Late last year it was revealed that the Dept. of Transportation was looking into possible problems with the batteries in electric vehicles after a Chevy Volt caught fire following a crash test. Now it looks like General Motors will spend the next few months upgrading the battery containment and coolant systems in every Volt currently on the road.
Thankfully for GM, that’s only around 12,400 vehicles.
According to the Detroit News, the fix will strengthen an existing portion of the Volt’s vehicle safety structure so as to better protect the battery in the event of a severe side collision. Additionally, a sensor will be placed in the reservoir of the battery coolant system to monitor coolant levels, along with a tamper-resistant bracket to the top of the battery coolant reservoir to prevent potential coolant overfill.
Since it was a NHTSA crash test that sparked the first Volt fire, the agency recently ran a crashed test on a new-and-improved Volt and found no fire or intrusion into the battery pack.
“The preliminary results of the crash test indicate the remedy proposed by General Motors Thursday should address the issue of battery intrusion,” NHTSA said in a statement, with the cavet, “The agency has not concluded that investigation and is continuing to gather and assess information on the post-crash fire risk in these vehicles.”
No formal recall has been announced yet, though that may come in the near future. Dealers, who are currently still allowed to sell Volts as-is, won’t be getting the parts to upgrade existing vehicles until February. Meanwhile, the Volts that will come off the GM assembly line in Detroit will include the new safety add-ons.
Shortly after Thanksgiving, Chevy announced that concerned Volt owners could receive free loaner cars.
GM announces structural fixes for Chevrolet Volt [Detroit News]
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AGAIN these fires happened days if not weeks after the wrecks.
in other words make sure to exit your wrecked car within a week or so to play it safe. /s
Does anyone but me think that this vehicle is already inching its way into the graveyard of “Christmas Past”.
Another victory for green initiatives – and on top of the fact they’ve sold a whopping 12,400 of them! The success of this program should be a model for all other green programs.
Someone do a case study quick, before anything else happens.
GM has a lot of catching up to do, having sat on electric vehicle tech for years, while their competitors actually worked on it.
The vehicle catches fire weeks after it’s wrecked… where’s the news? Correct me if I’m wrong, but don’t combustion engines catch fire *when the wreck occurs* every day? quick – someone issue a recall for every other vehicle!
Yeah, they explode on contact. You see them burning all the time after even the most minor of wrecks. I saw 4 cars explode on my way to work this morning.
Also, when any car hits a stationary car from behind, it flips.
This saved me many years ago when the group of Nazis chasing me ran their halftrack into a Ford Pinto.
I think the deal is, you have a wreck in your Volt; it’s either still drivable or you get it fixed (or so you think), and then you take it home and park it in your garage. It waits until you’re asleep several weeks later and spontaneously combusts, burning down your house.
Then the insurance company has to replace your house and your Volt – a process known in the industry as ‘reVolting’.
the accidents that they test that cause these fires are not bumper rubs. Think 30mph concrete slab into the side of it. The car will not move, let alone someone wanting to try it.
Then substitute “Your home/house” with the repair shop and repair shop employees.
Who has a severely-wrecked car towed to their house?
Also, there’s a recommendation to discharge the battery in the event of a serious collision, just like there’s a recommendation to disconnect the regular 12V battery in a conventional car after a wreck. (Some BMWs have an automatic battery disconnect when they detect a collision, in fact.) If that recommendation had been followed there never would have been fires in the first place. It’s good that GM is hardening the battery packs, but they’re fixing what’s mostly a non-issue for operational safety.
I believe it was mentioned that these impacts that would ignite the batteries also tend to crack the frame of the car or cause other damage necessitating being taken to the shop.
That said, there’s a reason why it’s being fixed, but the rarity of the circumstances in general makes this a ‘no big deal’ in the grand scheme of auto recalls.
I don’t know if that was a set-up for the “re-volting” non-joke, but that’s not at all the case. These are serious, total-the-car side impacts that collapse the passenger compartment all the way to the center tunnel where a big part of the Volt’s battery is installed. The cars probably can’t even be safely towed with 2 wheels down, and certainly can’t be driven home.
Oh for crying out loud. To damage the batteries you have to really smash the car. If you smash the car like that it wont be drivable. If you don’t take it to a garage, but leave a smashed, leaky car in your garage bad things will happen. If you take it to a garage, they’ll fix it which will include inspecting the batteries.
