Here’s an interesting BBC story about the safety hazards associated with the Chevy Volt — specifically, the risk that its battery pack could catch fire after even a minor impact.
But the real problem may no longer be a technical one, but one of dented consumer confidence. Customers are handing back the keys in droves.
At first, when the problem first came to light, chief executive Dan Akerson offered to buy back Volt models from any concerned customers.
Then, when dozens of customers came forward wanting to hand back the keys to their cars, the company changed tack.
Rather than automatically buying back the Volts, and thus losing its as yet tiny army of early adopters of electric motoring technology, GM started offering them some 6,000 free loan cars while awaiting the outcome of an investigation into the fires.
And here’s why:
It now appears the fire hazard was first discovered back in June, when GM first heard about a fire in a Volt that occurred some three weeks after the vehicle had been crash tested.
Yet, almost five months went by before either GM or the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) told dealers and customers about the potential risks and urged them to drain the battery pack as soon as possible after an accident.
Part of the reason for delaying the disclosure was the “fragility of Volt sales” up until that point, according to Joan Claybrook, a former administrator at NHTSA.
“NHTSA could have put out a consumer alert,” he said, according to industry website Autoguide.com.
“Not to tell [customers] for six months makes no sense to me. They have a duty to inform people when they’ve rated a vehicle as ‘top rated’ and make it clear there’s a problem.”
While it isn’t surprising that GM was reluctant to announce product safety bulletins that would dampen early sales of its much touted hybrid, according to the linked story the NHTSA was an accessory to this as well, and for the same reason:
“Part of the reason for delaying the disclosure was the ‘fragility of Volt sales’ up until that point, according to Joan Claybrook, a former administrator at NHTSA.”
At Autoguide.com, there’s a story saying that Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood responded today saying the accusations were “absolutely not true.”
“We have opened an investigation into battery-related fires that may occur some time after a severe crash,” LaHood said. “Chevy Volt owners can be confident that their cars are safe to drive.”
Meanwhile, the National Legal and Policy Center (NLPC) filed a formal request under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) for any and all communications with General Motors (GM).
The Volt is the first hybrid-type car I’ve ever considered buying, specifically because of the gasoline engine. I drive around 30 miles round-trip for work per day but make regular road trips of hundreds of miles. The Volt would get me to work and back without using gas during the week but wouldn’t limit me from taking off on a longer trip whenever I needed to. I won’t buy a regular hybrid because the gas savings isn’t big enough to justify the cost. This is still true for the Volt, for now, but it is much closer than a Prius or other hybrid. Most of my driving is rural highway so the urban advantages of a normal hybrid don’t help me much.
The issue with the Volt is the Lithium-Ion batteries. It’s a good bet that GM and the battery manufacturer will make improvements to the batteries that make them more shock resistant, but as mentioned above, you have a lot of energy in a small package and back things will happen when it is suddenly liberated. This is no different than the fuel tank on a normal car. The big difference is that the car makers have had over a hundred years to refine their designs to protect the fuel tank. All-electric vehicles using Li-Ion batteries are still fairly new and it will take some time to work out all the kinks. All technologies have some growing pains early on.
The real issue here is if GM and the NHTSA passed over known safety issues with the batteries in order to meet a schedule. If they passed all the required testing, then maybe the DOT needs additional requirements for electric vehicles.
I’m about as anti-Green as you can get, but as an engineer, I think the concept used for the Volt is more practical than anything else out there. In the end, the market should get to decide how successful it is. I have a problem with the gubment paying people to buy them, but I also think some of the criticism is unwarranted. Time will tell.
PONTIAC IS GONE, BUT THE FIREBIRD LIVES ON!
A friend was once involved in a side-impact crash. Restrained by the lap belt, her major injury was a crushed pelvis as the belt held her against thin incoming bumber of the impacting vehicle.
The dummy here would have sustained the same injury – an injury that can cripple for life.
So… do you think that this might be a good time to pick up a Volt on a fire sale?
