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…
I think this would be true in 90's. It was really bad. Now a days, Ford and the rest make excellent vehicles on all fronts.
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
> 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
Apple's solution was akin to taking a Tesla going 80 mph on a freeway, suddenly turning on "limp" mode and locking the car to 10 mph, all without informing the user anything abnormal was going on.
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…
But it's not the GM-made part of the car that's failing here, it's the LG-made batteries.
And totally understand the sentiment, but Foxxcon isn’t blamed if iPhones start to fail left and right, Apple is.
The people branding the car are responsible for their supply chain.
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…
The risk of lithium ion fire is very obvious and real. But to decide if this is a problem relative to the current alternatives (gasoline) we would need to compare the rates and severity of fires between the two.
Gasoline cars also have complicated parts to help mitigate their fire risk.
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.
> 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.
This may have been in the playbook typically, but most car lots are really sparse. All of Q2 production was 688,236 vehicles [1], and there are about 107,000 Bolts in the US [2]. While current Bolt owners are undoubtedly frustrated, GM would really hamper efforts to expand market share.
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…
> GM has said the fires are a rare event and are the result of two uncommon defects that stem from a manufacturing problem in LG’s plants in Michigan and South Korea.
Recommending people park 50 feet away from other vehicles to me means that’s not rare enough IMO.
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…
Cool, but if i bought a low cost electric car specifically because my commute range allowed for it, for example, until your "bug fixes and changes" OTA was quietly force-pushed and i find myself on the highway with a dead battery, i'm likely to set the fkn thing on fire myself...
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
TFA is about the Bolt, not the Volt.
That’s my point, why bother with Bolt et al. when the volt has already established as a clear front runner.
Bummer. I thought nickel was suppose to be better at handling these fire issues? As consumers, should we be waiting to see when CATL's sodium batteries are arriving?