GM offering loaner cars to worried Chevrolet Volt owners (gas, buy, review)
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Government motors seeking to advance its failed electric car offering has taken the unprecedented step of offering loaner cars while the government proves you won't be burned to a crisp in their POS car:
I'm glad you're not a football referee. Declaring the Volt to be "failed" when it's only been out a year? You'd probably declare a team has lost the game before halftime!
GM sells every one they can make. Hardly "failed." And only one Volt has caught fire in crash testing. I can guarantee you that more gasoline powered cars have caught fire annually. We drive around in gasoline bombs on wheels as it is.
As the NHTSA report shows, it seems they bashed the battery out of the car.
Which makes me wonder what would happen if they took a fully loaded 20 gallon gas tank out of a Lexus and slammed it upside a concrete wall. You might expect a spark to ensue and a major conflagration following that event. A ruptured leaking gas tank can cause just as much of a risk, if not more so, gasoline's liquid nature means it can "travel" away from a vehicle and won't be contained to just the car.
It seems they were taking the battery pack itself out of the car (unless these reports are off base) and smacking the pack and turning it like a rollover and then the coolant mixes with the lithium over 7 days and bursts into flame. Abusing the pack without the protection of the car doesn't quite seem like a real world situation.
Sounds like they had mythbusters do the testing: "Hmmmmm, let's take ridiculous situations and see what "could" possibly happen."
I'm glad you're not a football referee. Declaring the Volt to be "failed" when it's only been out a year? You'd probably declare a team has lost the game before halftime!
I got as far as Government Motors and figured that out
GM is a bit spooked by all this, and is offering Volt owners loaner-cars in case they're concerned about the prospects of their vehicle, well, exploding on them. GM denies any real risk of this, of course. But then, they didn't exactly emphasize the fire risk in their last electric car foray.
While few may remember it now, GM's EV-1 also had battery-related problems. In the case of the EV-1, fires, euphemistically known as "thermal incidents" were happening when people plugged the cars in to recharge. GM had to recall 600 of its first-generation electric cars after 16 such "thermal incidents" including one where the vehicle was engulfed in fire.
What is surprising here is that people are surprised. After the rash of exploding notebook computers a few years back, people might have thought about the wisdom of trying to run a car on the same kind of batteries that can detonate your laptop. As John Hockenberry wrote in a Wired article in 2006, "The technical term for these bizarre incidents is thermal runaway. It occurs when the touchy elements inside a Li-ion battery heat up to the point where the internal reaction accelerates, creating even more heat. A sort of mini China Syndrome of increasing temperature builds until something must give. In the case of a laptop flameout, the chemicals break out of their metal casing. Because lithium ignites when it makes contact with the moisture in the air, the battery bursts into flame." Hockenberry predicted that things would only get worse, as more is demanded of a battery technology that is at its practical limits.
Ever since there have been automobiles, there have been people who have fixated on electric cars. They've been predicted to take over the market nearly every few decades since the turn of the last century. Like diets that work, they're better seen as "tomorrow's technology of tomorrow."
Sure, GM may be able to resolve the problems with the Volt. But the big hurdle, as Anderman pointed out last year, remains lackluster demand. Why would a car buyer choose a Volt, which gets 40 miles per gallon on the highway and costs $41,000, when he could get a Chevy Cruze, which is nearly identical in size, gets better mileage, and costs less than half as much?
Back in 2009, Johan de Nysschen, the president of Audi of America, cannily predicted the Volt’s future: “No one is going to pay a $15,000 premium for a car that competes with a Corolla. . . . There are not enough idiots who will buy it.”
On Monday, GM began offering loaner vehicles to those very same Volt owners while the NHTSA investigation continues.
Government motors seeking to advance its failed electric car offering has taken the unprecedented step of offering loaner cars while the government proves you won't be burned to a crisp in their POS car:
Unprecedented? I've gotten a loaner for years when I take my car into the dealer.
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