United States ambassador Jeffrey Bleich said
“It’s watching Keeping Up With The Kardashians and actually getting smarter.”
No science needed to take on the accuracy of that claim then……
If the range is 40 miles for the Volt, what is its’ WINTER mileage between charges,at say -30 F Maybe 8-9 miles?
I always knew there must have been a reason we kept practicing Chinese fire drills lo these many years.
The Volt gets around 37 mi/charge at STP. Any deviation from STP causes the range to decrease and there is plenty of deviation from STP in the US. San Diego, within ten miles of the beach, would be just about the only place that you could consistently get the max range.
It takes about 22KWH and eight hours to charge the battery in order to get that 37 mi round trip. At $.20/KWH, the cost to charge up is $4.44 or the equivalent of about 1.25 gallons of gas giving a fuel efficiency of about 30 mi/gal.
Anyone not willing to give up $45,000 for a car that goes 37 miles and gets 30 mi/gal in the past will certainly do so now that it can turn your home into a barbecue for no additional cost.
Battery pack replacement costs $10K – 12K. Adds a little cost to your fender bender.
JazzRoc says:
December 9, 2011 at 1:27 am
Conventional cars have MORE danger sources than electric cars.
There appears to be failure to recognize the similarity here, or to look ahead beyond present difficulties.
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Jazzy, I think you’re not being entirely accurate with this statement. A car like the volt has the gasoline hazard and also has a massively more powerful battery that uses a more hazardous chemistry (li-Ion). There is also the matter that a conventional car doesn’t have high current conductors running all over.If we’re going to be EV fanboys we still need to be honest about the additional potential hazards of these vehicles.
The main problem with this story is that the Administration and its Government Motors has decided that a small percentage of the public’s lives are expendable along the way in their pursuit of a Green Utopia, and, of course, not making the Administration look bad. Woe be unto anybody else that tried to pull this stunt that’s not hooked into the govt’s green machine.
If you think about it, any damaged electrical product has a risk of electrical faults that may cause heat, and thus fire. Drop-kick a radio or a toaster across the room and then plug it back in. Bad things may occur — or not. Depends exactly what damage you cause.
So it stands to reason that banging your Volt into a tree or a pedestrian might bend come component or shake something loose. If you are unlucky that bent or loose bit might get hot and you can guess the rest.
Perhaps the main question is: why is anybody surprised about this?
In fairness, maltreating a gas-driven auto could still damage its electrics with similar results, but the Volt has (I presume) many more electric bits so is statistically more likely to combust.
Why hasn’t a scapegoat-hunting media-circus been orchestrated like for the pseudo-problems with Toyota cars? Remember that?
Answer? The Toyota factories in America aren’t controlled by the UAW union like the government protected GM Volt is.
No real world problems have occurred. These were tests. Now let’s say you own a car, any car. You have an accident that totals the car. Do you sit in it for hours, days or weeks? Do you tow it home and put it in your garage? No. It gets towed to a body shop or salvage yard where it sits outside.
It’s not like the issue with the cruise control brake switches on Ford vehicles that always had current to them even when the key was off. Those switches were shorting and burning up vehicles, garages and houses even though they had not been involved in any sort of accident.
I’d be one of the first to say that electric and hybrids are a joke but I would have no worry driving a Volt. To me this is a non issue.
I’d be curious to know how many General Motors labor union members drive Volts.
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If the cars are given back does GM have to then pay the $7500 back to the govenrment or does the purchaser? Someone got the money(credit/deduction).
“No real world problems have occurred.”
There have been at least two house fires attributed to the Volt. With the small number sold, the record is far worse than the number of non-Volts that spontaneously combust. There are over 500 million non-Volts and only a few thousand Volts; non-volts would have to be autocombusting at 10000 per year to beat the Volt’s record.
Charles.U.Farley says:
December 9, 2011 at 2:39 am
“Kinda reminds me of the Lithium Polymer (Li-Po) batteries my brother uses in in his model planes and helicopters.
