“Good news for GM: The Chevy Volt has the highest customer satisfaction rating of any new car this year, according to Consumer Reports. The bad news: Chevy Volts also sometimes catch fire.” http://slatest.slate.com/posts/2011/12/01/chevy_volt_fires_gm_offering_buybacks_and_loaners.html.html Discu…

Wow, I Might Consider Buying One, Now. I’ve Been Concerned That An Electric Car Might Have A Problem Supplying Enough Heat For Cabin Comfort And Defrost Safety, But Not Anymore ! Good way to preheat your car on a cold morning. Reminds me of trying to start airplanes in really cold weather. Overpri…

“License And Registration !” “On Your Way To A fire, Mister ?” “I believe so, Officer !” CSA

There are 250,000 car fires each year, and almost none of them are the Chevy Volt. Do any of those car fires make the news? IMO this is a good will gesture. You may recall that GM preferred to lease Volts and made the leases attractive compared to buying the car.

People seem to have no issue driving around with 20 gallons of a highly flammable liquid sloshing around under the back seat. Why is an electrical fire cause for so much concern?

NTSB had 3 Volts catch fire as many as 3 weeks in storage after some crash testing. The first one was weeks after a minor side impact test. According to a friend in the industry, lithium-ion batteries, like the one used for the Volt, are chemically unstable. They tend to go into thermal over-run ve…

The thing of it is, when gasoline leaks out, it’s dangerous, sure, but when the contents of lithium ion batteries are compromised and exposed to air, they can spontaneously ignite. And they’re a lot harder than gasoline to put out, too. Lithium is highly reactive with even the humidity in the air.…

The biggest maker of large lithium batteries is a company in China. Unfortunately they called the company ‘Thunder-Sky’. Now they’re changing their name to Winston (tastes good like a battery should). http://www.everspring.net/product-battery.htm And, yes, early users have had them turn into big f…

“The Tesla seems to be avoiding these problems because of their battery design. It is basically thousands of small laptop Li-ion battery cells put together and protected with a series of sophisticated buffer circuits to provide a lot of protection. The Volt only uses a couple hundred battery cells, …

The Tesla is built on a Lotus Elise chassis. The Volt shares a chassis with the much cheaper Cruze. That probably has a lot to do with it, as well. Plus, the Volt has a lot of Gov’t grant money and incentives behind it. I heard the cost of manufacturing the Volt is much higher that the selling price…

GM Offers To Buy Back Volts From Worried Owners

Maintenance/Repairs

dagosa December 3, 2011, 6:58pm 11

“jt” is absolutely right. Ever bothered to look ? Gasoline is unstable too. Ever think about hydrogen powered car problems too ? We wouldn’t be dealing with this if companies were allowed to make the batteries that powered the last GM electric.

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GM Offers To Buy Back Volts From Worried Owners

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