A class-action lawsuit has been filed against General Motors over the problems some owners are experiencing with the Chevy Bolt EV battery pack.
Lawfirm Chimicles Schwartz Kriner & Donaldson-Smith filed the nationwide class-action lawsuit on behalf of plaintiff Andres Torres. The law firm claims that when the lithium-ion battery pack in the Chevy Bolt EV is “charged to full, or very close to full,” it can pose a risk of fire. It also says that GM’s only fix for the problem is a software update that limits the maximum state of charge to approximately 90% battery capacity, thereby reducing the amount of mileage that these vehicles can otherwise travel on a full charge.
The complaint accuses GM of violating the Illinois Consumer Fraud and Deceptive Practices Act and the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act, along with fraudulent concealment/fraud by omission. It also accuses GM of breaching its express and implied warranties on its vehicles. The plaintiff is seeking restitution and punitive damages as a result of “GM knowingly introducing defective vehicles into the marketplace and defrauding consumers across the country, and also an award for costs and fees and other relief,” the law firm says.
GM issued a recall for almost 69,000 units of the Chevy Bolt EV worldwide in November after it received five separate complaints of the battery packs in the vehicles catching fire. GM has not yet identified the root cause of the fires and has instructed dealers to install a software patch that limits the battery capacity to 90 percent of its limit as a sort of stop-gap measure. A more permanent fix for the problem is expected to arrive sometime in the New Year.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has also launched an investigation into the Chevy Bolt EV battery fires. The safety watchdog has received three complaints from owners pertaining to the issue thus far and says all the fires started under the rear seat of the vehicle while it was parked.
Chevy Bolt Executive Chief Engineer Jesse Ortega said previously that the battery fires can be traced back to defective cells manufactured by GM supplier LG Chem in South Korea between May 2016 and May 2019. Only certain 2017, 2018 and 2019 model year Chevy Bolt EV models are believed to be affected by this problem.
We’ll be following this Chevy Bolt EV battery fire situation closely, so be sure to subscribe to GM Authority for more Chevrolet Bolt EV news, Chevrolet news, and around-the-clock GM news coverage.
Comments
LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL
Vehicle manufactures knowingly produce and sell ICE vehicles that have a chance of going up in flames every day.
Nothing is ever 100% perfect, also of the 70k Bolts produced only 5 are known to have caught on fire, that’s a .007 % chance.
This will fail.
The lawsuit takes the allegations a bit far, but the warranty is purported to cover “defect related to materials or workmanship”. If the battery fires are a result of material defect, they should be covered under the warranty. The current recall is just a temporary measure to reduce the likelihood of fires while they determine how to identify the batteries that may have material defects in order to issue a more targeted recall on them.
GM could replace all of the batteries, but the cost of doing so would probably total near a billion dollars. They could employ dozens of engineers working specifically on this determination and still end up ahead if it turns out it’s only a problem in fewer than 50% of packs.
I’m personally not that concerned about the fires. I rarely charged my battery to full before the recall, and the recall actually ends up taking the battery to 95% as displayed (90% actual SoC) instead of the 87-89% it would charge to on hilltop before.
Most likely, the fires occur due to shorted cells. Lithium tends to plate out of solution only when cells near full charge when the voltage is sufficient to convert ionic lithium into metallic lithium. There are secret additives that battery makers add to stabilize the chemistry in the paste in the battery and keep the lithium from plating. There must be a manufacturing error that affected some cells, allowing the lithium to reduce to metal when full terminal voltage is reached.
The interim fix appears to be an attempt to keep the voltage low enough to prevent getting into the region of plating lithium. The question to me is whether that is really a fix at all. It looks more like a public relations effort to show that something is being done.
Having said that, even though EV fires and Bolt fires in particular occur at a much lower rate than fires in the general population of vehicles, EV fires appear to be more difficult to manage and extinguish.
LOL.
The reprogram is a TEMPORARY fix, basically word for word in the recall and in documents to dealers. It is not the only fix as it states. GM issued a recall and the temporary cut to battery capacity via the reprogram. This lawsuit is laughable.
The question is how interim of a fix is it really? Will GM actually do anything further? I had an AMC/Chrysler product a number of years back that suffered from an engine oil seal failure issue, and the fix from Chrysler was to mail me a certificate for $500 off the sticker if I wanted to buy a new Chrysler product.
