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

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271–280 of 432 posts

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

#271
post #3

Is there a lawsuit to make GM take back the cars? This is ridiculous.

GM has bought back the cars of many owners who have asked, but not all. While GM may have drug their feet on buy-backs early on I doubt they would let any individual request get to the point of a lawsuit before changing their mind.

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

#272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but an important part of that context is that electric car fires also burn longer and hotter and take significantly more effort to put out. Too little water can actually make the fire worse. Annecdotally, my recollection from other articles is that electric cars do in fact catch on fire less often. But it also seems like they may be more difficult to deal with. This may change as EV's become more mainstream & fi…

> For the time being, rare or not, they post a much larger problem to deal with when they do occur. It seems to me that being harder to put off but occurring less frequently, and most importantly not exploding (leaving significant amount of time for occupants to get out, if they are able) is a pretty good trade off.

I don’t know about giving occupants more time to get out. I have seen the carpark video of a Tesla going up in flames in China.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2019-04-22/tesla-inves...

Thing went from 0 to 110 real quick.

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

#273
post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve never heard of a gas tank spontaneously bursting into flames.

There are about 160,000 fires involving personal internal combustion engine vehicles per year.

So, there’s a guaranteed recipe for starting an engine fire (though from oil, not gasoline): Icy hill, and idiot drivers holding their engine at max revs for a few minutes to try and conquer them. The heat destroys the seals, oil leaks out, and combusts on the hot block.

Which makes me wonder, how would an EV handle the same poor driving conditions?

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

#274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the key word there was "spontaneous", along with the relative danger and difficulty of dealing with them. An EV fire can take 24 hours to secure. A gasoline car takes about 300 gallons of water. I'm not saying EV fires are a bigger issue than gasoline cars. I'm saying that you cannot look merely at incident rate to determine the issue.

I would say that's an advantage for EVs. I'd rather have fires that are slow to start and slow to put out than the opposite.

I’m not sure, it’s 24 hours of constant monitoring and fire suppression from a trained fire crew. Not something that’s scalable.

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

#275

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…

Anyone know who's financially responsible in cases like that? LG, GM, or shared between the two? I've heard the recall is in excess of 1 billion.

I believe GM is footing the bill but hoping to then get LG to pay it because the defects are in LGs manufacturing and not in GMs design.

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

#276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many of those are due to the ICE? In my experience most vehicle fires are electrical in nature, whether it's an EV or not (the 12v system in an ICE car can still cause a fire).

Ethanol gasoline degrades older vehicle's rubber fuel lines, This has lead to many fuel fires.

Yeah, I'm not saying it doesn't happen, I'm just saying it's very infrequent in my experience (~15 years as a firefighter). Electrical issues, accidental fires in the passenger compartment (cigarettes/joints igniting trash in the footwell), and even arson are all far more common than fuel system issues.

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

#277
post #71
post #51

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…

The cells for the bolt were made in Korea though, right?

The older 2017-2019 models were manufactured in Korea but they found the same defect in batteries built by LG in Michigan that they used on the 2021-2021 models. Which is why they are trying to figure out how to test the batteries to determine how common the defect is. It's actually two defects (broken anode tab and folded compartment) that when combined in the same model produce the fire risk.

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

#279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Volt isn't made any more, for one. And it's smaller (lower to the ground, at least, and less head clearance). I wasn't comfortable in the Volt, but the Bolt is great.

buying a new car is generally antithetical to buying a sustainable car

If nobody buys a new car, how do you expect there to be any used ones?

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

#280
Folks are apparently being told they can't park their Bolts in various garages, etc:

https://old.reddit.com/r/BoltEV/comments/pp2inx/just_receive...

https://old.reddit.com/r/BoltEV/comments/pp3yrs/another_no_b...

https://old.reddit.com/r/BoltEV/comments/po9imp/is_this_goin...

These cars just became a lot less useful.

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