We seek to be an unbiased publication, not beholden to carmakers, government agencies or even political affections. But with all the news and mis-information that has been out there about the Chevy Volt, we finally feel it’s time to weigh in on what we feel is an overblown reaction.
The issues that have been in the headlines about battery fires and the subsequent inquiries by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) have turned into a public relations boondoggle for GM. And like many of these things this one has gotten severely out of hand.
We know this just from listening to the radio talk show hosts as we travel around the country, to whom the Volt has become a punch line for fires and death. Many of the ill informed use the imagery of a Volt bursting into flames and killing everyone within 100 feet as a tool to tear down GM, its association with the Obama Administration, and the entire idea of electric cars. This editor is a very conservative Republican who isn’t all that jazzed about the government’s involvement in GM, but the Volt is not however a whipping post for that matter. This was a car who’s product planning, design and development was well underway before the government ever came along or Obama came to office.
All this negative vibe however has severely hurt sales of the Chevy Volt in the past three months. There are well played news stories of dealers turning them away because they cant sell them. There are jokes still on the late night TV shows about them. The crime here in fact is that not a single Volt has burst into flames in an accident. Not a single person has been hurt or died in a fire.
What must be clarified is that there is no immediate danger posed by the design of the Volt that it’s going to burst into flames on the scene of an accident. Once MUST remember that the fire issues are ones that occurred well after a crash test was conducted on one, as it was sitting in the storage yard. Subsequent tests were done and duplicated the problem – again a week or so later the battery began to burn.
A problem does exist, yes. In some side impact crashes the car deforms in such a manner that the battery located in the central tunnel can be compressed or pierced. This causes the negative and positive components of the battery to potentially meet and or get close enough to begin generating heat. Over time with the lack of a cooling system, this can eventually lead to a fire.
The concept reminds me of a time when a member of my household taped a pile of watch batteries together to store them, the plan to keep them from running all over free in a drawer. The batteries in a glob all short circuited against each other and in minutes the taped up blister pack became so hot you could not touch it. It was a good thing we caught it and unraveled the mess before they burst. The idea however is much the same as what was happening with these crash tested Volts.
GM did look hard at it, and they came up with a fix as we reported a couple weeks ago. Additional steel gussets were added to further protect the battery tunnel against deformation. That’s it. It’s that simple.
And while this will likely fix the problem long term, it will still likely be recommended that electric cars – all of them, be sequestered when they are hauled off to a wrecking yard just to be safe. We would share however that the risk of a battery pack heating up over time after an accident is far less a danger than a gas tank in a conventional car exploding on impact. Thus if one is intellectually honest, that still puts the Volt and any other electric car on safer ground.
Bottom line is that sometimes we all need to look at the facts behind the hype. The same could be said for the Toyota run-away acceleration problems of a year back. In hindsight most of those cases turned out to be plain bogus, human error. In this case, the controversy is much powered by politics, media sensationalism, and ignorance as opposed to the realities.
The Volt may be easily critiqued for a lot of things like the question, “Is it an electric car or a Hybrid?”. But make no mistake that it’s just as safe as any other similarly sized car you can buy. GM deserves the benefit of consumers looking past the headlines and measuring the car on its merits.
