Chevrolet Volt Battery Issues Growing, Safety Findings May Have Been Suppressed
Joan Claybrook, a former adminstrator at [National Highway Traffic Safety Administration] believes part of the reason for the delay was the “fragility of Volt sales.”
Had there only been more government oversight…
I don’t see one parked in the White House drive way. So I guess Bambam either got the recall notice – or he’s not stupid enough to practice what he preaches.
Kate are you sure China is the only criminal enterprise?
Unsafe at any speed.
Someone on this board said a “Volt for a Dolt.”
How true-
Buy a Volt to get rid of your house payments..
Maybe not that much of a surprise….the volunteer fire guys hereabouts….engaged in rescue operations, very early on were, early on, trained/tutored/briefed on the potential for electrical fire and danger of electrocution from these marvels…hybrids included…
I can’t put my finger on it but for some reason the old Mission Impossible tv series comes to mind…
chevy has officially announced the buy back of all chevy volt’s for fear of spontanious fire hazrds..lol. look it up . saw it on the ticker at sun news !!!
Wow! the comments at the link are NOT friendly to the Volt,or it’s major proponent,Obama.
“Hitler had the VW,Obama has the Volt”, “the Obamawagon”,etc.
dmorris, exactly. I was thinking the same thing this morning while eating breakfast and hearing about this on the radio news. The only difference is that the VW was a great land and amphibious vehicle that served well during the war and after, not like the obomination that the Volt is.
Soooo where is that EV guy who came here often? You remember him? Tony Guitar, was it?
Oh, and do EVs have a heater?
First the Pinto, the Corvair and now the VOLT.
Humm and some provincial governments (currently HAVE NOT Provinces) were offering $10,000 incentives to buy them?
Connect the political dots!
The Pinto was a Ford product…just sayin…
The largest shareholder of General Motors is the US government. Until the government can dump its stock on unsuspecting suckers, it will suppress or downplay any bad news.
If a business concealed material facts about a company while selling stock, insiders could be prosecuted and sued.
The Volt is too obviously a government initiative. Expensive and it doesn’t work. And some governments give a $10,000 subsidy the the piece of crap. A money sink.
Get the gubmint involved. If they’d only been regulating it this never would happen. HA!
Apparently, due to the incredible and massive response from Volt owners, GM has decided to walk back on their offer to by back the little fire hazards.
That didn’t take long.
at least with a pinto you could modify and stuff a 351 C in it and that puppy would rock, volt would only be good as scrap
Can’t find a thing regarding the Dolt buy-back thing.
References??
Not so much a buy back as we’ll give ya a loaner if yer too freaked out…
http://www.ottawacitizen.com/cars/clarifies+Volt+buyback/5813959/story.html
Thanks Syncro.
What happened to the original EV1 from GM back in the late 90’s ? It seemed everything was going fine and then GM pulled the plug, recalled them all and crushed them. WTH ?
I strongly suspect Big Oil had something to do with it.
,
No prob…
This crony socialism gets a little messy, doesn’t it?
Thanks for that link to the Ottawa Citizen article,syncro. The GM Canada Pres is sure the master/mistress of doublespeak and bafflegab.
They’re very concerned with their customer’s wants,unless the customers want their damned MONEY back!
What a bloody boondoggle.
I said this would be a stinker & I wasn’t wrong.
Not because I’m smart , but that the City of Edmonton tried electric Zamboni s that where a complete disaster.
10,000 every 2 years to replace the batteries.
Fires. Acid so bad in the air, as well the floor your work boots melted. As well driving them became a hazard as you couldn’t gage speed by the engine.
A lot of people drove them right threw the boards in a rink.
This Obamabile was always a publicity stunt for his take over of GM.
After this, my next car will be manufactured by the 20th Century Motor Car Company.
Yeah gee I wonder what happened to the EV1 wonder what the problem could have been…
“As a result the public relations nightmare surrounding Chevy’s halo vehicle appears to be deepening, though a good deal of the blame in this case also rests with NHTSA.”
