By Mike Spector And Christina Rogers
A jury began hearing Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV Chief
Executive Sergio Marchionne's testimony Tuesday in a lawsuit over
the death of a 4-year-old boy in a Jeep that caught fire, a case
expected to draw new attention to the fuel tanks in older
sport-utility vehicles that federal regulators have tied to 51
deaths.
Lawyers for the boy's family, which alleges Chrysler was
responsible for his wrongful death, started to play a videotaped
deposition of Mr. Marchionne 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.
Jurors viewed a brief part of Mr. Marchionne's testimony dealing
with a vehicle-safety standard during a lawyer's opening statement,
according to a video feed of the proceedings provided by Courtroom
View Network.
The company says the SUVs in question are safe and that it
agreed to recall 1.56 million if them, starting in 2013, 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.
Fiat Chrysler has avoided the kind of recall scrutiny received
by GM and Takata.
Both 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 is expected to spotlight 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 only communicated
that he would attend the meeting alone.
After the meeting, both sides eventually agreed to the limited
recall, service campaign and trailer-hitch solution. A NHTSA
spokesman said the agency continues to receive complaints from
consumers having trouble getting their Jeeps repaired.
A Fiat Chrysler spokesman said the company has engaged in more
than five million additional mailings, emails, phone calls and
Facebook Inc. ads to alert Jeep owners, and had received about
61,000 responses as of the end of last week.
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. 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.
Write to Mike Spector at mike.spector@wsj.com and Christina
Rogers at christina.rogers@wsj.com
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