Reposted from NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT (and HT/Ted P, BobM, and meab)
By Paul Homewood
h/t Tallbloke
GM recall of Chevy Bolts will cost $1.8bn
The recall and others raise questions about lithium ion batteries, which now are used in nearly all electric vehicles. Ford, BMW and Hyundai all have recalled batteries recently.
President Joe Biden will need electric vehicles to reach a goal of cutting greenhouse gas emissions in half 2030 as part of a broader effort to fight climate change.
The GM recall announced Friday adds about 73,000 Bolts from the 2019 through 2022 model years to a previous recall of 69,000 older Bolts.
GM said that in rare cases the batteries have two manufacturing defects that can cause fires.
The Detroit-based automaker said it will replace battery modules in all the vehicles. In older versions, all five modules will be replaced.
The latest recall will cost the company about $1 billion, bringing the total cost of the Bolt battery recalls to $1.8 billion.
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Arthur Brown still gets around…
That’s a crazy world!
Set on fire
It’s a crazy and rather dangerous looking video too.
https://youtu.be/en1uwIzI3SE
A prediction: the correction of the “Manufacturing defect” will result in greatly reduced range, greater weight, and reduction in measured service life.
“...greatly reduced range,…”
The remedy for Bolt owners until GM can replace the battery:
1. Set your vehicle to a 90 percent state of charge limitation using Hilltop Reserve mode (for 2017-2018 model years) or Target Charge Level (for 2019-2022 model year) mode. Instructions on how to do this are available in the video below. If you are unable to successfully make these changes, or do not feel comfortable making these changes, GM is asking you to visit your dealer to have these adjustments completed.
2. Charge your vehicle more frequently and avoid depleting your battery below approximately 70 miles (113 kilometers) of remaining range, where possible.
3. Park your vehicle outside immediately after charging and do not leave your vehicle charging indoors overnight.
ref: https://my.chevrolet.com/how-to-support/safety/boltevrecall
Go Climate Woke, Go Broke.
Well … at least you won’t have to pay the $16,250.00 MSRP for a replacement Bolt battery …
Get woke, don’t choke … good luck
We all pay for screwups.
There is no free lunch
“The remedy for Bolt owners[:
buy an ICE vehicle.
So simple it is funny!
🙂
Glad to Janice visiting. Her sarcasm has improved, too.
Hi, Theo 🙂
Good to see you, too.
And, btw, wasn’t being sarcastic above.
Further, not only are ICE’s vastly superior technology,
ICE’s = FREEDOM.
EV’s (for the most part) = tyranny of Big Government.
Take care,
Janice
DECARBONIZE OR DIE
Misinformation
Decarbonize
orand die. FIFYBring out you dead.
I am not dead yet.
Pay someone else to bring out their dead and get credit for it.
I think that was meant as a joke.
So in other words – charge your battery during the day when you need to use the car?
Brilliant….
It never said that. They don’t want you to charge it overnight INDOORS because if it caught fire it could burn your house down. Better that they worded it ‘charge your car outdoors’ and left it at that.
It’d definitely fill your house with toxic smoke.
For three days, while the fire department is trying to put out the fire.
They CAN’T put out the fire. Not possible. All they can do is stand around and watch, to make sure it doesn’t set anything else on fire, and wait for the fire to burn itself out.
Go Climate Lie, Go Die
No problem … the EPA will simply *ahem* “adjust” or “smooth” the official Range data to offset the loss.
Wouldn’t it make sense to homogenize the range value by taking into account neighbors’ ICE car ranges? Or maybe just adjust down the neighboring ICE car ranges?
If I owned such a vehicle, I would want to know what MY car and MY battery were capable of, especially for a trip where re-charging might be problematic.
While I suppose one can expect an ICE vehicle to get reduced gas mileage after about 100,000 miles, I suspect that the Li-Ion batteries will degrade slowly from day one and therefore the range will continue to decrease until such time as the battery has to be replaced.
