General Motors recalls new Chevrolet Bolt EVs due to battery fire hazard

GM has handled this entire process disastrously. The battery cells were produced in the same factory as those of the Hyundai Kona MY2019 and both Hyundai and GM thought they could solve it with a simple software fix.

Shortly after the fix at Hyundai, a few cars caught fire again, after which Hyundai, under pressure from the Korean government, eventually proceeded fairly quickly to draw up a plan in which all affected battery packs would be replaced.

GM, on the other hand, continued to believe in software solutions. But these kinds of hardware errors, where a separating layer is incorrectly applied in the battery, cannot be solved with software. You can’t prevent the battery from catching fire with software either. But GM still tried.

And when after the second, final, update another car went up in flames that had received all software updates, GM started thinking again how they could solve this as cheaply as possible. Still not realizing that, more than a year after the problem was discovered, the only solution is a complete replacement of the battery pack. Because what did they come up with then? They were going to run a diagnosis of the different modules so that they could find out which battery modules would contain bad cells and then just swap those modules.

What now appears? GM is unable to tell the bad from the good modules so they have finally made the decision to switch the battery modules. And yes, just the modules, not the full pack. Garages will therefore have to dismantle the liquid-cooled packs themselves to get to the modules without well-trained personnel because GM believes this is cheaper than shipping battery packs in their entirety and refurbishing them at a central location.

And to top it all off, a few days ago, a Bolt EV MY2020 caught fire for the first time, the first Bolt to self-ignite with a battery that was not made in Korea, but in the US. The cause of the fire is not yet known, although I hope for GM that it is not the start of problems with the batteries produced in America.

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