If you take it to a garage, they’ll fix it which will include inspecting the batteries.
Not if they total it. Then it will be sitting in an impound lot for a while…where it can start a fire…just like it did when the NHTSA tested it.
That’s why there is a procedure (which the IIAS and NHTSA didn’t do) to drain the batteries after an accident.
The battery wasn’t ruptured in the tests. The battery’s coolant system was damaged, and eventually the battery overheated and sparked. It didn’t catch on fire.
The battery wouldn’t have overheated if it had been properly drained after the test.
Yeah, I’m sure Big Ed’s Wrekin’ Yard and Grithouse in Cornsqueeze, Alabama is right on top of all the battery draining equipment and procedures necessary to store a Volt so that when the Highway Patrol calls them to come haul a rolled one off the Interstate they can do so efficiently and safely.
If Big Ed is too dumb to figure they ought to look up some information made readily available by the manufacterer on how to properly handle a new-fangled Vee-hickle then who’s fault is it when the fire occurs?
Apparently, it’s Chevrolet’s. Otherwise they wouldn’t be fixin’ it.
Chevrolet is fixing it because a bunch of alarmists got their petticoats all bunched up about it and the first thing Americans do when something they don’t understand frightens them is call a lawyer.
im sure all 17 chevy volt owners will be very happy to hear this news
… or 12,400, but who has the time to read anymore.
Yeah but some have no time for sarcasm.
Since my comment wasn’t sarcastic at all. And neither is this one.
I award you zero points.
its funny because i was being sarcstic and you didnt get it
so i confiscate all of YOUR points
CURSES! MY POINTS!
They actually didn’t sell all 12,400 of them… They barely sold 7500 for the year. The rest either sit on lots, or are in shipment, etc.
I’m just so glad the US taxpayer has subsidized the production of these vehicles of up to $250k each… http://hotair.com/archives/2011/12/21/govt-subsidies-for-chevy-volt-up-to-250000-per-car/
awesome.
C’mon, can’t you see through the writer’s intentional stupidity here? The subsidy doesn’t amount to a per-vehicle subsidy unless GM buries every bit of technology they’ve developed using the money. GM is likely to continue to develop and improve the technology, and as battery technology improves there will be more and more vehicles using Voltec and similar technologies because it’ll make more economic sense at that point.
Or is it that you just wanted to repeat the writer’s knee-jerk, government-waste trope without thinking about whether there’s much truth to it?
Look at this – it says the Ford Mondeo cost $6 billion dollars to develop:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Mondeo#Mk1_.281993-1996.29
So why not take that $6 billion investment and divide it by the 38,000 orders for the Mondeo from it’s first year on the market?
That comes to about $158,000 per car.
Or maybe this isn’t really a valid way to calculate the allocation of development money?
More about the serious math abuse in this story:
http://www.torquenews.com/1075/250k-chevy-volt-subsidy-claim-bogus-says-thestreetcom
And now for the latest – I heard this today on the radio – GM might move production of the Volt to China:
http://content.usatoday.com/communities/driveon/post/2011/09/gm-cuts-china-electric-car-deal—-a-china-shakedown/1
Pretty sure that’s completely bogus.
GM is planning to build Volts in China, but just for Chinese people. Same thing we do here in the USA, Nissan and Toyota build cars here for Americans.
Unlikely all Volt production is going there, considering GM just invested a boatload of money into the Hamtramck plant in Detroit to build Volts, and hired 2,500 workers:
http://www.freep.com/article/20110526/BUSINESS01/105260471/General-Motors-Detroit-Hamtramck-plant-run-3-shifts-1st-time-26-year-history
I hope so – I thought that would be pretty crappy as we bailed out GM and then they would move a whole division to China!
And this is why we went with the Nissan Leaf instead of the Volt.
Because why?
Better casing around the battery. I think they are more durable than the Volt.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/22/business/tsunami-reveals-durability-of-nissans-leaf.html
Owners will be surprised when after dropping off their Volt for repair, they get a letter telling them they’ve all been crushed.
New test shows that Volt explodes when hit by 155mm arty. Chevy to recall and up armor the Volt.
Um, what’s that word they use to describe a request to return a product to the manufacturer for necessary safety-related repairs or adjustments?
Someone help me out here.
/closes governmentspeak dictionary
This bulletin just in from our insect overlords:
In: Comprehesnsive fix
Out: Recall
We bought a LEAF. So, I’m okay with that.