Looks like some more Volt battery fires.

I know A123 was chosen for the Chevy Spark EV when it was announced back in October. It is not about the Chevy Spark EV.

The question now; is GM going to continue to build more Volts with same battery, a modified LG Chem battery or a new battery from A123. Also, a solution for more than 6000 already sold.

Episode 784 – GM Swaps Battery Suppliers, EV Stations Outnumber E-85 Stations, Luxgen5 Revealed – Autoline Daily

 

I doubt they are changing ponies. I will believe it when there is an official announcement. Here is the back hoe crush test

I don't really believe anything says these LG chem batteries are unsafe. GM will only throw them under the bus if A) they are actually unsafe and data is being hidden or B) A123 under cuts the price and can do better on volume.

http://www.businessweek.com/news/20...ess-volatile-than-volt-s-for-spark-model.html

If they get energy density up and costs down all the car makers might switch chemistries in future models. Since the battery is modular, it can be changed much easier than other parts of the car.

 

Different link than your last post. That's not a particularly authoritative source, and all other articles about it can be traced back to autoline.tv

It would make no sense to switch since nothing has show the actual batteries to be the problem. Current reports suggest its the coolant crystalizing and causing shorts. E.g. see
Coolant likely cause of Volt fires, says AP source | The Car Tech blog - CNET Reviews

Coolant likely cause of Volt fires, says AP source | The Car Tech blog - CNET Reviews[/url] likely cause of Volt fires, says AP source | The Car Tech blog - CNET Reviews

 

Figured it was time to update the thread to officially close off the Volt "fire" issue.

NHSTA closed its investigation.

“Based on the available data, NHTSA does not believe that Chevy Volts or other electric vehicles pose a greater risk of fire than gasoline-powered vehicles,†the agency said in an e- mailed statement today.

Government closes investigation into Chevy Volt, says car is safe - The Washington Post

Nice little clip at

Chevrolet VoltAge - NHTSA Closes Chevrolet Volt Investigation

 

Chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee to GM and NHTSA: You guys screwed up by keeping a secret.

At a combative House hearing, Republicans questioned whether the government’s partial ownership in the automaker created a conflict of interest for the Obama administration in the Chevrolet probe, which began after a test car caught fire in June, three weeks after a side-impact test.

But Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, who led the hearing by the House Oversight and Government Reform subcommittee, said he found it “deeply troubling†that the agency waited until November to notify the public about the fire.

At first, GM blamed NHTSA for the June fire, saying it should have drained the battery to prevent any fires after the test. But the company quickly retreated and said it never told NHTSA to drain the battery. GM executives also said there was no formal procedure in place to drain batteries after crashes involving owners.

Now the company sends out a team to drain the batteries after being notified of a crash by its OnStar safety system.

GM chairman and CEO Daniel F. Akerson said sarcastically that while the company designed the Volt to be a great car, “unfortunately, there is one thing we did not engineer. Although we loaded the Volt with state-of-the-art safety features, we did not engineer the Volt to be a political punching bag. And that, sadly, is what the Volt has become.​

Read More

In my opinion, Volt was engineered to be political by displaying political MPG (electric miles divided by gasoline gallon) on the screen and hiding the electricity consumption. It was rushed out to the market before the engineering standard (SAE J1711) was released to measure emission and efficiency. It is no coincidence that Volt's tailpipe emission and fuel efficiency are substandard.

 

“You wait six months before you start an investigation, and two weeks after you start an investigation the secretary says it’s fine, and you think that’s normal?â€

“How dare you tell us you’re still developing protocols while the president is sitting in an electric car?â€

​

Source

The fire broke out at NHTSA back in June 2011. President Obama visited Detroit-Hamtramck on July 30th. I wonder if he knew about it. NHTSA definitely knew about it, possibly GM did too.

Volt is giving electric cars a bad name. In that sense, I am glad they didn't market it as a hybrid.

 

More like politics is giving electric cars a bad name, for political advantage.

Elsewhere in the same NYT article that was linked above:

"Mr. Strickland said it took time to determine that the Volt’s battery was responsible for the fire, which occurred three weeks after a side-impact crash test in May, and happened on a weekend when no one was around to see it. And it took weeks to reproduce the event, he said. If his agency had to disclose every allegation of safety problems, it would make 40,000 such disclosures a year, he said.

“It is irresponsible, and frankly illegal, for us to tell the public there is something wrong with the car if we don’t know what it is,” he said. “I don’t disclose to the public anything we find that we don’t have proof is a risk to safety.”

The agency said last week that there was no discernible safety trend, and the inquiry was closed."

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"But Mr. Akerson, in his testimony, questioned whether the June fire represented a highway hazard. He said the fire could be reproduced only by impaling a battery with a steel rod, and even then the fire did not occur immediately; that took three weeks the first time and one week the second time.

“As one customer put it, if they couldn’t cut him out of the vehicle in three weeks, he had bigger problems to worry about,” Mr. Akerson said."

