One can learn a lot from history. When gasoline-fueled motor cars began roaming streets (and their proxies) in great numbers at the beginning of the 20th century, fuel tanks were thought to be ready to burst into flames if looked at sideways, and gasoline run-off was blamed for sewer explosions. Such fear and misinformation prompted the New York Times to release a piece in 1912 entitled “Gasoline Is Not Dangerous Fluid.” Action-flick writers excepted, people today generally understand that the internal-combustion engine’s fuel doesn’t explode. The lesson: New technologies have a way of intimidating and scaring the uninformed.
A similar panic has unfolded a century later: Since two crash-tested Chevrolet Volts caught fire following government testing, GM’s plug-in has everyone afraid of batteries. Thanks largely to media sensationalism, old hysteria is new again. And it’s likely as unfounded now as it was then.
OnStar: We’ve Sensed an Accident; Emergency Responders Will Be There in Three Weeks
It’s important to understand the circumstances surrounding those Volt fires. The first occurred three weeks after a NHTSA crash test. The car sat in storage, its lithium-ion battery pack damaged from the impact but not discharged according to GM’s recommendation in such situations. The pack’s coolant system was also compromised and is thought to be the what helped cause the fire. NHTSA later crashed three more Volts in a similar manner, one of which caught fire a week afterward. Then everyone went nuts.
If you ask us, even just one day is plenty of time to safely exit a vehicle that’s in peril of burning. And get this: We’ve even heard of internal-combustion cars catching fire during a crash. When such an event happens—unless it’s indicative of a more widespread problem, as in the case of the Pinto, for example—the individual models generally aren’t the subject of big government investigations or recalls as a result.
We’ll also point out that the above incidents are the only two known conflagrations resulting from Volt accidents; no Volt owners have had their battery packs go up in flames from real-world events—but that didn’t prevent some bogus media reports from stating such. A search of the U.S. government’s complaint database turns up a total of three entries for 2011 and 2012 Volts, none of which contain the terms “battery” or “fiery death.” (Recall that the same NHTSA database was inundated with hundreds of runaway-car reports—many of them hilarious—in the wake of the media overhyping Toyota’s non-problem.)
Starting New Fires
Not satisfied to simply paint the Volt’s battery pack as the scapegoat, other reporters looked for additional smoking guns. One found smoking 120-volt chargers. More accurately, one reporter found charger plugs that have the chance of becoming deformed as a result of high heat. But since shouting “Melt!” in a crowded movie theater won’t get anyone’s attention, headlines on the original item and those parroting its “information” suggested the charger has a propensity to go up in flames. No person has actually reported such an occurrence.
The same media outlet also claimed that GM calls the Volt’s 120-volt charger a stopgap to be used until an owner gets a 240-volt charger, an inference never made by the company. Beyond that, the 120-volt charger can’t be a stopgap for obvious reasons. Many owners use the 120-volt charger exclusively; it’s designed to fit under the load floor to be portable and used with some frequency. Some quoted owners of melted chargers openly admitted that they were using the unit improperly by not following instructions that are marked on the charger—which include a warning to not plug the charger into an extension cord, a surge protector, or any other outlet intermediary.
GM recommends that an owner get their house’s wiring inspected before plugging in the 120-volt charger, as old wiring can cause heating issues that lead to melted plugs. That’s fine if you only use it at home, but the charger, again, is portable for a reason. Having an electrician follow you around in a van kind of defeats the car’s purpose. Still, safety is ultimately more important than mobility, and we’re all on an EV learning curve with infrastructure attempting to catch up.
Any damaged or nonfunctional charger can be returned to GM for replacement, and the company will take it back and test it. GM told us that “returned units with visible thermal damage to the wall plug had no electrical faults or excessive temperature rise over ambient temperature observed when tested.” This backs up the improper-use hypothesis. GM has made changes to the 120-volt unit since launch, but they have been limited to improving the strain relief at the plug to avoid cracking. That strain is likely caused by the charger brick hanging off of a wall-mounted outlet; unfortunately, the one-foot distance from plug to brick can’t be increased, as it’s mandated by the National Electric Code. (The Nissan Leaf’s 120-volt charger suffers from the same problem.) The picture at right shows our strain-relief solution during an overnight stay on a recent comparison test involving the Volt.
The PR Response that Backfired
From where we sit, GM has done everything it could to address and allay the fears of the nearly 6000 Volt owners. Maybe too much. When the fires first hit the news, the General immediately responded by offering loaner vehicles to owners for the length of the investigation. A few took it up on the offer, while some—reports have the number at “a couple dozen,” but GM won’t confirm the total—requested that the company buy back their Volts. Those requests were no doubt spurred on by inflammatory media reports. Through all of this, the company has asserted that the cars are safe; it really only offered these options to the small number of early adopters as a way to save face and keep customers happy.
No vehicle is completely and infallibly safe. High-voltage batteries and electricity, like gasoline and fuel tanks, come with risks and must be handled with care and common sense. There’s a learning curve here, and fortunately the ones doing the experimenting are government agencies and not motorists. The problem is that lessons learned are being broadcast across the country in misleading, fear-mongering reports topped by misleading, fear-mongering headlines.
The onus is on owners and emergency responders to understand the idiosyncrasies of battery-equipped vehicles. None of us would store gasoline in a bucket in our garage, smoke at a gas station, or attempt to rig up our own gas pump with hoses that are visibly cracked or about to burst. At the same time, no one would reasonably expect to run (highly regulated) gas stations in their home, either. There’s some common sense and personal responsibility that needs to be learned yet.
Imagine if NHTSA had existed at the birth of the automobile, crash-testing Curved-Dash Oldsmobiles or Henry Ford’s Tin Lizzie, cars which, of course, were free of any safety devices and were not built to any sort of regulations. The automobile never would have made it off the ground. As the industry tries to reinvent itself—or at least a portion of its products—let’s not kill the modern electric car with misinformation.
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