General Motors issues update on Bolt recall

General Motors has issued an update on the Bolt recall in a Part 573 Safety Recall Report, which includes additional information. The issues related to the LG Energy Solutions battery in the KONA and Bolt models have sparked discussions on the long-term safety of soft-pack batteries.

Contents of General Motors report

The report contains some distinctive information:

1) All issues are concentrated in the N2.1 cells, which originate from LG Chem’s Ochang, Korea plant and have a production data that can be used to track these batteries.

2) General Motors has received 12 reports of Bolt EV fires out of 68,000 vehicles, with five being related to battery fires and four diagnosed as pre-incident, having high state-of-charge (SOC).

3) The automaker’s solution includes two parts: diagnosing if a battery module needs to be replaced through a diagnostic procedure provided to dealerships, which involves determining the actual status of batteries; and installing the pre-incident diagnostic software. Before solving the issue, General Motors’ approach to dealing with previous Bolts was unchanged: limiting the charging SOC to 90%.

Handling of KONA EV and Bolt EV

KONA and Bolt models are similar, with KONA EV being more severely affected. Both cars are the 8th and 14th best-selling models globally in 2021, respectively.

KONA has been discontinued in Korea and will be replaced by Ioniq 5. The latest battery produced by LG is mainly used to replace the previous KONA models. Kona EV still has considerable sales volume in Korea, with 11,193 units sold in August 2018 (1,399 units per month) and 13,587 units in 2019 (1,132 units per month). Due to the most serious fire accidents in Korea, KONA’s sales volume in Korea dropped to 8,066 units in 2020 (an average of 672 units per month). Due to recall issues, sales plummeted in 2021: 8 units in January, 167 units in February, and 809 units in March.

Note: 10,000 units in one quarter can rank among the top.

Summary:

As the weather gets hotter, there may be more news of electric car fires. The difference is that we have relatively fewer in the United States and Europe. Will the electric cars that flooded Europe in 2020 go through a safety test again?

This article is a translation by ChatGPT of a Chinese report from 42HOW. If you have any questions about it, please email bd@42how.com.