situation. The government would have had to prove that its evidence of a safety defect outweighed the auto maker's contrary evidence, said a person close to the matter.

The government's analysis showed the Jeeps performed worse than other similar vehicles in low and moderate-speed collisions, this person said. The problem could have remained unaddressed if regulators had continued fighting the company, this person said.

A NHTSA spokesman said the agency continues to receive complaints from consumers having trouble getting their Jeeps repaired.

A Fiat Chrysler spokesman says the company initiated more than 5 million "outreach attempts" including emails and phone calls to alert Jeep owners.

Write to Mike Spector at mike.spector@wsj.com and Christina Rogers at christina.rogers@wsj.com

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