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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

#51

Post by taurath »

My perception of American designed and engineered vehicles is that they’re really awful, not just from a reliability standpoint but also from a user interface standpoint. GM, Ford, and Chrysler haven’t been building good vehicles in my lifetime - once I switched to Hondas I’ve yet to have any serious engine trouble even in some very old vehicles, whereas every American car I’ve owned has been a money sink. Of course OPMMV, but I’d rather get a Hyundai or Kia nowadays than anything Detroit puts out. Touchscreens everywhere, actually horrible tech branded as being the second coming, vent positions that make no sense.

I’m excited for all the EV models to choose from in the upcoming years but news stories like this make me think it’s gonna be the same old story - an absolute lack of inspiration, mechanical and engineering rigor, and a lot like the USA the staunch belief that in the end it somehow must still be the best despite all evidence to the contrary.

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

#52

Post by notJim »

The flammability of lithium batteries kind of freaks me out. I hope we get to non-flammable batteries soon. Imagine a future where every car in a dense parking garage is lithium BEV, and then one of them catches fire. As far as I know, these fires are extremely difficult to put out, requiring enormous amounts of water. What if the fire spreads to many other cars? I'm not sure if this fear is at all rational. Probably not.

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

#53

Post by e-clinton »

routerl wrote: post #39
dmurray wrote: 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 can't decide if I like that better or worse. It's a really good question. Let's think about it. As you've outlined it, Tesla's approach prioritizes the user's confidence in the product, rather than the user's knowledge about the product. Naturally, when a product is faulty, the user's confidence in the product is inversely proportional to their knowledge about the fault; the less I know about the fault, the more…

Apple went with the Tesla model and had a PR mess as well as lawsuits

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

#54

Post by edge17 »

routerl wrote: post #39
dmurray wrote: 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 can't decide if I like that better or worse. It's a really good question. Let's think about it. As you've outlined it, Tesla's approach prioritizes the user's confidence in the product, rather than the user's knowledge about the product. Naturally, when a product is faulty, the user's confidence in the product is inversely proportional to their knowledge about the fault; the less I know about the fault, the more…

Isn't this basically what Apple should have done to avoid their throttling lawsuit? Told their customers to change their behaviors?

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

#55

Post by sjg007 »

raman162 wrote: post #8
dmurray wrote: 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 don't see how electric cars are any different than mobile phones. So basically this means a 3 year life span in terms of battery performance. Regular combustion cars though also suffer reduced mpg so I am not saying this is an apples to apples comparison.

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

#56

Post by cptskippy »

sleepytimetea wrote: post #13

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…

There are two defects, a torn anode tab and a folded separator. They implied both defects were occurring simultaneously in a cell but didn't indicate if all cells are affected. They did however identify that the issues came from multiple factories in the US and Korea, which indicates the problem might be with every single cell manufactured.

GM said they don't trust the stock of packs they have in warehouses or any installed in EVs. They are requiring LG to implement GM's level of QC, which we must presume is higher than LG's existing QC.

No batteries will be fixed in any EV until GM is confident that LG can actually manufacture the cells without defect. At that point in sounds like all packs will we fully swapped in all EVs made.

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

#57

Post by [deleted] »

dmurray wrote: 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.

[deleted]

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

#58

Post by reducesuffering »

ksm1717 wrote: post #27
reducesuffering wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Price and panel gaps

I'll give you price but I think that's an equivalent trade-off to all the cons:

Much worse horsepower

Much worse EV range

Still requires ICE maintenance

Worse software

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

#59

Post by desine »

dmurray wrote: 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.

To be fair this is the norm for pretty much any rechargeable electronic device. Lithium chemistries in particular are sensitive to damage from over discharging. "5% battery remaining on the display" is pretty much never "5% of available energy available"

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

#60

Post by weaksauce »

Animats wrote: post #42

Maybe lithium-ion batteries in mass-market vehicles aren't such a good idea. We may need a battery technology that can survive poor maintenance less than perfect battery construction, and low-cost vehicle designs. Tesla had to put a titanium plate under their battery. That's not a mass-market solution. BYD is converting over to lithium iron phosphate, which is much better behaved when damaged. Toyota is working on so…

might want to put it into context though... there are on average 160,000 passenger car fires per year and about 360 deaths due to that. i'd like to see that figure broken down per 100k miles driven or per 100k cars of the type but i can't seem to find that easily.

https://www.nfpa.org/vehiclefires

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