An ICE vehicle won’t necessarily get lower fuel economy as it ‘ages’.
A well maintained newer car can maintain it’s new MPG past 200,000 miles.
I have a ’97 Chevy Cavalier, 5 speed with 220,000 miles on it, that still gets 30 mpg around town and gets 40+ mpg on the fwy at 75 mph.
I am using low rolling resistance Michelins vs the original ‘crappy’ tires.
The engine also passes the CA smog check with 0.0% co, and 5 ppm hc.; as good as when new.
Nelson: Ha Ha!!
Regards,
Bob
Hi, Bob.
Dammit, you beat me to it.
I’m shocked. Shocked I say.
Go Climate Woke, Go Broke.
Schadenfreude for Government Motors.
Waiting for the mass Tesla recall. The “manufacturing defect” is the use of lithium batteries without sufficient thermal protection — a conceptual design flaw common to all of the EVs. This is one likely reason that Tesla switched from emphasizing battery sales in EVs to the equally ill conceived grid storage, as well as why it made more sense to use an old prototype roadster for a space booster test throw weight than to replace the battery pack.
From what I know of the chemistry of batteries, any high energy density battery will have the same sort of problem. Perhaps someone could come up with something less toxic than lithium, but an energy dense battery is prone to deflagration if not explosion.
And surprisingly, electrons hardly weigh anything at all.
It’s all those pesky things like atoms that they insist on hanging around. Free the electrons!
Not on your life! I like them just fine where they are.
+1,000 !
Mainly transition metals impurities, particularly iron caused heating in early batteries. Tighter specs cured that problem.
The large tonnage usage for autos and back up storage might mean even tighter specs are required, or that global Li chemicals are not sufficiently standardized across the industry.
Only little more than a decade ago specs for Li-carbonate were 95%+ with restrictions on key elemental impurities.ĺ
Getting rid of Mg and Na proved difficult, especially from brine sources which had to sell their product to intermediaries for upgrading. Today 99.99+ is possible directly at reasonable cost, especially from hardrock sources.
Not that I’ve heard about.
I’ve had batteries explode back in the bad old generator and voltage regulator days, but never burn.
NiCd batteries may cause their plastic casings to melt, did you mean them?
Not a lot of EVs in Portugal at this point but one of the large shopping malls just turned a full aisle of parking spaces underground into EV charging bays. Parking is at a premium underground and worse now with all these spaces gone. Plus, if one of these things should catch fire it will be a big mess. It would have been a lot smarter to install the charging bays up on the outside, open-air, parking. So far, have only seen two EVs charging….
One would almost imagine that there is a market for fake charging ports you can add to your car to use these parking spaces…
Alas, the electricity is metered so not free parking. Next time I am there I’ll check the cost.
Yes, a BIG mess.
“…the Bavarian town of Kulmbach has just banned electric and hybrid vehicles from parking inside parking garages because their batteries are so difficult to extinguish when fire starts.”
February, 2021
(Source: https://notrickszone.com/2021/02/16/vw-hybrid-car-explodes-bursts-into-flames-22-fire-brigades-to-extinguish-hazardous-battery-fire/ )
I guess detach garages will become the rage far away existing structures so when the catch fire the fire departments can stand back and watch them burn. Oh Bavarian town, my guess you don’t have the space for that.
Disposable detached garages…
Smart people around there, and they know how to brew gut bier.
You should point out this obvious problem to the store owners.
The Australian Standard for domestic battery installation prohibits batteries being installed beneath living spaces.
And of course, those two don’t have to pay anything for charging, its free energy.
“Who Killed The Electric Car?”
it was a suicide. Aided and abetted by Red Chinese battery factory employed by LG (South Korea) … Chevy’s battery supplier
Funny idea to call cars sold by the manufacturers before they are long term viable, sooeecides.
The manufacturers should be charged with culpable vehicular slaughter. People who bought them share some responsibility, too.
That’s more than $12,000 per for a vehicle with an MSRP of $32-35k.
