Obviously, a very high profile vehicle like the Chevy Volt is going to be under the microscope. So it’s understandable that people would be interested in the recent fires that involve the new extended range electric vehicle. A handful of fires in early production Tata Nanos in India were publicized around the world, because of interest in the cheapest car in the world. However, that attention doesn’t mean that the Nano or Volt are necessarily fire hazards. A number of people have reacted to the news of the Volt related fires by saying that the Volt is dangerous or that EVs in general are not safe. Some sites that have linked to Cars In Depth posts about those fires have grossly misrepresented the situation, blaming the Volt when investigations have barely been started. Before you say that the Chevy Volt is a fire hazard, let’s look at how hazardous conventional internal combustion powered automobiles actually are.
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When he’s not busy doing custom machine embroidery, Ronnie Schreiber edits Cars In Depth and contributes to The Truth About Cars and Left Lane News
The Ferrari 458 Italia had a number of fires in the early months after it was introduced, which is a huge percentage given that they are built at a rate of 4 or 5 cars a day. The problem was identified and fixed, and the car is a huge hit.
Google Image “burning 458″ if you want to see what a really bad car day looks like.
New cars often have teething problems, especially if they have new technology.
Despite all the Government Motors & subsidy baggage, the Volt architecture is a good way to go. Replace the gas motor with a methanol fuel cell and you have what I think the car of the future will look like.
A lot of people who know way more about physics and chemistry than I do have said that methanol is the liquid fuel of the future. REB Research, in suburban Detroit, sells a hydrogen formulator that uses methanol and water as feedstocks. They could make a methanol fueled fuel cell car right now. Not sure if it’d make sense economically, but the technology is there today.
According to some sources, Chevy has sold 5000 Volts. Three of them have been involved in a fire over 8 months. That’s 0.06% of all Volts.
There are over 100 million cars in the US. If 21 of them burn per hour, that works out to about 121,000 over 8 months, or about 0.1% of all vehicles. I wonder how they would compare on a fires per vehicle miles basis.
Per the DOT and the National Fire Protection Association (found ‘em on Google) there were about 256,000 passenger-car fires in 1999, and 216 million total vehicles, which does indeed give us a per-vehicle fire rate of 0.1%
You may want to did deeper into the numbers.
From what I can determine, the 256k fires included both those were the fire was a cause (= car catches fire) and a result (= car crashes then catches fire). It is not clear to me whether or not intentional fires are included in the 256k number (= arson)
GM announces the reintroduction of the Chevy Blazer.
Lithium batteries use to be extremely dangerous. As in killed people who were working on developing them. In the 90′s. Flammable solid. Explosions. How has GM addressed this? Engineering please not Regulatory. If it would save the unions this administration would OK plutonium batteries.
Engineering wise, GM has probably put more engineering into the battery management, conditioning and temperature control than just about anything else in the car. It’s much more sophisticated than that used by the Nissan Leaf. In addition, in addition to normal crash testing, the Volt’s been crash tested extensively just to see what happened to the battery. Those are just the test that GM has done, besides the many tests that NHTSA has done on the car. With all those tests, there’s been one fire.
The liquid electrolyte in current generation Li-Ion batteries is flammable. An Ann Arbor startup called Sakti3, run by a Univ. of Michigan engineering professor, is developing a Li-Ion battery that is not flammable. It has other advantages as well. GM has a technical relationship with Sakti3. Longterm, if Sakti3′s technology works out on a production scale, I can see GM switching battery suppliers.
Having worked for automobile manufacturers and in the aftermarket, I can tell you that the vast majority of car fires are the result of one of two things: Modifications that are not done properly (stereos, burglar alarms etc.) – most of the installers seem to be clueless about how to connect to the cars electrical system without creating the potential for electrical fires, and poor maintenance – hoses, etc. that needed to be replaced but aren’t.
what annoys me is that the government gives away middle class citizens tax dollars to issue a tax credit to wealthy or business buyers of chevy volts…
let it succeed on its own merits. anything i create has to, why shouldn’t government motors be held to the same standard? we have to elect people to our federal government that will stop this subsidizing of large corporations, especially ones that are currently owned by the government itself.
