Posted on 11/28/2011 6:10:58 PM PST by raptor22
Industrial Policy: The investigation into the safety of electric car batteries intensifies after additional fires involving the flagship of a proposed electric vehicle fleet. Central planning doesn't work for cars or insurance.
When the Toyota Prius was being accused of having overlooked design flaws that were causing accelerators to get stuck with fatal results, the owners of Government Motors, a competitor, wasted little time pushing for a recall and congressional hearings while accusing Toyota of cutting corners for the sake of corporate profits.
We wonder if the same sense of urgency will prevail in the wake of new safety tests indicating that an earlier test in which a Chevy Volt experienced a battery fire three weeks after a side-impact test was no fluke and that the car's lithium-ion battery poses a fire hazard.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration announced Friday the results of tests designed to replicate the May test. In that test the crash vehicle, stored in the parking lot of a test facility in Burlington, Wis., caught fire. The fire was severe enough to cause several nearby vehicles to catch fire as well.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.investors.com ...
Chevy volt ping
Fires be damned. It takes a lot to produce the 1.21 gigawatts necessary to make this thing travel to a time where the price of this boondoggle is justified.
Oh. Wait. Am I on the wrong thread?
Electric vehicles are fine by me, if they stand on their own merits and warrant consumer support. It’s a tough sell for me to take it as gospel that electric vehicles are more dangerous than gas vehicles.
The Volt is overpriced. The Fed and State governments shouldn’t be subsidizing the industry.
I wasn't anticipating fires at that time, just environmental hazards and a lot of structural issues, since the center of gravity is located in a different place from a car with an engine mass and a fuel tank mass which are typically (in conventional vehicles) up relatively high and at either end of the car. In an all electric car you can shape the battery pretty much any way you want, so in most designs I have seen it essentially forms a floor pan. Could be a better result in that it moves mass to a lower position in the car.
Whatever the consequences, you would think that this emerging issue (fire) would have been encountered and dealt with a long time before anything made it into production.
An E-Cat in every Government Motors Dolt! Yes, that’s the ticket. Hundreds of millions of dollars into a car no one (excepting the regular eco-fools)and hundreds more millions into the E-Cat to power the car than no one wants. Add a little pixie dust and you’ve got a viable economic business enterprise there.
If you’re going to buy a Volt, make sure you order Accessory Group E420. It inclues four sticks, a bag of marshmallows, a box of graham crackers and a chocolate bar.
Well Mr. Kalbacken, what it comes down to is this: the parts of the car made of lead will keep on moving after the parts of the car not made of lead have stopped.
The difference in time will probably not be very great in absolute terms, but depending on where the people in the car are with respect to the moving pieces of lead, it could be an issue of some importance.
Then there's the subject of the electrolytes in the battery...
That’s some funny sh*t right there!
LLS
Considering that ALL cars running on fossil fuels explode quite spectacularly when crashed (in the MOVIES); just imAGINE the cool special effects that are going to be produced when two sparkies collide on screen!
Damn right. That large of amp draw requires some veerryy robust switches to prevent an arc. Sure they test extremes but there is an infinite number of scenarios that can happen. They change one thing to out of spec and pow. Just look how long aircraft take to develop.
“Whatever the consequences, you would think that this emerging issue (fire) would have been encountered and dealt with a long time before anything made it into production.”
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It is amazing what mistakes can be made, “New Coke” is often cited as an example. I worked ten years for a company that used to be so successful that almost no kind of office or business could be run without using its products. That company ceased to exist many years ago and the reason was decades of mismanagement. Shortly after I began work with them as a tech rep they ceased sales of a product on which they had spent a huge amount of money trying to make it work and I soon saw that all anyone needed to have done was show the first draft of the design to any experienced tech rep who would have told them that it would never work! The basic idea involved was so attractive that management would not listen to anyone bold enough to say that it was only slightly more practical than a screen door on a submarine. They never had one of those machines work for a full eight hour day without trouble and it took them a long time to figure out why. The answer was simply that it was an absurd design. Sometimes an absurd design involves a safety hazard.
Are you familiar with the polybutylene plumbing pipe fiasco? Millions of mobile homes and site built houses had to be replumbed because the manufacturer either did no real testing or ignored the results of tests. The pipe and fittings failed when used with chlorinated water. There were reports of at least one large housing development that was rendered worthless because the pipe was inside the concrete slabs that the houses were built on. There was no practical way to replace the plumbing in those houses.
FReepers amaze me. Many will realize that Americans can work through the technical problems to make Strategic Defense Initiative work but cannot trust that American private industry will ever figure out how to make an electric (coal fire or Uranium fission powered) car safe and economically viable.
I doubt it.
From Newtons Law (that ancient white dude for those in Rio Vista)
Force = massXacceleration.
The upper part of the electric car is made of light plastic
The floor pan, batteries and wheels will shear off and slide under the impacting vehicle.
Electric car driver and passengers become immediately gravitationally incapacitated .
SDI was based off of sound science and engineering.
The Chebby Dolt is based off of rainbow flavored unicorn butt global warming wishful thinking and greenie fantasies.
There is no way to make this sucker viable if we the taxpayers have to ‘incentivise and subsidize’ every unit produced.
Not only that, but the car was flat out lied about at every turn from the moment it was ordered to be produced by fiat order to the newly minted CEO of Government Motors.
How many revisions on the range did we hear?
And how long did they bill it as an electric car until it was shown that the ‘gasoline backup’ does indeed have a connection to the wheels?
If you have to lie about the product, the basic underlying reasons for it are NOT sound and never will be.
[been encountered and dealt with a long time before anything made it into production. ]
Not necessarily, and that’s why as someone with an engineering degree I’ve been skeptical the Volt would be a wonder car. If the chance of a fire is only 1/1000, for a production car that is huge but you wouldn’t necessarily see that result in any prototypes. The Internal Combustion Engine has more than a 100 years of testing, a lot under severe real conditions or racing, little bugs have been workd out.
But electric cars have other problems, especially in mass quantities. How do you produce and dispose of that much lithium? What happens when very cold weather hits and you are stuck in the boonies in the snow with no heat? (wait till those deaths occur). What happens when one submarines a truck and has the top sheared off? What happens when recharging breakers blow?
Lots of whatifs on the road to nirvana.
#8 - LOL - Now that got me laughing!
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