But all the clowns who bought the first couple of years of production get NEW batteries for free, probably at the time they were seeing loss of range. Lucky them.
Perhaps.
I’ve always been convinced that dealers always make their money back. Freebies from the dealers is always oxymoronic.
About correct. Just checked. The current list price for a complete Bolt replacement battery is about $15,700, plus labor at about $800.
Just about right…
1,000,000,000/73,000 = approx $13,600
Wow, $800 labor to install a battery, something most people can do themselves in a real car. As some of the costs associated with these toys are revealed people may start to wise up and just say no….
I think that in a lot of these things you actually have to remove most of the interior and lift the floor panels up. I don’t think I’ll see a useable electric car in my lifetime.
The total Bolt sales for SIX YEARS.
Are you kidding me?
No wonder!
I read further. The two defects are highly non-trivial, and both involve automated pouch cell assembly rather than the batteries made from them. (Bolt batteries are comprised of pouch cells, unlike Tesla.) Folded anode tab (can dead cell, causing adjacent cells to overcharge, then repeated overcharging can mean live cell kablooey), and misaligned separator (can short). Latter worse than former, since enables growth of metallic cathode ‘whiskers’ which will eventually for sure short to anode when long enough and big enough, causing kablooey. The ceramic nanoparticle coated LG Chem separator GM uses is precisely to mechanically hard stop whisker/separator puncture potential. Stunning QC manufacturing failures.
And since the 5 Bolt battery modules basically cover the entire vehicle floorpan, very non trivial to access and replace.
“kablooey” isn’t in the urban dictionary (yet).
Merriam Webster
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/kablooey#:~:text=2%20informal%20%3A%20to%20suffer%20complete,after%20his%20career%20went%20kablooey.
🙂
Au contraire. “Hamster Huey and the Gooey Kablooie” has been since 1988 a giant among illustrated literature.
So, kinda like –
“Trouble at mill.
One-arm flay rod gone askew on treadle”
?
“One o’ the cross beams gone out o’ skew on treadle.”
is the correct line 😉
Slight variations from performance to performance.
“Nobody expects the brigadas de bomberos!”
Wouldn’t it be fun if EVs and grid scale batteries all got safety regulated out of economic existence like they did to nuclear power.
Since one recommendation for old EV batteries was to use them to build grid power reserves, kill the first and get the second as well.
What I missed what the part where they have recycling programs set up for the batteries they are pulling out of the cars.
Probably right next to the blades from those end-of-life wind mill blades.
Which is just a few steps away from solar panels recycling station
I think I saw an article somewhere that seriously suggested carbon fibre turbine blades should be ‘recycled’ into wakeboards or snowboards. I want to know who these idiots are that think we are just crying out for more wakeboards.
Maybe they should build a battery-burning power plants as backups for wind and solar?
Imagine an EV battery fire at 2am in the crowded basement parking garage of an apartment building with the fire surrounded by full gas tanks and no one around. That scenario should drive the safety regs.
Very funny that the chemical hating greens should be pushing chemical energy really hard. Nasty stuff.
In the fiture the one or the other hydrogen car around……
Fun to watch!
From a good distance.
Outdoors a hydrogen fire is most harmless(hydrogen floats up) indoors a mess.
Mess – probably understates the devastation. The mess might look more like a chain reaction that gathers pace.
It has been a long road to develop fuel tanks for ICE vehicles that rarely explode on impact.
The Tesla owners manual instructions for crash first responders to “cut the 450volt cable”….in two places makes fun reading as does fire fighting instructions to submerge the entire vehicle in water or otherwise call hazmat team, cordon of the area, allow it to burn out (may reignite several times). No wonder Teslas target flashing lights on emergency vehicles when in robot driven mode. People want to hurt them. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/jun/18/thirty-tesla-crashes-linked-to-assisted-driving-system-under-investigation-in-us
Fire departments are going to have to start including a utility company lineman in their crews.
Yeah, I’m not getting anywhere near that cable.
