Chevrolet Volt catches fire weeks after crash, prompting closer look at safety

Chevrolet Volt catches fire weeks after crash, prompting closer look at safety

formatting link

Reply to
Jim_Higgins
Loading thread data ...

Of course no gasoline car has ever, ever caught on fire after a crash. Never happened. Let's eliminate these death traps immediately. You decide what is a death trap, however.

Reply to
PeterD

Fire was 3 wks after the crash test, sitting in a scrap yard, cause of fire not known yet, better recall all and stop building new ones.

Reply to
Tom

It has a legitimate problem, best to find out what happened and if it could affect others. Maybe the Volt is the Vega of the 21 century.

Reply to
Jim_Higgins

Huh? Drain a Lithium gel pack in the field? Are they NUTS? Author must have failed high school chemistry or too stupid to take it.

More like remove battery and place in sealed dry container treating it as hazardous waste and with caution.

And another reason why a F150 built mostly from steel and aluminum is more recyclable and in a severe crash, more friendly to the environment. And $10K off the price of a Volt for an F150 not only gets you working A/C and heat, $10K in fuel and no electric utility surprises is divine, green on your pocket book.

Lets put it this way. If gas leaks from a Volt, and the battery is cracked up and open, don't go spraying water on it unless you want hydrogen to be added to the gasoline.

Volt is a ecological farce, a fad.

Better off with a Tata Nano for $3500 from India, Euro crashed rated and over 50 mpg. Green in consumption, your pocket book green conservation, less hazardous to dispose of, no expensive potentially harmful lithium concentrations or expensive reprocessing and replacement required. I even hear tuneups are easy.

Reply to
Canuck57

Having gasoline spills isn't the same as a lithium one.

Reply to
Canuck57

They sold more Vega. Geo perhaps? Or Edsel?

Reply to
Canuck57

What happened was obvious, someone forgot to disconnect and remove the battery, a standard procedure for all vehicles involved in a crash. So someone screwed up big time, and now blame the vehicle? Sheesh. (Note: I'm not a big fan of the Volt, but this is silly...)

Reply to
PeterD

Hey, I had an Edsel... It never burst into flames. Couldn't while driving because it rarely was running!

Reply to
PeterD

The Volt is not an electrical vehicle so this means nothing in the discussion about the safety of the electrical cars.

The Volt has an ordinary engine aboard like all other combustion engine cars with its 1100 moving parts and petrol tank and wirings and gearbox and everything else a combustion car needs.

An electrical car has a motor with 4 moving parts and all wirings and batteries can be stuffed away in closed compartments.

An electrical car is lightweight the Volt is not.

The real question is why in the world is the Volt called and electrical car?

It is at best an hybrid.

If we talk about automakers themselves who have spent billions of dollars in making this brilliant machines that are wonders of ingenuity and 1100 moving parts with lots of explosion going on is a real masterpiece If you say to them we want to stop using your masterpiece and replace it with this small engine which is more powerful than yours and does not need a gearbox because it is so powerful and has only 4 moving parts This is destroying their way of life Same goes for the car dealers They live on you buying the car and after you drive away and are depending on them for now on and into the future for all kinds of repairs looking after your car, changing oil Their business case is you are subscribing to their services forever The electrical car reduces this need by

2/3 This is a completely new model New way of thinking

Electricity is cheaper than oil and petrol It is a waste to use oil and petrol in our cars They only use 25% of the power to move the car and the rest goes to waste When we use electricity we use 95% to move the car and it is clean

automobile makers are against electrical cars and trying to work against its use There are powers against electrical cars

Reply to
gosinn

A single standard lead acid battery isn't the same as some very much larger lithium one. And I am sure they don't use skinny cables with a post.

A more accurate way to look at it is they don't remove the fuel tanks. But many need to on the Volt.

Reply to
Canuck57

Yes, but they are political. Take Zenn Motors. They have had $11,000 pure electric cars with a much greater battery range than the Volt. And inexpensive as it doesn't have the unnecessary complexity of 2 power systems. Also reduces costs in build and service as less to go wrong.

But not CAW/UAW made so they are black listed in the governments acceptance of safety. Same thing with Tata Nana for $3500 and 50+ mpg with Euro crash rating. Many Chinese 4x4 at $10,000 are copies of what is on the US roads but not allowed in.

Yep, you buy any auto in North America, it is price fixed to keep CAW/UAW and negligent management of a corrupt auto industry alive. The industry is already in protectionist mode and consumers pay the price.

Reply to
Canuck57

ever stop to think of what the wages and working conditions are in india and china, answer back after you take a wage cut.

Reply to
Tom

Funny, I take the same attitude as a UAW/CAW worker shopping at Walmart. What makes a CAW/UAW uneducated idiot think he should live in the same neighborhood as doctors and engineers?

And the cost of living is a lot less in China and India.

I knew an India guy once who quit his job in Canada to go back to India. He was going to make about 1/3rd the wages in India. So I asked why? He said, he will not be taxed like a slave, and his money will go a lot further in India than in Canada. Gas will not be so high, utilities will be cheap, property taxes lower and might even be able to swing a house servant.

See, it isn't just what you make, it is what you can do with the left overs after taxes. And in Canada and the USA, incomes don't go so far any more. $40K for a Volt is stupid priced. Fact is NA auto costs too much. They are not too big to fail, they are too big and corrupt to save.

Reply to
Canuck57

Why do you mention Geo? It was just GM's foreign car rebrand name, IE Prizm=Toyota Corolla (NUMMI), Metro=Suzuki Swift (CAMI), Tracker=Suzuki Sidekick/Vitara (CAMI)

The Geo Tracker is a good vehicle, I know I have a '91 5 speed 4x4 model.

Reply to
Daniel who wants to know

Maybe GM should bring them back and keep the costs down. Be tthey would outsell the Volt in no time.

Reply to
Canuck57

=93I can=92t conceive that they didn=92t have a standard operating procedur= e in place for handling a wrecked vehicle before the car went on sale,=94 s= aid Clarence Ditlow, executive director of the Center for Auto Safety in Wa= shington. =93NHTSA and GM should have established protocols in place before= it went on sale.=94

formatting link

Reply to
gosinn

formatting link

We use the same SOP for the Volt that we used for the Fords that had faulty brake light switches...

Grab the marshmallows....

Short ANY battery out and you will discover they generate a LOT of heat very rapidly. The danger of many of the hybrids is that now you have a nasty mix setting there. A large battery pack with hazardous chemicals and a tank of fuel as well as all the plastics used. When they wreck the first thing you try to do is kill the power from the batteries. On some of them this can be real interesting. One thing I would like to see on ALL of them is a universal power shut off that is the same regardless of make/model. Currently we have about 40 different manuals for hybrids/alternative fueled vehicles, none of them are the same and many locate the master switch in places that are hard to reach in a bad accident.

Reply to
Steve W.

formatting link
>

But with GM you get Lithium.

Reply to
Canuck57

formatting link
>>

At least we won't get depressed or start acting like maniacs....

Reply to
Steve W.

MotorsForum website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.