The Chevy Volt, a plug in hybrid from General Motors, hasn’t had the best news coverage since it’s release into the marketplace. Numerous stories of potential for fires have lead to much concern and even prompted a federal investigation .
Fortunately, GM has announced a fix to prevent any potential fires and hopefully boost more positive and not so negative press. The problem originally started with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. From doing crash testing, a Chevy Volt caught fire while sitting in their parking lot.
The NHTSA found that it was because of coolant from battery cells leaking onto a circuit board and causing a spark which ignited the car.
From Fox News:
“To prevent this from happening in the future, GM Global Product Chief Mary Barra says that the automaker has redesigned the vehicle safety structure that the pack is housed in to more evenly distribute impact forces during a collision, and is aslo adding a sensor to the coolant system reservoir to monitor the level of the fluid.”
Even though the findings from the NHTSA raised many concerns, no case of such things have happened with consumers. Still, that doesn’t mean they couldn’t which is why it’s good that they’ve finally found a way to fix the problem with the Chevy Volt.
“On a conference call with reporters, GM North America President Mark Reuss said that there have been no real world fires of this type in any of the nearly 8,000 Volts that have been sold to date.”
Would you buy a gas/electric hybrid? Why or why not?
