GM Announces Enhancements to Chevrolet Volt

My biggest concern with this is the local dealer tech does something sloppy and I end up with a rattle.

 

No mention of laminating the electronic in the battery pack for extra layer of protection. I think that decision may come back to haunt them.

I don't understand the need to prevent coolant overfill. Isn't there no overfill drain pipe?

 

I guess I do not understand the whole concept of cooling fluids in the battery. Isn't it a closed system? Normally, if fluid is boiled off and exits via a drain, when it cools down, would it not need to be replenished? Given the location of the battery, how would you add coolant?

Does the Prius battery require cooling fluids?

 

Prius (and PiP) battery is air cooled and heated with the air from the cabin.

 

This solution is way better than laminating. If there is intrusion with enough force to break the cooling system and get a leak, its also quite possible that force could crack the circuit boards, causing delamination. By distributing the fouce around the battery pack, they don't have to worry near as much about intrusion. No Intrusion, no leak, no problem!

Also by monitoring the fluid level they can detect that a leak has happened, and then make sure they battery is more quickly scheduled for depower or at least cleared of any leaking coolant.

 

My concern is that this is a (sad) proof of a non-fully-developed non-fully-tested vehicle rushed to the dealers.
Hope (with luck?) this will be the only serious issue, otherwise GM recklessness can inhibit the whole process of electrification of the transport sector.

 

Nothing else could possibly go wrong! Murphy's law doesn't apply to the Volt!

 

GM said nothing's being changed with the batteries and that the cell chemistry is not part of any issue.

 

Your looking at it out of context. Hmm out of more than a dozen totaled cars, one has a problem weeks after the crash, and that's rushing it out? And to get the fire they had to roll the car manually (it never rolled in a crash). The Volt has better NHTSA safety ratings than the Prius and much better than the Honda Civic camera or most others. This is only getting press because of the anti-Volt anti-GM crowd feeding the frenzy.

2011 Volt:
5 overall, 4 front crash, 5 side crash, 5 rollover

2011 Prius:
5 overall, 4 front crash, 5 side crash, 4 rollover

2011 Leaf:
5 overall, 4 front crash, 5 side crash, 4 rollover

2011 Honda Civic Hybrid:
3 overall, 4 front crash, 2 side crash, 4 rollover

here are ratings for a lot of other cars

http://i2.cdn.turner.com/money/2010/10/05/autos/new_nhtsa_crash_tests/chart_crash_safety.gif

 

Better implies that it also addresses the potential for an ordinary leak caused by just plain old aging. Vehicles vibrate quite a bit. Over the years, seals lose their integrity from normal stresses. What happens then?
.

 

If there is a leak the new sensor being added will detect the low battery coolant and alert the car/driver. I presumed that is part of why the added it. Even with the leaked coolant, it took weeks for it to be a problem after the crash/leak. The coolant is low conductive in its liquid state, its only after it crystalized that it was a problem.

Edit based on todays's webchat logs. Apparently they are already coated.. so maybe the odd crash did exactly what I said above.. cracked the coating allowing the coolant to interact..

 

Do you know where the coolant senor is going in?

 

Going into the battery coolant system.. No exact picture of where. The comments were

 

I am most impressed (in a bad way) that these safety issues were kept under wraps for months, until GM had its fixes pretty much ready.

And while reinforcement of the battery case seems like something the beta cars should have had from the onset, I wonder about the decision to continue using the same coolant fluid even though we now know its transition to a conductor is a root cause of the short circuit.

 

Is this like your remote start carbon monoxide death scenario. They damaged the battery then rolled the car, then waited. Not a likely scenario. They still are waiting a week with a damaged car before blessing this fix.

What happens if an old person mistakes the gas for the brakes. OK, I have seen that scenario played out in the media before.

 

To their credit, this is a good move by GM to fix the problem now, for the entire fleet that is out there, and then work the solution into future models. It seems like a minor bug, and one that they are willing to fix, rather than cover up, the way Honda did with their sub-standard battery systems.

I think the current owners would be willing to have this change made, since most of them are "early adopter" types anyway, and were probably anticipating some bugs. This makes the car safer and more mainstream. (btw, I am not a GM booster) Just MHO.

 

You don't have to be an 'old person' to make this mistake (am I too old?).

 

From the quoted description it looks to me as a simple level switch at the top of the coolant reservoir that should have been there originally, but maybe I am wrong.