General Motors’ rather charming boss Mary Barra appeared before the media recently to humbly apologize for the inconvenience their ignition switch recall has caused to the owners of the affected vehicles, and also announce a recall of an additional 971,000 cars! That brings the total number of vehicles affected by the ignition switch debacle to 2.2 million.

For some strange reason though, it doesn’t appear as a surprise. If it was Toyota issuing such massive recall – as they did a few years ago – everybody would be shocked and chagrined. But when you look at the list of the cars involved in GM ignition switch recall, it’s like you were half expecting them to go wrong in one way or another. They are products of an era where it was accepted for American-made cars to be absolute rubbish.

Saturn Ion and Sky, Pontiac G5 and Solstice and the Chevrolet HHR and Cobalt – these are the cars with faulty ignition switches that may lead to crash, fire and death. In fact, 34 crashes and 12 deaths have already been associated with the problem. It was after these cases the GM decided maybe they should do something about this. Not to worry though. As soon as you get your car to the appointed dealerships, they’ll fix it in a jiffy. Although, with cars like those you are better off leaving them on the side of the road.

“We’re taking no chances with safety” said GM CEO Mary Barra. “Trying to locate several thousand switches in a population of 2.2 million and distributed to thousands of retailers isn’t practical. Out of an abundance of caution, we are recalling the rest of the model years.”