Chevy Bolt EV Forum banner
  • Hey Guest, welcome to ChevyBolt.org. We encourage you to register to engage in conversations about your Bolt.

US investigates fire reports in Chevy Bolt electric vehicles

Tags
bolt recall
19K views 145 replies 38 participants last post by  Cav1982 
#1 ·
Just passing this along here:


DETROIT (AP) — The U.S. government's road safety agency is investigating complaints that the Chevrolet Bolt electric vehicle can catch fire.
The probe by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration covers nearly 78,000 Bolts made by General Motors from the 2017 through 2020 model years.
The agency says in documents posted on its website Tuesday that it has three reports of fires that began under the rear seat while the cars were parked and unattended. One person suffered smoke inhalation.

The fire damage appeared to be concentrated in the battery compartment area, spreading into the passenger area.
GM says it's cooperating with the probe and is conducting its own investigation. “The safety of our products is the highest priority for the entire GM team,” the statement said. The company would not comment when asked if the vehicles should be parked outside until the cause of the fires is determined.


The safety agency will determine how often the fires happen and assess the safety consequences. The probe could lead to a recall.
In one of the complaints from March of 2019, a Bolt owner in Belmont, Massachusetts, said the vehicle was parked in the driveway and plugged into the charger for a little over an hour when the fire began.

Then the owner found smoke billowing from the rear of the 2018 Bolt, apparently from the battery area. It took firefighters about three hours to control the blaze, and the owners reported headaches from the smoke. GM sent two engineers from Detroit to inspect the charger, and the company bought the Bolt from the insurance company, the owner wrote.

In another fire from July 4, 2020 in Vienna, Virginia, the owner of a 2019 Bolt told NHTSA that the car was driven to a townhouse development with a private parking lot.

Twenty minutes after arriving, a neighbor rang the doorbell and reported white smoke coming from the back of the Bolt. Firefighters doused the car with water for an hour and left the area, but the fire restarted less than an hour later.
Firefighters returned and put out the fire, and once the car cooled, it was towed to a dealer, where the fire started again. The owner wrote that GM is refusing to investigate the fire because the owner called an insurance company first.
GM spokesman Dan Flores said the company is investigating the Virginia fire and will inspect the Bolt as soon as the company can get access to it.

The National Transportation Safety Board, a separate federal agency, is investigating electric vehicle fires, and a report is expected soon.
 
See less See more
#14 ·
Spontaneously? I suspect a pretty small number. Contrary to popular believe, it takes a fair bit to get liquid gasoline to burn.

Lithium-ion batteries on the other hand require very little encouragement, which is why people are justifiably nervous when they seem to be igniting without external assistance.
 
#15 ·
I'd like to know how many amps were used for charging on all 3 of these ... were they fast charging? I have a variable charger 16, 24, 32 and 40 amps ... I dialed down to 24 amps, charging is cooler. At 40 Amps outlet was hot even though using 8 gauge wire.

Probably wasn't an issue
but just feel safer lowering the charge rate AT HOME
 
#16 ·
I'd like to know how many amps were used for charging on all 3 of these ... were they fast charging? I have a variable charger 16, 24, 32 and 40 amps ... I dialed down to 24 amps, charging is cooler. At 40 Amps outlet was hot even though using 8 gauge wire.

Probably wasn't an issue but just feel safer lowering the charge rate AT HOME
Interesting point you bring up here. We have the JuiceBox 40 (which I bought in the interest of "future proofing" our EV aspirations), but dialed it down to 32A since the Bolt isn't capable of accepting 40A anyway. Since this most recent fire indicated that the owner had a JuiceBox as well, would be interesting to know what the settings were, as you noted.
 
#18 ·
I can't believe some of the ignorant cavalier comments here. Always the same BS hiding behind "Wonder how many ICE cars caught fire" Well children, this is your car, not some one else's car and if you don't have the brains to park outside until GM figures out what is going on then you get what you deserve. May be nothing,
but also may be the whole fleet. How lucky are you feeling today?
Children...youth is wasted on the young.
I've been parking outside since the last posts and glad GM is investigating.
 
#34 ·
Just tired of hearing the same old rationalizations when there is a possible problem with our "beloved Bolts" Could be nothing, I concur. Could be the a total fleet recall. Has happened before. Just stop pretending everything will be ok because you can't deal with reality. Not talking about you specifically.
 
#44 ·
I've got a deal alert set for Nest Protect, which goes on sale for $60. It integrates with Google Home or Alexa, has an app to give remote notification, and does smoke and carbon monoxide. Lasts exactly 10 years. Requires WiFi connection. It does not tie into existing wired detectors.

I plan to put one in the garage and perhaps one centrally located on the main level. I don't have an EV yet.
 
#45 ·
When I built my house, I had two smoke/heat (wired) detectors installed and a pull alarm in the garage. The pull alarm was a joke for the wife. She was a hose dragger at the time. I park my Bolt in the garage and I'm more concerned about my lawn tractor and weed whacker being the source of the fire than the Bolt. I'm not changing my habits but for what it's worth I'm not really concerned but I would think that EV's are more likely to cause a fire in a garage than their ICE counterpart, vehicles of the same age. Still an incident rate so low it's not worth worrying about, imho.
 
#46 ·
Hah, as a kid I had the habit of cleaning up spilled gasoline in the garage by lighting it on fire. I spilled a little 100% of the time I filled something. One time was a bigger spill than normal, and it flared up big enough to make me take a step back, where I then kicked the open Jeep can over. A stream of fire spilled out into the garage and I had to prioritize the disaster. Grabbed the burning and spilling fuel can and chucked it out into the lawn. Grabbed a blanket and put the fire out on the pressure washer. Moved other equipment off of the areas of the floor that were burning. Dad asked me why there was a burned patch in the lawn, and I told him it was because I saved the garage from burning down... he had actually burned it down years earlier, so I think he gave me some slack.
 
