“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.”
Discuss amongst yourselves. It’s just coffee talk. No big whup.
This is good…Hats off to GM for doing the right thing.
Hopefully the car-fire is NOT a big problem and can be resolved quickly.
Who knew you needed to carry a fire extinguisher in an electric car?
That’s the type car I would MOST want to have an extinguisher along with me. You’re sitting on some serious Amperage in those things man…
I’ve heard a few reports that simply charging the batteries has been a problem. They are suspected in some house/garage fires. Too bad…the Volt looks like a decently designed vehicle.
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. Overpriming and updraft carburetors are not a good combination, but if you could keep the pilot from getting out in a panic, the darn things would usually start right up once the carb and air filter caught fire. The running engine would suck the fire out immediately.
Does the Volt come with Nomex coveralls and gloves ? Good gift suggestion for the Volt owner on your list.
CSA
“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 very easily. They are easier to manage in small packages, like the ones in your cell phone that contain only an ounce of material. But, when they are up-sized for bigger devices,like lap tops, they’ve had more problems. Sony can tell you that. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15058478/ns/technology_and_science-tech_and_gadgets/t/sonys-battery-headaches-worsen/#.TtoTJHo2bSg
I can only imagine the danger and problems associated when they get super-sized, like in the Volt. There are plenty of videos on Youtube about exploding lithium-ion batteries. Even the small cell phone batteries release an amazing amount of energy when they burn. This is not a simple electrical fire.
PS. 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, so they are considerably larger cells that are harder to manage.
“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.
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. If Li-ion batteries are to be used in cars, they need to be segregated from each other in very small cells, protected by some kind of substrate that is not flammable so that a failure of one won’t cause a runaway reaction with the whole bunch. What we ultimately need is a safer battery technology. We’ve been dealing with gasoline and it’s hazards for over a century, and even the dumbest person has a vague understanding of the hazards in handling it. (with the exception of the fool I saw at a gas station the other day filling multiple cans that were in the bed of his pickup) Not so with electricity.
Even the thickest person probably knows it’s a bad idea to fill up their car while smoking. But give an idiot an electric car and they’ll cheerfully plug their car into a circuit that can’t handle the current requirements for charging it. And as the cars age, problems will begin to develop with the batteries and charging systems, and people will drive their partially wrecked electric cars because they still run and they can’t afford to get the damage checked out or fixed. I’m sure we’ve barely seen the tip of the iceberg as far as garage fires and other problems.
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 flares!
“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, so they are considerably larger cells that are harder to manage.”
The Tesla roadster costs about $110,000. I’m sure that a lot of that cost is the battery with the sophisticated circuitry. The Volt is expensive enough at $32,000.
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. The Tesla doesn’t have that much help.
The Tesla also has a highly engineered cooling system to remove the heat from the litium ion cells.
Teslla did the engineering and testing before considering the design saleable. GM’s history suggests that they take a somewhat different approach. Having bought a Vega new in '72, as well as a Saturn in '95, I guess I can rightfully make this statement with a clear conscience. I’ve had experience.
Anyway, I’m glad they’re doing the recall.
Just like mountainbike, I can attest to the fact that GM has a history of selling new vehicles that have not undergone sufficient development and/or testing, and that they have tended to use the early buyers of new models as their test drivers. God knows that my '81 Chevy Citation (one of the infamous X-cars) needed at least two additional years of testing, development, and refinement before it went on the market.
However, I would like to think that “the new GM” has learned a bit from their history of errors and that they are now doing business in a more honorable way.
Are they?
Only time will tell.
I’d like to think that too. Unfortunately, based on what I’ve seen so far, I’m afraid I cannot.
I thought they’d learn from the Vega, too. Boy, did I miss THAT guess!
“…GM has a history of selling new vehicles that have not undergone sufficient development and/or testing,”
IMO, it does not make sense to think that what GM did 30 years ago has any resemblance to what they do today. If doing that is reasonable, then you must really hate Toyota for the awful cars they inflicted the US market when they started selling cars here. More recent efforts like the Malibu and Cobalt have been successful from the start. The real problem wasn’t that GM was inattentive, it was that Toyota and Honda were able to bring a new design to market faster. GM had non-recurring expenses (like engineering) that continued longer than those competitors and didn’t want to lose more money by completely testing the car. They learned their lesson the hard way. Oh, and the Vega; there’s a recent faux pas.
“IMO, it does not make sense to think that what GM did 30 years ago has any resemblance to what they do today.”
…and that is why I stated, “I would like to think that ‘the new GM’ has learned a bit from their history of errors, and that they are now doing business in a more honorable way”.