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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

#411

Post by ineedasername »

lelanthran wrote: post #359
sailingparrot wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Yes, as I understand it, the fuel vapors give a relatively minor boom that disperses the rest of the gasoline enough to become essentially the second stage. Not that it takes long enough to really discern two stages: aerosolized gasoline will go up fast.

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

#412

Post by ineedasername »

mellavora wrote: post #401
lelanthran wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

How long would you suggest those tongs should be, to ensure a safe distance? For the ones that go bang.

I think, given the HN community, the appropriate answer is "build a robot to do it for you"

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

#413

Post by WorldMaker »

martin_a wrote: post #390
raxxorrax wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, if the manufacturer says I should park my car 15m away from others due to spontaneous fire risk...

I don't understand this at all. Right now I'm in the second recall with my Hyundai Kona EV. They have found that there might be a problem with the battery packs, so ALL Kona get a new one where the bug is fixed. Might take its time till they are done, but they did not tell me to park near a river or something, in case the car catches fire. So either GM is even more cautious or just stupid.

Given GM's history between recall lawsuits in the past and "activist" shareholders in the present, I'd lean way more towards "more cautious". GM is an American company more prone to certain types of US lawsuits than other manufacturers and a lot of their PR has always been full of CYA, and also currently in a multi-year battle against some shareholders trying to intentionally tank GM's electric efforts (presumably so that Tesla "wins"?).

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

#414

Post by jdsully »

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.

The “explosions” you hear from car fires are almost always first the tires popping, and later the airbags going off. I watched a car fire near me last year and the firefighters didn’t even flinch when the loud bangs happened.

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

#415

Post by jdsully »

retSava wrote: post #344
Closi wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, they should have just been transparent about the throttling. They still throttle now after the lawsuit, you can just stop it if you want to. Also an important difference with Apple is that the iPhone throttling wasn’t a safety concern.

The throttling was a reaction to poor battery performance at the technical endish-of-life part of the product. After X cycles the battery recharge ability was limited, couldn't be fully charged. It also had increased internal resistance, meaning an increased power draw (eg CPU/GPU load increase) can't be sustained. If too much current is drawn, the voltage drops, and the result may be a brown-out event (voltage too l…

Around that time there were a ton of battery recalls for phones nowhere near the end of their life - mine was one.

I think they just got a bad batch of batteries or were too aggressive cost optimizing and this was the fix. 5&6 era iPhones never had this problem and their batteries degraded just the same.

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

#416

Post by WorldMaker »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #346
usefulcat wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a 200 lb hot-swap battery would get you 40 miles. According to one report, for a Tesla Model 3, a supercharger can add ~100 miles of range in ~10 minutes. It's hard to see how any improvement over that could possibly justify the immense additional complexity of physical battery swapping for only 40 additional miles of range. https://insideevs.com/news/506520/tesla-model-3-supercharger...

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.

Somehow gas pumps get repaired/maintained in the "middle of nowhere" today. Eventually the economic incentives will align that that the charger networks get maintained no matter where they are.

Arguably it should be far easier to get those economic incentives aligned as chargers are far simpler mechanically (they are just plug sockets with weird over-engineered male adapters) and most of what breaks on them is either vandalism or a small subset of existing problems of gas pumps: credit card reader malfunctions, display/screen problems, internet connectivity issues for account management/credit card transactions. (All the human UX points of contact.)

> 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.

Most already do (even while still competing for range) because it's a battery maintenance requirement. Li-Ion cells generally don't like being 100% full, especially not for long periods of time, and sometimes have a preferred "directionality" (ie, a cell should only be charging until it hits 100% and then you can draw from it and vice versa once you start drawing from the cell you should keep doing so until it hits 0%) so battery controllers already have to do a bunch of math to keep a "reserve" so that they don't violate "directionality" (you always want cells in the "charging" direction available even while driving for regenerative braking storage, for instance) and don't generally hit 100% charge for long rest periods, but instead 95% or so.

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

#417

Post by WorldMaker »

worrycue wrote: post #272
sailingparrot wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

From an exterior perspective of a parked car certainly that would look like the case. The interior software in an operating Tesla has very loud warnings as soon as the first firewall breaks between cells which according to multiple incidents happens at least 5-10 minutes before enough cells hit critical temperatures that the entire vehicle becomes fire. Far more warning than an ICE fire.

There's probably a case to make that there should be an effort to provide better, similar software warnings for parked/"off" vehicles to signal emergency services with that extra lead time.

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

#418

Post by [deleted] »

falcolas wrote: post #274
Robotbeat wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

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

#419

Post by jimmaswell »

dredmorbius wrote: post #289
jimmaswell wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We get by fine without rigorous inspections, and they amount to a regressive tax like a lot of other fees related to keeping a car.

Death by burning from an exploding battery from an uninspected, poorly-mainteained car in the garage of your shared low-rent apartment building is also a regressive tax. I'll take the inspections.

It's not like states without inspections have an endemic of exploding cars as it is. I don't think the justification for inspections is really there.

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

#420

Post by jerome-jh »

willcipriano wrote: post #70
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…

The idea isn't getting you to adhere to it, the idea is when inevitably one of these ends up incinerating a national forest or a home for orphans, GM can say "We told you to park 50 feet away, if only you hadn't been negligent and followed our simple directions!" rather than "So sorry about that"

Yeh that's completely insane and irresponsible, but we're getting kind of used to that sort of thing.
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