I had a green tell me salt wasn’t a chemical. I had another tell me that rattlesnakes never bite people. They’re not anti-chemical; they’re anti-fact.
I had a green tell me a snake had a right to life as much as I do. That occurred when I told him any rattlesnake snake in my yard is a dead snake. I also told him rattlesnakes in the wild I leave alone(from someone how almost stepped on a Mohave in the wild.)
It’s a good idea to leave pretty much everything alone in the wild, but especially dangerous things. In Australia they are not only in the wild, but in our gardens and houses quite often. In my house I’ll kill it. In my garden and the wikd (same thing really) I have a pretty strict rule: if it’s running/slithering/crawling/swimming/flying away from me, leave it alone. If it’s coming towards me, kill it.
I have a different approach. If they rattle, I leave them alone. If I spot them and they don’t rattle, I dispatch them and then cook them like fried chicken.
There seems to be some thought that most people will terminate a rattlesnake if they are aware of its presence, usually from rattling. Thus, there is evolutionary pressure weeding out the ones prone to rattle. I’m trying to reverse the evolutionary pressure by only weeding out the ones that don’t warn of their presence. Although, I certainly wouldn’t want them hanging around my house!
Like lightning, a rattlesnake never bites the same spot twice — if you hang around, they will work their way up your leg.
Dogs who can bite higher than my knee are not welcome to stay.
Tech hating greens prevented the building of a Starlink ground station in Saint-Senier-de-Beuvron: they (allegedly, the town habitants, but really, François Dufour and Benoît Hamard the greens) want a moratorium, a radio wave study, a ground study (whatever that is)!
“(Starlink radome building in my village) is a violence against inhabitants and democracy”
So building 5 small radomes is treated like an American agression (Musk is a billionaire so… I don’t see the relevance but the factoid is mentioned in each and every article) but huge wind turbines and electric cars are 100% fine…
Greens, environmentalists, socialists, etc., depend on feeding people’s natural tendencies toward jealousy and envy.
In that case, not just envy. Pure indifference for others.
One opponent had that killer argument (rephrased, exact meaning kept, no reinterpretation):
We already have good Internet connectivity here so we don’t need the teleport.
EDIT:
The other argument (that I almost forgot):
They want to put the Earth in a fishnet stockings.
They could replace the batteries with WW2 era coal burners.
At least that way nobody is going to be alarmed at the first signs of smoke and flames emanating from their conveyance.
Neat, hey?
Very neat but does it have cup holders 🤪
D cup holders I believe.
(aka warm hands)
Does it come with ABS brakes and GPS?
No, but you can have any color.
(as long it is black)
Eco chick magnet 🙂
Gas bag cars. Despite top heavy appearance a full bag doesn’t weigh a lot. With a home methane plant who needs gasoline?
https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2011/11/gas-bag-vehicles.html
With a home methane plant who needs gasoline?
You could even have a mobile methane plant. Just eat plenty of beans…
Everyone putting a lot of money on the table for an electric car and is now victim of a recall like these doesn’t deserve better.
The complete systems of batteries isn’t technically mature and only pushed, by gouvernements and car constructors, to follow an insane green agenda without any value.
There isn’t enough global lithium resource at even double present prices, nor cobalt resource at any price, to enable the enfeebled Biden goals just for the US. And Biden just lost Afghanistan’s lithium resource (pegmatite spodumene) to the Taliban, who for sure aren’t green.
The use of pocket-calculators is absolutely overwightetd.
I will NEVER buy an all-electric vehicle, at least not while they have these low-range, highly dangerous lithium-ion batteries. Joe Biden will have to pry my current vehicle, a 2016 Ford Fusion hybrid, from my cold dead hands.
“Ford Fusion hybrid, from my cold dead hands.” does not that vehicle have lithium batteries also? Just asking?
“And Biden just lost Afghanistan’s lithium resource (pegmatite spodumene) to the Taliban, who for sure aren’t green.”