Theyre quite susceptible to bursting into flames at the smallest impact that pierces the outer skin thereby allowing air and its oxygen content into contact with the lithium contents.”
Told a friend of mine about the hazards of LiPo last week, her husband is a model plane enthusiast. She said “What? some of them are in our kitchen!” Scared her stiff. Hehe. Guess hubby has some ‘splaining to do now…
@jimbob
Good observations and cogent thoughts. The offers are getting better.
Perhaps they will move to super capacitors sooner than later now that there are materials capable of storing 1.2 Farads per sq inch. I was once assisting a Pinto beside a highway when it was hit square in the back by a Volvo 122. I was sprayed (along with everything and everyone around) with gasoline from the bursting tank but it did not ignite. That is a rare danger these days. The dangers posed by a capacitor are significant and the battery people will no doubt hype that when the time comes. Hollywood will have a field day shooting scenes where a cop puts a bullet through the 100 kWh capacitor of an escaping vehicle! Technologically, it is like 1910 all over again.
While we’re talking about green inventions with the potential to destroy lives, take care when refilling your A/C. The new refrigerant R 1234 yf (proposed as a replacement because it allegedly warms the planet less than the old ones) is flammable at high temperatures (600deg C IIRC) and explosive at low concentrations.
http://www.r744.com/articles/2010-02-15-tests-confirm-hfc-1234yf-explosive-at-low-concentration.php
Avoid when possible.
OK, so there are only 100 million non-Volts and 6128 Volts in the US auto fleet. So, 100,000,000/6128 * 2 actual spontaneous Volt combustions = 32,637 non-Volt equivalent autocombustions.
The danger of electric cars as compared to conventional cars (as I understand it) is in the fire and rescue side. Yes, gasoline burns “real good”. But fires are normally put out with water. I have a couple of fire fighter friends that have been through electric/hybrid rescue training and are scared to death of them.
One added gotcha is that there is no standard “cut-off” mechanism. Each and every make/model requires a different method and a different location to disable the electrics. Even if standardized, a crushed metal frame can make all sorts of unexpected changes to the wiring harness.
I discussed this with a friend of mine who is a power systems expert in the satellite field. The large Aerospace companies have incredibly detailed specifications on how to handle these batteries, including vibration and shock specifications. If a battery gets more than an X shock in handling, it is removed from possible use on a satellite due to the number of incidents involving spontaneous combustion. The problem is almost impossible to fix due to the way that the batteries are made today.
People who know these battery technologies well, know about this problem. There is no way that the engineers at GM did not know about this from day one.
You mean people trying to push the “green” agenda would lie about a key component of their agenda? Say it ain’t so. I mean, they all are on the up and up, clean as a whistle, as honest as Abe, etc., so they would never doctor reports, data, computer models, or repress unfavorable reports that would harm the “green” movement.
Re:mkelly says:
December 9, 2011 at 7:28 am
“If the cars are given back does GM have to then pay the $7500 back to the govenrment or does the purchaser? Someone got the money(credit/deduction).”
I’m guessing that the Volt purchase tax credit is like the “solar plant 30% investment tax credit”. The instant that plant goes into continuous operation that solar tax credit is the investor’s to keep, even if the plant subsequently collapse in ruins, forfeits on its loans or is sold to others. There is no provision in the tax code for recapture of the credit.
Even if GM deducts that $7,500 credit from the price it agrees to pay the customer to “buy back” the car (notice the term is “buy back”; not “cancel purchase”), I’m guessing the U.S. Treasury will be $7,500 poorer for each Chevy Volt originally sold because the benefit will have simply been transferred to GM.
Sal Minella wrote, “At $.20/KWH, the cost to charge up is $4.44 or the equivalent of about 1.25 gallons of gas giving a fuel efficiency of about 30 mi/gal.”
But where I live (NC) electricity costs half that. (Unfortunately, “green” mandates from Gov. Bev “we should postpone elections for two years” Perdue and her ilk are pushing the rates higher.)
Dave