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


"Mr. Strickland of the highway traffic agency said most investigations were started after calls to the agency’s phone hot line, warranty claims or accidents on the highways, but there were none of those in the case of the Volt’s battery. And the fire burned three cars when no one was around to see; it took time to establish that the fire originated in the Volt and wasn’t arson, he said.

The agency closed its investigation with an announcement that said the car was no more dangerous than an ordinary car filled with gasoline.

Mr. Akerson said the first fire occurred after the agency completed its normal procedure, which included rotating the wreck in 90-degree increments and holding it in each position for five minutes. That let a conductive coolant leak out unto a printed circuit board, resulting in a fire three weeks later, his prepared testimony said.

The company has since reinforced the metal protecting the battery.

“The Volt is safe,” he said. “It’s a marvelous machine.”"

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Yes, politics as usual. I'm not a big fan of the Volt but I certainly don't believe all the anti-Volt hoo-hah from the lawmakers.

It's also unfortunate that nobody draws any distinction between overheating risks in NiMH batteries (air-cooled), air-cooled Li batteries (as used in the Leaf for example), and liquid-cooled Li batteries (Volt and I think Tesla??).

 

The proof was sitting in NHTSA's own parking lot. Does it take 5 months to figure out that it wasn't arson? Once they rule out arson, I think they should have came out public. I don't believe there are 40,000 other cases that also happened right in their parking lot. Those may be reported cases without any evidences. For the case of Volt, the evidence is right under their nose.

In one of the test, Volt battery sparked and produced smoke within hours. If a rescue worker saw it, the spark and smoke will disturb the rescue process, especially if Volt's gas tank has already leaked.

The "fix" did not cover up the circuit board that sparked the fire. They just reinforced the battery casing to pass the test.

 

+1

Yep Jim Jordan and Mike Kelly are behind this
Jim Jordan on Energy & Oil
Both voted to keep oil subsidies, and are trying to use this as politics against Obama.

It would be nice if the NHTSA had more transparency and released the information sooner. Congress should have and exercise its oversight. That said this is really just a partisan move. Talking about differences in technology would make it more of a proper discussion, but we can't have that in washington. Volt, tesla, and focus ev and ford energi are liquid cooled, just about all others are air cooled.

 

Well clearly you should go work for the NHSTA and straighten them out!!

 

Well - THAT was a disturbing read:

They left out one bullet point:
- Don't worry about whether the next generation has any carbon based fuel. We couldn't figure out what to replace it with ... so let them figure it out.

.

 

Luckily your opinion does not matter much as its not consistent with history. PHEVs have existed, in conversion form for years. GM declared its intent to release the Volt in 2007, with a declared release date of 2010. SAE released J1711 in 1999, and was not revised until 6/8/2010. EPA did not decided to separate MPG and EV until Nov 2010. GM met their timeline of a dec 2010 release, so if standards were not their it was not GM playing politics, it was political processes moving too slowly to keep with the pace of innovation.

 

...this is PR problem for EV. It's old news but gets repeated every week in national press. Hopefully no more EV probs with the new crop of EVs coming out.

I have mixed emotions, feeling that some pushing so hard to promote EV, to some extent misleadingly pro-EV. Now we have some negative news getting overblown the other way. John Q. Public has hard time if not impossible to sort it out given the strident advocacy both ways.

 

who is going to wreck a VOLT, then take it home, sit it in the garrage for 2 weeks?

if you can buy a volt, i think you would have it insured, and it would be atleast in the body shop within a few days after the wreck

 

So, were they irresponsible and broke the law when NHTSA said not to drive Toyotas? It seems to me, they have double standard because US government still own 26% of GM.

 

The Toyota acceleration issue was brought up by individual owners and hyped by the media and then NHTSA had to react to that. The Volt issue was found during government testing and had never been seen or reported elsewhere. NHTSA actually put far more resources into investigating the Volt issue than they would for a typical car because it is new technology.

I didn't closely follow the discussion here during the Toyota investigation but as someone following general press coverage I never had the impression that NHTSA actuly told people to stop driving their cars. All I remember was being told to check my driver-side mat to make sure it was the correct size and type and was properly installed. Yes, the media lost all self-control on hyping the issue but what else is new? NHTSA can't control that or the goofy people who make false reports.

 

Ray LaHood, the secretary of transportation was the one that made the offending statements about toyota.
LaHood: I Overstated Toyota Warning - CBS News

So yes, LaHood was wrong, and he did a backhand admission of it the same day. It seems really wrong that some congressmen believe he should repeat this mistake to be fair. NTHSA never made this kind of statement on toyotas. There were years of UA reported incidents on toyotas before NTHSA made any public statement on them at all.

 

+1

Reality doesn't matter, this is politics.

 

I vaguely recall that there have been years of UA reports on ALL makes of vehicles, in rough proportion to the number of each make on the road??

I suspect that we will ALWAYS have UA incidents due to the wrong-pedal syndrome. Preventing stuck-accelerator UA by brake-accelerator shutdown has no effect on wrong-pedal UA.

Since wrong-pedal UA is most frequent with us older folks, I bet the frequency of UA will correlate better with age of driver more than with make of car, once all cars have the brake-throttle shutdown feature.