Don’t look now Rud, but China already has it’s eyes on Afghanistan’s lithium and other rare earth deposits….
https://tinyurl.com/wxuh4b92
China is already working to build a cozy relationship with the Taliban. Mining all those REEs could put a lot of money into the Taliban’s hands, just what the West does not need.
And who is China’s buddy? “The Big Guy.” **
** Hunter Biden email refers to Biden as “the big guy” who is to get a % from Chinese company. ([Edit: scroll down in this article for that fact: ]https://www.westernjournal.com/fact-check-biden-unleashes-whopper-covid-vaccinations-cnn-town-hall/ )
Are you suggesting that the Taliban are tolerant of Confucians and Buddhists?
Aren’t they infidels too?
Every bit as tolerant of infidels as the Chinese are of Uighurs. A match made in he!!.
….Are you suggesting that the Taliban are tolerant of Confucians and Buddhists?
Aren’t they infidels too?
My enemy’s enemy is my friend…. even Joseph Stalin was “Good ole Joe” from June 1941 to late 1945! Having defeated every Imperial power from Alexander the Great to Uncle Sam, it will be interesting to see how China fares…. I suspect they won’t try to beat them into submission, rather they will let them remain a bunch of warring tribes separated by a common religeon while they plunder the country with a smile…kind of like they are reclaiming eastern Siberia.. Sun Su style you might say.
Cheers
Mike
Not only does it not bother the Taliban that the Chicoms are infidels, the Taliban have actually signed off on the Chicom torture and k!lling of Muslim minorities in China. Pakistan has also signed off on the Chicom atrocities.
Apparently, if you are a Chinese Muslim, you don’t count in the Middle East.
But if they can make enough profit, who know what may be revolutionized.
Lots of Li Rud. The Manono and Kitolo pegmaties in SE DR Congo are each up to 500m across and 5km long. A couple of recent drill holes across bands of mineralized pegmatite exposed at surfaceup to 300m across, gave a geological estimate of a billion tonnes grading~2% Li2O which is about
10,000,000MT of Li. This project makes the sum total from all presently operating projects only a rounding error.
In 2000, there were only half a dozen producers. In 2017, there were 400 projects being evaluated.
I visited the small operations in Portugal and Brazil 2017 and 2018 and found that despite a century of mining, they were only pitting the surface (ceramic companies). Recent drilling has multiplied resources more than 100-fold in Portugal and will be doing the same in Brazil. Also I worked on a plan for an EU Li-integrated mine to batteries using recently discovered deposits in Sweden, Finland, Portugal and Austria.
I am a consultant to competitors in DR Congo who own a prospective 40sqkm of land around and on strike with Manono and Kitolo (look for elephants in elephant country).
They also secured ~80millionMT of Li bearing tailings from 60yrs of mining Manono-Kitolo pematites only for tin, discarding the spodumene – Li. The chain of piles is a 10km long topographic high in the region.
I don’t care about stupid people victimizing themselves with green pipe-dreams. What I resent is being held at gunpoint to take subsidies from my pockets.
TWO defects that could cause fires? Lol.
Good deal financially for owners of older models…provided they don’t DIAF first.
You’ve gotta laugh, because it makes you laugh!
Buyers remorse insurance.
On the back of a diesel truck 🙂
Now that is really funny.
The new opportunity in roadside service is charging capability. I think that is already happening in the UK. Cheaper than getting transported to the charging station.
Weakest link to EV growth is the material supply chain. There may not be enough minerals and metals in the world to achieve the planned EV growth.
With less than 8 million EV’s (of the 2 BILLION vehicles in the world) currently operating on the world’s highways, a Cambridge University study showed that replacing all the United Kingdom’s 32 million light duty vehicles with next-generation EVs would require huge quantities of materials to manufacture 32 million EV batteries. It is becoming more and more obvious as States and Countries jump onto the EV train, that there may be insufficient materials in the world to complete those EV dreams.
https://www.cfact.org/2021/02/15/weakest-link-to-ev-growth-is-the-material-supply-chain/
Peak EV car materials in sight 😀
We passed peak intelligence a decade or two back.
