Pirate's Cove

Just what you need with the really expensive car you didn’t want to buy but were forced into, eh?

GM heralded this plant as a model for its electric car future. Then its batteries started exploding.

Before General Motors recalled the entire fleet of its most popular electric car because of fire dangers, before her factory was stilled, assembly line worker Carol McConkey stood in the middle of a teeming factory floor and marveled at how seamlessly the Chevrolet Bolt is manufactured.

The nine-year GM employee ducked under a car frame on an orange vehicle carrier, swung a mechanical arm out and drove five bolts into a nearly 1,000-pound battery pack with roughly the footprint of a bathtub.

Little did she know that soon, the same section of the car she works on would garner worldwide attention for another reason: exploding lithium-ion batteries. She and hundreds of other workers were sent home to wait out an extended assembly line closure.

The crisis involving the Chevrolet Bolt was a painful reminder for the auto industry that despite treating the electric vehicle era as essentially inevitable – a technical fait accompli – significant obstacles to manufacturing the cars, and especially their batteries, continue to threaten that future.

Why is it essentially inevitable? Consumers aren’t clamoring for them. There’s not big demand. Demand for hybrids is up a bit, because they make economic sense, being not much more than the standard versions. And they sure don’t want the batteries to explode while driving the super expensive EVs.

It’s the kind of disruption GM can ill afford as it aims to scale up its production of electric vehicles to 1 million units per year by 2025. The company wants to have a global lineup of 30 EVs by that year. And it plans to shift production away from gasoline-powered cars entirely in the next decade and a half.

Are they expecting to actually sell one million? GM sold 7.72 million in 2019, which was about half a million down from 2019, and that was down about 1.3 million from 2017. EVs being one seventh of their yearly sales is ludicrous.

Today, electric cars – plug-in hybrids, battery-powered vehicles and hydrogen-fuel-cell vehicles – make up less than 5% of U.S. new vehicle sales. But policymakers and automakers hope that by 2030, EVs will make up at least 40% of U.S. new car sales. That would be a critical development in the nation’s strategy for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Funny that most of the same policy makers aren’t driving them themselves. What they’re doing is being authoritarian in trying to force citizens to comply with their climate cult demands.

Anyhow, it is a long, long piece on how bad things are for GM. Maybe they and the others should consider what the consumers want, not a bunch of fascist lawmakers.

.@GM “urged some owners of @chevy Bolt electric cars to park and store the vehicles at least 50 feet away from other cars to reduce the risk that a spontaneous fire could spread.” https://t.co/dY13QyUFRZ

— Dana Pico (@Dana_TFSJ) December 31, 2021