Whatever.
It is still a pig in a poke. The advocates very conveniently never speak to the problem of producing and recycling those batteries. Nor do you speak to the cost of charging stations and production of electricity. All so you can drive a very few miles per day.
Once the government herds us all into their idea of planned developments, and puts a daily mileage limit on us, then the Volt may make some sense.
High speed rail anyone?
While I really appreciate any attempt to put data into perspective, in this case I’m not sure it’s an apples-to-apples comparison. While admittedly the data are very sparse and preliminary, what bothers me is that the Volt seems to burst into flames when it’s not being driven. My worry would be not just that it’s going to burn, but it’s going to burn in the middle of the night and take my house with it.
Good point. Make sure to park it in the street, next to the curbside electrical outlet!
I don’t know whether the Volt’s have a systemic problem that is leading to an unsafe situation while charging… However, I seriously doubt that there will be Congressional hearings, where the GM CEO/top brass are marched up to Capitol Hill for a public dressing down, unlike their competitor Toyota with the equally dubious claim that there was a problem with Camry’s accelerator pedal sticking.
Why, you say? How about because the government owns GM… I said it then that it was unfair that the Feds had a serious conflict of interest there. They got to play tough for the cameras, Toyota’s sales took a huge hit, AND the people demanding action and genuflection from Toyota WERE THEIR COMPETITORS!!!
Early gas engine proponents used tu quoque arguments, too.
(See what I did there?)
Pointing out statistical risk is not engaging in tu quoque, but that was still cleverly done, sir.
Actually, a lot of effort was put into electric cars. Studebaker started out making electric cars. Detroit Electric was in business for two decades. Thomas Edison tried to make EV batteries. Henry Ford had a team that tried, in 1914, to make Edison’s batteries work. Gasoline won out over steam and electricity because it has 13,000 BTUs/gal and guys like David Buick and Henry Leland figured out how to extract that energy before the needed improvements in batteries occurred. It’s always been about batteries.
I can show you EV concepts from just about all the Detroit automakers (including little American Motors) going back decades and decades. It’s always been about energy density.
Yup my thought too. There are lies, damned lies, and then there are statistics. You need to compare the 5,000 Chevy Volts–little used and not driven very far, against the 100 million or so cars on the road in the USA.
As a radio control model hobbyist, I use a lot of lithium batteries. They don’t take well to crashes or mishandling, and they do occasionally burst into flame. One of my friends had a $50,000 garage fire at his house when a lithium battery burst into flame. (Hobbyists can’t afford Volts–average Volt owner income is $175K—so that means a garage fire in our houses can’t cause $800,000 in damage–the Volt/Siemens Charger fire episode).
That said, I’m well aware that gasoline can also be quite explosive in a crash. But if you’re going to have a gasoline fire in a crash, it’s pretty immediate –not three weeks later in some other location.
As a process control systems engineer with some experience with Li-Ion batteries, I know that their stability is not very good. I have seen Li-Polymer cells catch fire spontaneously when simply allowed to get too warm. I have seen minor errors in the charge/discharge protocol light them up also. Impact that would barely dent a gasoline tank can damage a Li-Ion cell so that it self-discharges, unbalancing the battery and opening the way for spontaneous combustion at worst, or a very expensive replacement at best.
In the very best of chargers, a ten-cent component failure can all too easily unbalance the cell set, setting the stage for a fire. This is especially true if the charge protocol is trying to minimize cycle time, as opposed to maximizing safety.
Finally, someone please examine the age and maintenance history of the conventional cars which caught fire. I’ll wager that a great many are ten years old or older cars in poor condition. Compare with these Volts, which are all under a year or two old.
Personally, I care little whether Volts catch fire or not. I will never own one, because I will never ever again buy GM. I experienced the UAW at GM first-hand, for almost 15 years, and frankly I hope this silly car sinks GM and that the UAW goes down with the ship.
When the Ford Pinto burst into flame, they recalled every one of them. Why not the same with the Volt? (True, nobody’s been killed. Yet.) Two million Pintos were built.