#64 ·
Unauthorized isn't the same as "it's to blame". The burden of proof lay on the manufacturers, and I guarantee those grease monkeys at the dealership aren't going to deduce that an extension cord was used simply by noting that a part failed. They will find the failed part, see the vehicle is under warranty, and follow their standard procedure for replacing the failed part.

They don't have electrical engineers working on the cars, they have technicians that follow written procedure for diagnosing and repairing the vehicle.

Regarding insurance; it covers accidents and negligence too. People often say they don't want to do something themselves because they don't want to invalidate their insurance, but you can smoke in bed, fall asleep, burn down the house, and that is covered by insurance.

If anything, warranty and insurance should give us more confidence to implement unconventional solutions, not less confidence.

As I stated before, the limit of a warranty denial is limited to the specific thing that invalidated the particular warrantied thing. In other words, doing something dumb that damages one specific thing does not invalidate the remainder of the warranty on the vehicle. It makes no more sense to take a risk on something in warranty or out of warranty in other words, because doing something destructive is not covered in either scenario.
 
#65 ·
@redpoint5 : Apparently I have a low opinion of insurance providers and corporate warranties. This thread. Car ignites. Investigation ensues. Oh look...what's this funny adapter and whoever said the EVSE could be plugged in to an oven plug. From the battery all the way up stream to the EVSE...all exposed to possible damage...all possibly due to the non-code-compliant adapter and shoving 240V into the certified for 120V brick.
 
#66 ·
Someone on another forum posted that they'd asked their insurance agent: "what would happen if I <insert flagrant code violation here> and my house burned down", and the answer was that the fire insurance would cover it. That poster reported that the agent told them the act would need to be willful (as in: you were trying to burn the house down) in order to be denied. Being stupid isn't enough. (of course, trusting what "someone said on another forum" is also pretty nutz!).

I do have a friend who had a rental property that burned down. A bird had built a nest on top of the motion sensor light under the eave, and it caught fire and burned down (thankfully no-one was hurt). That house had been a nightmare for my friend: it had asbestos issues, lead paint issues, etc. Insurance assumed it was fraud, and tried to refuse the pay-out, and had it investigated by three different investigation companies. But all three concluded it was not arson, and he got his money.

BTW, if you have assets to protect, I'd recommend an umbrella liability policy. It has limitations too (like: it doesn't cover consequences of your actions while performing a criminal activity like robbing a bank, or doing commercial activity like driving Uber), but it avoids some of these questions.
 
#67 ·
@sundog Get that in writing from a lawyer of the insurance underwriter and you'd have something. :)
How do you prove willful? Is stupid not a form of willful? uh I didn't know I needed a permit. What? I need an inspection too!? uh I'm sure I read a reference that said I could do that. etc.
Anyway...I was talking about the car. Damage the car from this method. The car ignites. House burns down. Deny.
Or of course the other way. Damage the electrical from this method. House burns down. Deny.

I'll repeat...I know this all works electrically. Great. It's just two steps of risk exposure I'm not willing to take on.
 
#70 ·
.....and another one goes up in flames This one on a public charger in Germany.

That one definitely started inside the battery case itself (or due to a punctured case). You can see the smoke venting from the battery case, unlike the U.S. fires, which started in the cabin. Hopefully, GM can get their hands on the raw video from this incident. This seems like a slightly different cause/issue, but it could still be related.

One interesting thing is, the car's electronics were all still functioning, and the DIC was still lit up even after the rear of the car was burning. It was showing an empty battery (duh), but it was still displaying vehicle data.

31427
 
#73 ·
In the beginning of the event, you could see much more smoke coming from the front than from the back and the wind is going from left to right of the car, suggesting something happened on either the front of the battery or under the hood, as a matter of fact the firemen started by opening the hood first.

31429


Then the real fire starts on the back of the pack.
 
#74 ·
In the beginning of the event, you could see much more smoke coming from the front than from the back and the wind is going from left to right of the car, suggesting something happened on either the front of the battery or under the hood, as a matter of fact the firemen started by opening the hood first.
That really makes me wonder if the source was the onboard charger (I'm assuming the car wasn't on a DC fast charger).

I'm glad those firefighters were wearing breathing equipment - that smoke looks nasty.
 
#75 ·
Does it really matter whether you see flames or smoke in the front or the back? Doesn't the battery pack pretty much run the full length of the vehicle? And couldn't any one of the cells, anywhere in the pack, start the fire? I know everybody wants it to be something other than the battery (the ignition point, at least), but even if that turns out to be the case, that means the battery pack is either still not being sufficiently protected, and/or its design has some inherent flaw that makes it susceptible to a 'secondary ignition'.

Need real-time vehicle data to trap this problem, I think. Used to develop software for weapons systems for the Navy first 9 years out of college. 200 people on the project. Lots of unit testing, integrated testing, full-system testing, formal government-witnessed testing ... but then, once the system was out on the Boat in use ... a glitchy problem would occur. Fortunately, we had 'hooks' into the Operating System, giving us a "Black Box" data set that could be played back in the Lab. Even then, it was difficult to stamp out these hardest-to-kill system bugs. Without this kind of information, and with these Bolts burning to a crisp, I really wonder if they'll be able to confidently find and fix this problem. Might take a few iterations.
 
This is an older thread, you may not receive a response, and could be reviving an old thread. Please consider creating a new thread.
Top