My concern is that GM potentially faced with having to replace 68,000 Bolt main batteries will say, “Oh well that is too much work, here’s a certificate toward the purchase of a new Chevy to compensate you for the fact you only got 90% of what you paid for. Live with the 90%.”
That certainly does pose a logistical and servicing issue for GM if the faulty LG Chem cells are distributed randomly throughout the cohort of 68,000 cars. None the less simply lopping off 10% of the battery capacity of every Bolt in attempt to reduce the already small fire risk is not an acceptable solution. I doubt engineers are even really sure how much the fire risk is reduced, given the complexity of the complexity of the chemistry occurring as a cell nears its terminal (literally in a few cases!) voltage. Most likely the thought is that something is wrong in some cells with the secret sauce formulation that discourages reduction of lithium ion into metallic lithium as the cells near full state of charge. The batteries that shorted and burned up really can’t be analyzed, so the next best thing is to try to check the chemical content of still good batteries and guesstimate what happened. I suggest the 10% reduction is arbitrary and more of a public relations maneuver of GM to show it is doing something, and hoping that is more than enough to avert running up against the time when lithium starts to plate out of solution inside the cells.
The EV fires are dramatic and are actually worse in some ways than gasoline fires even though potentially similar amounts of destructive energy release are available to the respective fires. The EV fire is more difficult to extinguish with standard fire fighting equipment. The video of the Bolt fire in Germany is a case in point. The fire pretty much had to be managed with cooling water as much as possible, then the entire car was dropped into a shipping container full of water using a crane. It is true that EV fires occur at a much lower rate than fires in the automobile population at large, but EV fires appear to be more difficult to manage and extinguish.
The supposedly interim GM solution to limit the charge level to 90% is something drivers can do themselves anyway. The “hilltop reserve” setting on older Bolts limits to 90% and newer Bolts can expressly set a 90% limit. The GM solution is essentially a software hack to enforce consumer behavior. One wonders how thoroughly tested the software hack is, and if the hack itself could have unintended interactions with the existing software.
not much comfort in sitting on a battery pack that can burst into flames – that’s for any EV
One wonders, but I am still OK with driving my Bolt. Riding in a car with a gas tank is pretty scary too if you think about it, but people are more familiar with and inured to the risk. If anything, there is more potential destructive energy available for release in a gas tank. I witnessed the guy who lives across the street from me have two GM products totaled by fires. One was a 1966 Toronado that had a fuel leak in the engine bay. The second was a 1984 Fiero (aptly named) that had an electrical fault that ignited a magnesium fairing and subsequently the fiberglass resin.
This is another problem with EVs. remember battery fires in Boeing Dreamliner, Tesla’s catching on fire, maybe after a collision. How will people in metro areas apartment houses charge EVs where there is no garage space? no one seems to care about the energy that goes into making battery packs, from mining Lithium to completion, as well as end disposal. Only that where they drive there is no emissions. Nobody presents the whole picture. Also, I don’t want to sit on top of a battery pack that can burst into flames.
but you will sit on top of a vehicle powered by flammable liquid that gets exploded multiple times in front of you? Risk Analysis is key here, or we would never leave our house, which by the way has electricity and maybe gas running though it all the time!!!!
There goes the profits on this piece of junk. Future sales will probably decline.
Being GM long-standing customers (whole family includes kids , brothers and sisters ,
Moms and dads , grandmas & grandpas for generations I think the electric car industry is making GM appear like startup industry beginners . And leaving all of the amazing historical
Vehicles (engine/drive tech) from the past is a mistake the needs to be better managed.
I am an old retired electrician who 30 years ago who went into frequency drive sales (same PWM technology as boLts and all ev ) in the mining , forestry and pulp industry . The drives industry at that time had a very high short term failure rate . The solution was a sweeping management change . The drives were managed by new technology and not the historical type of engineers . The old boys had a history of better problem tracking and solving . It turned out that the 2000 hp form coil motor engineers had more success fixing the problems of the tech drives engineers .
It ended with the drives having to be more reliable to a safety factor of 200% not just 10%
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I would like to see the trusted Cadillac/ Buick type of managers dealing with the EV evolution at GM to make better designs for more long lasting products for the future.