“An interesting point on the subject been raised by Clarence Ditlow, executive director for the Center of Auto Safety in Washington D.C. He said that he is “surprised that NHTSA didn’t drain the battery after crash testing as it is standard procedure to empty the fuel tank on conventional gasoline powered vehicles.”
So the NHTSA crash tested a Volt after which it sat for three weeks without the battery being discharged (the recommended procedure – I believe GM has published information on the correct method) after which it caught fire after the coolant must have caused a short. And why is this all GM’s fault?
FWIW – I saw a Volt recently in a parking lot and talked with the owner. He only had the car for one month and had been avereaging 3.1 lites/100 km (this includes use of gas engine). He recently drove to Montreal and back averaging 5.1 l/100 km. there and 5.5 on the return (mostly using the gas engine obviously).
Last week GM was talking about ramping up production of the Volt in 2012 to upwards of 60,000 units. That was in a story on 660 Newsradio in Calgary. The link isn’t from 660, rather a different story that says 45,000 units in ’12.
http://www.autoguide.com/auto-news/2011/12/chevrolet-volt-wont-reach-sales-target-for-2011.html
These guys and the climate bunch too, are reminding me of the propaganda guy in Baghdad. Telling the media that the Yanks were no where near the city as the tanks rumbled by in the background.
Let’s appoint a Special Committee to bury, I mean, investigate this!
There is no solution to this problem. Lithium is used because it offers the highest energy density for any battery. However, it’s not stable, meaning that it easily catches on fire. Here’s the full list of all the elements with their electromotive potential.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_electrode_potential_%28data_page%29
Note that lithium is as good as it gets. There’s no new elements in the periodic table, so lithium batteries are the maximum possible storage method for electricity using any form of battery.
Please note further than many of the batteries better than lead oxide (your car battery at -0.58) but less than lithium either use highly expensive materials like yttrium or are not stable under any condition.
Electromotive potential means NO new miracle batteries waiting to be developed, ever. Period, end of story.
cgh, your last sentence reminds me of the famous scientist who, shortly before the Wright brother’s first flight, predicted that powered flight was impossible.
You’re right that Li as about as good as it gets for electrochemical batteries. The other thing Li is useful for is as a reducing agent and I’m surprised that producers of methamphetamine haven’t been stealing Volt’s for the large amount of Li that is present in the battery (I guess it’s just a matter of time).
When it comes to non-chemical energy storage devices (which I suspect will continue to be referred to as “batteries”), there is the potential for far higher energy density than the primitive electro-chemical cell. Ultracapacitors are promising but it’s not clear what their maximal theoretical energy density is. They have the advantage of being able to handle very large charging currents — like what one gets when using a generator to brake a vehicle when going down a hill. Room temperature superconductors are another potential energy storage modality although I suspect they’d discharge in a rather spectacular fashion if their temperature rose high enough. And, of course, there is always the future potential of LENR’s in unit weighing less than 500 lb.
Assuming that the cost of the CAGW scam doesn’t destroy the world economy, I predict that within the next 50 years there will be a battery whose energy density is higher than gasoline. Assuming that the cost is comparable with gasoline, then people will start switching to electric vehicles. Right now it’s damn hard to beat the energy density of hydrocarbon fuels, especially when one resides in a high O2 containing atmosphere. Until such time I’m sticking with well tested technology even though the geek in me would love to have an electric vehicle to tinker with (I’d buy one if I had a few million $ in spare cash kicking around).
“Electromotive potential means NO new miracle batteries waiting to be developed, ever. Period, end of story.”
Good point. Several years ago a reader at The Truth About Cars posted an excellent short analysis of this. I’m not at my computer now so I can’t post (I saved his comment). It explained that the energy required/gained from moving electrons was much less than that from splitting chemical compounds (i.e. hydrocarbons) hence a chemical reaction such as burning fuel would always be more energy dense (my term) than from a battery. If I have time tonight, I will try to find that comment.