The lesson of Peak Anything is that long before it is essentially exhausted, it will become so expensive as to be uneconomical for the application(s) that drove it to peak production.
Personally, I don’t think that it will be lithium that becomes critical, but rather, cobalt.
There’s enough for it, but we’ll have to really tear up the earth to pieces to get it.
And we will “tear the earth to pieces” with a little battery-powered this and a little windpowered that. LOL.
Canada has been the world’s miner, and has many of the minerals needed for an “all electricity” era: lithium, cobalt, nickel, copper, iron, vanadium, oil.
However, we’re in process of reconciliation: our First Nation ancestors signed majestic Crown treaties with our Settler ancestors and … were cheated.
Our First Nations hold the spiritual principle of preserving Mother Earth for 7 future generations. Already, one First Nation in Québec, north of the Ottawa River and upstream of our capital Ottawa, has started a Change.org petition to prevent a lithium mine from opening.
Unless Canada can quickly develop
NetZeroPollution of air, water & soil for mining -at much higher cost- don’t expect us to supply many minerals.
I’m not an EV fan, but I regret this loss. A primary objective of society is the creation of wealth, not the confiscation of it, nor the useless frittering away of capital and resources and labor. The latter of which is what has happened here. What’s bad for GM is not good for us as a nation. That money could have been spent to build Hondas or other useful things.
Oh, the Biden admin will just toss another couple billion into the “infrastructure” bill to bail out GM, America’s biggest welfare queen.
Yes, I am certain that we are paying this bill at some point, probably sooner than later.
among many others!
Likely to happen.
Back the 1980’s, my first car was a used Chevy Monza. I’ve avoided GM products ever since.
At what point does GM pull the plug on electric vehicles (pun intended)
When the subsidies run out.
I was actually happy after I saw this report on another site…Does that make me a bad person? LOL
A back of the envelope analysis of the bolt battery follows:
Bolt Capacity 65 kWh
2 gallons of gasoline 66 kWh.
1000 recharge lifetime = 2000 gallons of gasoline
2000 gallons of gas = $6000.
Bolt battery $15000
65 kWh = $6.50 @ur momisugly 10 cents kwh
1000 charges = $6500
Conclusion. The bolt battery costs more than double the value of all the energy it can store in its lifetime.
Forget about using EVs as grid storage. The reduction in battery life is greater cost than value of electricity.
The bolt EV works out about the same as an ICE bolt with a 4 gallon gas tank spayed with $10k of gold leaf that slowly peels off each time you drive the car.
yep, and the fuel inlet is a tiny straw that forces you to drip the fuel into the tank when refilling.
That is very easy to fix, just increase electricity price.
So what does THAT matter in the Green Dream.
Henry Ford would be amused.
Henry and Tom Edison were EV fans.
Of course the battery was the sticking point and Edison’s battery venture was a huge economic failure.
The bolt battery is 65 kWh. Your standard househould plug is about 1.8 kW max. So you are looking at 1.5 days min to fully charge on your heavy duty extension cord run outside.
In the UK normal socket rated at 13A and ~240V giving approximately 3kW. So 20% to80% charge would take 17 hours. Effectively all day Sunday for a 15-20 mile commute to work with nothing spare.
Probably OK for most areas in England but anywhere rural in UK or outside big cities in Europe it means at least one midweek charge.
My work commute was 25 imperial miles a day. My diesel Citroën Xantia, the most comfortable car I’ve ever driven and had 4 over the years, could do that on a full tank a month, with some to spare.
When I’m out on my bike in the morning before the local commute gets underway I pass a number of Teslas on drives most are being charged. I cycle a scenic route to a local shop for croissants and bread for breakfast and lunch. A habit from living in France where a baguette lasted about 6 hours. The UK croissants are fine but baguettes not so much.