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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

#351

Post by nickik »

awesomeusername wrote: post #316
beamatronic wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 negative replies to this are largely valid, but ignore the fact that we can have multiple strategies at the same time. I for one would love to be able to take my battery out, swap it, have a few so some are always on solar charge. Be able to take one onto the boat. Use a new one for higher performance special occasion driving, and an old one for bumper to bumper slow commute which I can wrong every last mile out…

Literally nobody is arguing against some companies being allowed to do that.

And Nio does in China.

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

#352

Post by vbezhenar »

SamBam wrote: post #251
gpm wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 int…

Certainly no one should expect to be able to swap the main batteries that are embedded into the chassis of the car. The total weight of the batteries in a Tesla are around 1200 lbs. But it seems like there could be a hot-swappable portion of the battery, kind of like a separate "reserve tank" (although it wouldn't actually be reserved). Some back of the envelope math says that if 1200 lb battery gets you 250 miles, a…

What about small generator and a canister of gasoline?

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

#353

Post by Ekaros »

beamatronic wrote: post #217
outworlder wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The issue is when we're eventually talking about a 22-year old Model 3 that's had 13 years of deferred maintenance, is totally clapped out, 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. Except that the 22 year Model 3 also has a computer inside the battery that should be keeping things in check. Assuming the battery can e…

And said computer was likely receiving software updates and sending telemetry for most, if not all, of that time.

Or it have been hacked either to send fake data or no data at all... Knowing the general level of security in industry and even with some high end smartphones, I expect it to happen.

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

#354

Post by devoutsalsa »

A relative of my lives in a three story apartment building with an underground parking structure. He had purchased a bolt w/ a recharging station. After the last batch of fire hazard safety notices, he sold the Bolt and bought something else. With this notice, I think he'd have had to park the car outside the city limits to stay at least 50 feet from another car, and I'm not sure how he'd have handled charging.

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

#355

Post by dvdkon »

rrix2 wrote: post #88
NotSammyHagar wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Obviously the manufacturer should compensate its customers, it's just better to have an EV with worse range than an unsafe EV or even a pile of scrap (if they all got recalled and probablt not fixed).

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

#356

Post by lelanthran »

gpm wrote: post #248
beamatronic wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 int…

> Asking for interoperable batteries between vehicle brands is like asking for interoperable engines between vehicle brands, it's ridiculous.

Engines are interoperable to a large degree; you can switch out the engine+ecu of your car for the engine+ecu of another car more easily than you'd think because the majority of the effort will be in changes requiring an adapter plate and shaft for the transmission.

There are hurdles that make it harder (for example, auto transmissions have software that expects a particular set of engine characteristics), but by and large most engines are isolated enough from the rest of the car and the drivetrain that you don't need to worry.

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

#357

Post by nickik »

beamatronic wrote: post #300
gpm wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 int…

It's not ridiculous but it does lead to this conclusion: That there is probably a single optimal "skateboard" type design. Manufacturers are converging on this anyway. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skateboard_(automotive_platfor... Then the real truth that no one wants to hear, is that there is no need for so many different types of passenger vehicles.

This is nonsense. That's like saying 'everybody converging on a 4 wheel design'. The details of how the platform is built and integrated is still very different.

> Then the real truth that no one wants to hear, is that there is no need for so many different types of passenger vehicles.

Good that we have you to tell us what vehicles people should drive.

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

#358

Post by bananasbandanas »

nickik wrote: post #350
TeMPOraL wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does the Supercharger network come with a fleet of drones that can autonomously repair a charger in the middle of nowhere, that broke down one late evening of a particularly snowy winter Sunday? That said, it's probably a UX problem. Once EVs stop competing on range so much, it'll make sense to just designate the last 10% of battery as "reserve" and not count it in the battery level indicator.

No but there are always multiple supercharges at each station. > it'll make sense to just designate the last 10% of battery as "reserve" and not count it in the battery level indicator. Very questionable? Why would you do that? We don't do that for gas cars either.

Every ICE car I've ever driven did exactly that with the 'reserve' where the needle is already at (or below) the zero line but you still get about 50 km of range.

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

#359

Post by lelanthran »

sailingparrot wrote: post #147
ineedasername wrote: post #136

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.

> 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.

It's very rare to get a gas tank to explode (as others have pointed out). You need to have very little fuel (or better, none at all) in the tank before a spark will cause explosions.

Take a 2l plastic soda bottle, fill it 90% full with petrol and (with tongs from a distance) drop in a lit cigarette. I've tried to get the bottle to go bang multiple times and it never happens - the ciggarette is extinguished every single time.

Then empty that bottle until there is less than 5ml of petrol in it, close the bottle and shake it up to get a rich mixture, and then repeat the experiment (I've gotten fairly big bangs every single time, this way).

The TLDR of it all is that there is danger of explosion when the tank is emptied, not when it is full, because the fumes cause explosions, not the liquid state of the fuel (which just catches fire).

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

#360

Post by nickik »

notJim wrote: post #52

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…

Check out:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LgAaB7fsSbo

Safety can and will be improved quite a bit even of current batteries.

And newer chemistries will do better anyway.

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