Federal fines of $935 million.
Up to $625 million for victim compensation.
More than $200 million to fix the cars.
And $575 million to settle many, but not all, of the pending lawsuits.
The known financial toll to General Motors for hiding a deadly safety defect now exceeds $2.3 billion, or about $900 per recalled car, on top of whatever GM lost selling them in the first place. It will undoubtedly keep rising for years as the remaining legal issues play out.
"People were hurt and people died in our cars," GM CEO Mary Barra told employees this week as she outlined a $900 million settlement with the U.S. Justice Department. "We accept the penalties being announced today because that's what it means to be held accountable."
But outside GM, there's little feeling the company has been held genuinely accountable for the negligence, inaction and, according to prosecutors, intentional concealment of the ignition-switch flaw now tied to 124 deaths and 275 injuries over more than a decade.
Safety advocate Ralph Nader called GM a "homicidal fugitive from justice." Clarence Ditlow, executive director of the Center for Auto Safety in Washington, wrote in an email: "GM officials walk off scot-free while its customers are six feet under."
Even U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, who exacted 25 percent less in fines than he collected from Toyota Motor Corp. in a similar settlement last year, sounded displeased with his ability to seek justice given the abundant evidence of wrongdoing.
Corporate "siloing" and the high burden of proof for violations of laws governing the auto industry mean that prosecuting individual executives or other employees is "not as easy as it looks sometimes," Bharara said during a press conference at his offices in New York.