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GM tells some Bolt owners to park 50 feet away from other cars

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Re: GM tells some Bolt owners to park 50 feet away from other cars

#21

So what is a family with a two car garage supposed to do, park the Bolt a block away? This seems like the kind of thing GM should get wayyyy in front of with a very generous offer to buy back the cars as a trade towards another GM model.

Park outside the garage in the driveway, or next to your neighbor's car that won't return your mower they borrowed six weeks ago.

Re: GM tells some Bolt owners to park 50 feet away from other cars

#22
post #8
post #4

> The automaker told Bolt owners to limit the charge to 90 percent, plug in more frequently and avoid depleting the battery to below about 70 miles of remaining range. Tesla's approach here would be to issue an OTA update that told your car to treat 90% as 100% and 25% as 0. I can't decide if I like that better or worse.

I think there's the 5 second cool factor but after that novelty you're probably just as disgruntled as the fact that you lost 35% of the range for your car. I hope the Chevy bolt is a rare case and stories like this don't pop up with the other upcoming electric vehicles. The new lightning F150 looks very attractive.

I think it would be good. If you drive your car or charge it out of those ranges it can catch on fire. Removing that area of "ordinary things you can do with your car and it might make it burn up" is exactly why that is important to consider. There must be hundreds of thousands of bolts and at least some of those customers have not heard about this. The other side of it is hey you took something away from my car and I don't like that. GM has to deal with this by fixing people's cars and giving them monetary compensation.

Re: GM tells some Bolt owners to park 50 feet away from other cars

#23

So what is a family with a two car garage supposed to do, park the Bolt a block away? This seems like the kind of thing GM should get wayyyy in front of with a very generous offer to buy back the cars as a trade towards another GM model.

what about those of us thay have our car parked next to a bolt on the street. 100 feet is 5 parking spaces give or take.

Re: GM tells some Bolt owners to park 50 feet away from other cars

#24
post #15

The Chevy volt model as established in the early 2010s is an arm and a leg beyond the next closest competitor in the electric automobile space and this is a smirch upon its namespace

Why is the Volt an "arm and a leg beyond" a Model 3?

Re: GM tells some Bolt owners to park 50 feet away from other cars

#25

So what is a family with a two car garage supposed to do, park the Bolt a block away? This seems like the kind of thing GM should get wayyyy in front of with a very generous offer to buy back the cars as a trade towards another GM model.

People park their car in their garage?

Re: GM tells some Bolt owners to park 50 feet away from other cars

#26

I would think the well publicized early failures of large Lithium ion battery technology (787 burning down while docked at a gate, the various Tesla fires and Samsung Note phones being banned from planes) would have taught enough lessons to eliminate these risks in the future. I haven't dug into the details of the "manufacturing defect" at LG's battery plants - seems like a failure in Quality Control. I also don't kn…

They did try replacing faulty cells and modules before the full recall, even though other manufacturers using the same LG cells were doing a full recall and replace. They also tried software fixes. I dont know enough to understand why it did not work.

Probably the replacement program and the associated logistics were too expensive and the recall was an easier solution in terms of costs/benefits. Not sure about the PR costs this will cause though.

Re: GM tells some Bolt owners to park 50 feet away from other cars

#27
post #15

The Chevy volt model as established in the early 2010s is an arm and a leg beyond the next closest competitor in the electric automobile space and this is a smirch upon its namespace

Why is the Volt an "arm and a leg beyond" a Model 3?

Price and panel gaps

Re: GM tells some Bolt owners to park 50 feet away from other cars

#28

I would think the well publicized early failures of large Lithium ion battery technology (787 burning down while docked at a gate, the various Tesla fires and Samsung Note phones being banned from planes) would have taught enough lessons to eliminate these risks in the future. I haven't dug into the details of the "manufacturing defect" at LG's battery plants - seems like a failure in Quality Control. I also don't kn…

I've heard that this is the reason that all the future major lithium ion companies have already been founded.

Learning all the really hard lessons about QC and how to prevent fires and defects takes more experience and knowledge and time than any new competitor could devote to catching up.

Re: GM tells some Bolt owners to park 50 feet away from other cars

#29
post #16
post #4

> The automaker told Bolt owners to limit the charge to 90 percent, plug in more frequently and avoid depleting the battery to below about 70 miles of remaining range. Tesla's approach here would be to issue an OTA update that told your car to treat 90% as 100% and 25% as 0. I can't decide if I like that better or worse.

They should have limited the charge from the beginning. No way the engineers didn’t realize deep cycling is bad for the battery.

It's not that they were deep-cycling the cells before. Discharging lithium cells to 0 volts is very bad for them; the cars definitely restrict the cells from being discharged below a certain point. Rather, the potential for danger due to this rare, hard-to-detect manufacturing flaw is great enough that Chevy is asking Bolt owners to self-impose even tighter restrictions on how low the batteries will be discharged.

Re: GM tells some Bolt owners to park 50 feet away from other cars

#30

So what is a family with a two car garage supposed to do, park the Bolt a block away? This seems like the kind of thing GM should get wayyyy in front of with a very generous offer to buy back the cars as a trade towards another GM model.

People park their car in their garage?

For the few folks that doesn't live in SF, maybe?
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