PHONY SALES? GM Channel-Stuffing Surges To All-Time Record. “Because when economic growth at all costs is needed to demonstrate just how viable America is, and a semi-nationalized car marker is one of the only conduits to ‘generate’ economic growth, it does not matter if the end product is actually demanded or will simply corrode and rust in some dealer showroom in perpetuity. After all it is the act of building the car that matters for various monthly PMI, CMI, regional Fed and GDP purposes.”
Related: GM willing to buy back Volts. “General Motors will buy Chevrolet Volts back from any owner who is afraid the electric cars will catch fire, the company’s CEO said Thursday. In an exclusive interview with The Associated Press, CEO Dan Akerson insisted that the cars are safe, but said the company will purchase the Volts because it wants to keep customers happy. Three fires have broken out in Volts after side-impact crash tests done by the federal government.”
UPDATE: Ronnie Schreiber emails:
Only one fire has broken out in a crash tested Volt. The other fires were in battery packs, not cars. One Volt that was tested earlier in the year by NHTSA, and after a 20mph side impact into a pole, followed by a rollover test, it caught fire three weeks later. Within the last month NHTSA performed additional testing but from my reading of the press release it appears that the testing was on battery packs alone. Since the battery pack in the Volt that caught fire had been penetrated during the testing, NHTSA tested three batteries by damaging the cases, cutting the coolant lines, and then rotating the batteries. The experiment was designed to replicate the conditions of the Volt that burned. Of those three batteries, two experienced “thermal events”.
I think that’s the source of the “three fires have broken out in Volts after side-impact crash tests” meme. . . One battery started to spark and smoke soon after the damage and inversion, one battery initially showed a temperature increase and then a week later caught fire, and one battery didn’t do anything. According to some reports, the battery that sparked and smoked extinguished the fire itself. While there were two “thermal events” in the battery testing, it appears that there was actually only one fire. So, rather than “three fires have broken out in Volts after side-impact crash tests” it’s really more like one fire in a crash tested Volt and one fire in a crash tested battery pack.
GM crash tested the Volt plenty before sending it off to NHTSA. NHTSA and also IIHS, the insurance industry highway safety trade group, performed many more tests. In all that crash testing, only one battery caught fire, and then only after 3 weeks of sitting there with the battery still holding a charge. GM’s protocols with the Volt call for discharging the battery in the event of a serious accident, which wasn’t done by NHTSA on the Volt that burned so it’s possible that in GM’s own crash testing, the exact conditions of the NHTSA fire never existed. Perhaps the NHTSA test revealed an unknown vulnerability in the Volt design or perhaps it was just a rare combination of circumstances. The part that intrigues me is the intrusion into the battery pack in the original crash test. I’m wondering if GM, NHTSA or the IIHS ever observed that kind of intrusion in any of their crash testing. If not, I don’t think that GM can be faulted for not anticipating something that their own testing never produced. Of course learning from unanticipated failure is called engineering. I’m sure that Volt version 2.0, if there is one, will have a steel jacket around the battery pack, like the Nissan Leaf.
Ah.