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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

#241

Post by thescriptkiddie »

jimmaswell wrote: post #207
InvertedRhodium wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and is only on the road because someone paid some mechanic off to look the other way during a state vehicle inspection for the past 5 years. Making mechanics liable - maybe jointly as a business and an individual - for their failure to inspect vehicles properly would be a pretty simple mechanic to reduce this risk.

These inspections are nothing but pointless revenue generation for the state, checking for the check engine light and inspecting 1 wheel at most usually. Lots of states don't even have them.

In Germany they are very serious about vehicle inspections, and insurance requirements.

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

#242

Post by thesausageking »

beamatronic wrote: post #213
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are too heavy to swap them by hand

Tesla actually had a battery swapping machine at one point, I think it was at the Kettleman City location. There's no reason the battery and charging infrastructure can't be leveraged for all passenger vehicles. The battery on your electric vehicle should be like the propane tank on your gas grill - just swap it out when you need to. (This doesn't preclude recharging it) Not to mention, when the battery reaches the e…

Tesla's swapping machine was just for tax credits. It was never built to be something they'd sell to customers. They built that one demo location and then abandoned battery swapping completely as not viable.

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

#243

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

epistasis wrote: post #35
ksm1717 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Price and panel gaps

The panel gaps and misalignment ive seen online for Teslas are still better than the general fit and finish issues that plague every single GM car I been in. Massive chunks of messy rubber foam, obvious joiners, bad internal panels... Maybe Tesla is not as tight as BMW, but it is definitely better than GM.

> Maybe Tesla is not as tight as BMW

Have you seen the i3 disaster?

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

#244

Post by dylan604 »

clouddrover wrote: post #38
dylan604 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it GM or LG for making bunk batteries? TFA clearly states that GM believes they will be recouping this money from LG.

Both really. The problem is supposed to have been caused by misaligned robots at LG's factories: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2021/08/misaligned-factory-robo... But the fault of both GM and LG is that they weren't able to detect the problem sooner.

So better regression testing on new battery deliveries and better unit tests on the batteries themselves. That's a good item to add to the after action report. Now, what do you do to the battery to make the unit test? Shake it? Heat it? For how long?

I guess I'm just not seeing fault at GM here. Trying to get there though.

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

#245

Post by InvertedRhodium »

jimmaswell wrote: post #207
InvertedRhodium wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and is only on the road because someone paid some mechanic off to look the other way during a state vehicle inspection for the past 5 years. Making mechanics liable - maybe jointly as a business and an individual - for their failure to inspect vehicles properly would be a pretty simple mechanic to reduce this risk.

These inspections are nothing but pointless revenue generation for the state, checking for the check engine light and inspecting 1 wheel at most usually. Lots of states don't even have them.

That sounds more like an argument for effective inspections being universally required more than anything else? Apologies if I've misinterpreted.

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

#246

Post by CameronNemo »

rootusrootus wrote: post #214
giantg2 wrote: post #44

My understanding is that GM will replace the battery within 3 years, right? Seems like a good time to buy a cheap electric car at a discount from someone who is (understandably) impatient.

At the moment they really aren't dropping in price on the used market. The Bolt is popular with owners, even now. There hasn't been a mass exodus yet.

Wow so maybe buy $GM, not a Bolt.

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

#247

Post by ReGenGen »

beamatronic wrote: post #194
avernon wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem here is the form factor of the cell as much as the chemistry. Pouch style cells are very difficult to regulate temperature in. This is a key reason why other automakers like Tesla use the small cylinder cells. Chinese companies like BYD have always used lithium iron phosphate. It has less energy density than lithium nickel batteries like NCA and NMC, but is cheaper. The patent was never taken out in China…

If batteries are easily swappable with minimal tools, then a lot of range concerns go away as well. I think battery ownership and care needs to be decoupled from the vehicle. I also think the federal government should enforce interoperable batteries between vehicle brands.

The battery is the most expensive part... which susceptible to wear, abuse and fraud. (and fire). Making them easily swappable with minimal tools means they'll be easily stolen.

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

#248

Post by gpm »

beamatronic wrote: post #194
avernon wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem here is the form factor of the cell as much as the chemistry. Pouch style cells are very difficult to regulate temperature in. This is a key reason why other automakers like Tesla use the small cylinder cells. Chinese companies like BYD have always used lithium iron phosphate. It has less energy density than lithium nickel batteries like NCA and NMC, but is cheaper. The patent was never taken out in China…

If batteries are easily swappable with minimal tools, then a lot of range concerns go away as well. I think battery ownership and care needs to be decoupled from the vehicle. I also think the federal government should enforce interoperable batteries between vehicle brands.

The cars shape and structural components are designed around the battery. The cars software, motors, charging electronics, software, cooling systems, etc are all designed for the specific battery. The battery eats up a significant fraction of the cost of the car, and the systems designed around it a significant fraction of the remainder.

Asking for interoperable batteries between vehicle brands is like asking for interoperable engines between vehicle brands, it's ridiculous. The government should not be saying "hey, that $xx,xxxx item with a million constrains and optimizable variables, why don't you make it meet this arbitrary standard so people could theoretically put it in another chassis that wasn't designed to let you optimize it as well as possible".

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

#249

Post by pavon »

ineedasername wrote: post #20

That's insane. For (probably) a majority of owners it makes the car unusable if you adhere to that restriction. If I had one then I would have nowhere to park it. Certainly not at work. And at home with once car in the driveway and another in front of the house they couldn't be 50 feet apart. In tightly packed houses even one driveway to the next isn't 50 feet apart. If you went shopping and we're lucky enough to man…

Yep. I have a Bolt. We are fortunate that the previous owner of our house put in RV hookups so during the recall we have been able to charge while parked in the driveway rather than charging in the garage and then moving to the driveway each night. But there is no way we can follow this latest guidance.

The farthest we could park is on the street evenly spaced between our driveway and our neighbor's driveway. This will end up being about 20 feet from the entries to our respective driveways and 35 feet diagonal from our respective garages. And I don't live in a dense area at all.

My biggest concern in all of this has been that there is a large pine tree in our front yard and there is literally no place in the driveway or street that isn't at least partially under the canopy of this tree. If the car catches fire, so will the tree, with pretty good odds of falling on the house.

We love the car, and don't really want to go through the hassle of shopping and buying another car to replace it right now. So it is really tempting to look at 10 fires out of 140,000 cars and say those are reasonable odds, but I don't know if that's the smart thing to do.

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

#250

Post by wffurr »

mercutio2 wrote: post #151
mabbo wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. For about 18 months in 2017 and 2018, I had a job that had me in a new city every other week. Lot of rental cars. And I started to have very strong preference. I would go out of my way to get a Chevy. Great Android auto integration. Good controls…

I own a Bolt. I loathe GM's software. With a flaming passion. Like, I will never buy another GM vehicle. The infotainment system crashes about once a week. It will come back in 10 minutes or so, but nothing I've done has ever managed to make it decide to reboot faster than that. The radio turns on. All the time. Over and over again. I literally never want the radio on. I only want CarPlay to ever play audio. GM seems…

My Subaru does an annoying thing where every time the car is turned on (or cranked from the on position), the radio comes on. At least it’s whatever volume was set last, but it makes me a little crazy.

The Bolt I test drove didn’t do that at all, IIRC. I’m going to look at another one soon; I’ll pay close attention to that.

Maybe yours is faulty?

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