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> The automaker told Bolt owners to limit the charge to 90 percent, plug in more frequently and avoid depleting the battery to below about 70 miles of remaining

> The automaker told Bolt owners to limit the charge to 90 percent, plug in more frequently and avoid depleting the battery to below about 70 miles of remaining range. Tesla's approach here would be to issue an OTA update that told your car to treat 90% as 100% and 25% as 0. I can't decide if I like that better or worse.

lacksconfidence 5y ago
As long as it included messaging and an admission of fault, that seems significantly safer for the general populace.
raman162 5y ago
I think there's the 5 second cool factor but after that novelty you're probably just as disgruntled as the fact that you lost 35% of the range for your car. I hope the Chevy bolt is a rare case and stories like this don't pop up with the other upcoming electric vehicles. The new lightning F150 looks very attractive.
- rsj_hn 5y ago
  I heard really good things about the EV mustang from Ford. I wouldn't take this to be representative of EVs in general, but rather a remark on GM.
  - dylan604 5y ago
    Is it GM or LG for making bunk batteries? TFA clearly states that GM believes they will be recouping this money from LG.
    - clouddrover 5y ago
      Both really. The problem is supposed to have been caused by misaligned robots at LG's factories: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2021/08/misaligned-factory-robot-may-have-sparked-chevy-bolt-battery-fires/ https://arstechnica.com/cars/2021/08/misaligned-factory-robo... But the fault of both GM and LG is that they weren't able to detect the problem sooner.
      - dylan604 5y ago
        So better regression testing on new battery deliveries and better unit tests on the batteries themselves. That's a good item to add to the after action report. Now, what do you do to the battery to make the unit test? Shake it? Heat it? For how long? I guess I'm just not seeing fault at GM here. Trying to get there though.
        clouddrover 5y ago
        In this case you can x-ray it to see the problem. They were x-raying some, but not enough.
    - rsj_hn 5y ago
      If you're going to outsource manufacture of key components -- like the battery for an electric car, which is the single most important and expensive component in the entire vehicle -- then the buck stops with you for quality control. People inside GM may want to blame LG, but everyone outside GM will blame GM.
  - rootusrootus 5y ago
    The Bolt has been around since 2017, and the Mach-E arrived this year. It is way too early to be deciding that maybe Ford will have better luck. Neither company is actually making their own batteries, in any case.
- NotSammyHagar 5y ago
  I think it would be good. If you drive your car or charge it out of those ranges it can catch on fire. Removing that area of "ordinary things you can do with your car and it might make it burn up" is exactly why that is important to consider. There must be hundreds of thousands of bolts and at least some of those customers have not heard about this. The other side of it is hey you took something away from my car and I don't like that. GM has to deal with this by fixing people's cars and giving them monetary compensation.
  - rrix2 5y ago
    Cool, but if i bought a low cost electric car specifically because my commute range allowed for it, for example, until your "bug fixes and changes" OTA was quietly force-pushed and i find myself on the highway with a dead battery, i'm likely to set the fkn thing on fire myself...
    - dvdkon 5y ago
      Obviously the manufacturer should compensate its customers, it's just better to have an EV with worse range than an unsafe EV or even a pile of scrap (if they all got recalled and probablt not fixed).
  - genericuser314 5y ago
    > There must be hundreds of thousands of bolts 99,356 in USA & Canada, per this number: https://www.goodcarbadcar.net/chevrolet-bolt-sales-figures-usa-canada-monthly-yearly/ https://www.goodcarbadcar.net/chevrolet-bolt-sales-figures-u... I was curious about this so I looked it up, you might think it is interesting too.
    - NotSammyHagar 5y ago
      Thanks for actual data to correct my guess!
- sjg007 5y ago
  I don't see how electric cars are any different than mobile phones. So basically this means a 3 year life span in terms of battery performance. Regular combustion cars though also suffer reduced mpg so I am not saying this is an apples to apples comparison.
  - asdff 5y ago
    The reduced mpg is not all that much though, maybe 2-3 mpg nothing nearly as significant as driving behavior on mpg. A small displacement honda is going to have good mpg all its life unless something has really fouled up.
    - sjg007 5y ago
      I've noticed a 5mpg decrease with every car I've owned in pretty similar driving conditions over 5-10 years and immaculate maintenance.
      - jodrellblank 5y ago
        That can’t be right, it would leave your cars immobile after like 6 years, and getting half the range out of a tank after 3 years. Cars are good for 20 years still going roughly as far on a tank as they did. I’ll believe 10% loss of mpg over a lifetime, I don’t track that closely, but 10-20% range loss on a tank per year, nahhh.
        sjg007 5y ago
        Sorry I meant a 5mpg decrease overall not every year. That would fit with the 10% you describe.
      - mcguire 5y ago
        I'm driving a 2013 F-150; it's got ~20mpg since I got it in 2014. The 2004 Corvette still gets approx. 30 (mostly highway), although it desperately needs new fuel injectors.
      - 5y ago
- rasz 5y ago
  >The new lightning F150 looks very attractive you will be happy to know Ford is using SK batteries after switching away from LG. SK just recently settled for $2billions a case that revealed they stole LG battery technology. Bolt uses LG batteries. LG had a chain of costly recalls and replacements for all of their clients "LG Energy Solutions, the company that makes the battery for the Bolt and Kona EV, has not had a good year. First, they agreed to replace the 82,000 batteries sold to Hyundai for the Kona EV, Ioniq, and Elec City buses. Although the initial rumors were from a faulty battery separator, Hyundai later said that the problem was badly folded tabs. GM emphatically pointed out that they use a different separator, and a different factory. Thus neither of those problems should apply to the Bolt fires. Porsche recently initiated a recall on a loss of power in its Taycan LG batteries, and Ford also moved from LG in its Mustang Mach-E to SK in its Ford F-150 Lightning."
deelowe 5y ago
They should have limited the charge from the beginning. No way the engineers didn’t realize deep cycling is bad for the battery.
- avhon1 5y ago
  It's not that they were deep-cycling the cells before. Discharging lithium cells to 0 volts is very bad for them; the cars definitely restrict the cells from being discharged below a certain point. Rather, the potential for danger due to this rare, hard-to-detect manufacturing flaw is great enough that Chevy is asking Bolt owners to self-impose even tighter restrictions on how low the batteries will be discharged.
- pengaru 5y ago
  > They should have limited the charge from the beginning. No way the engineers didn’t realize deep cycling is bad for the battery. Have you even read up on the manufacturing faults behind this? It's a cell manufacturing robot alignment problem that went unnoticed, not a deep cycling problem.
  - deelowe 5y ago
    Thanks for the correction.
routerl 5y ago
> I can't decide if I like that better or worse. It's a really good question. Let's think about it. As you've outlined it, Tesla's approach prioritizes the user's confidence in the product, rather than the user's knowledge about the product. Naturally, when a product is faulty, the user's confidence in the product is inversely proportional to their knowledge about the fault; the less I know about the fault, the more unshaken is my confidence in the product. So I guess it comes down to this: when a product fails, would you prefer to react with "wow, how unexpected" or "figures"?
- e-clinton 5y ago
  Apple went with the Tesla model and had a PR mess as well as lawsuits
  - bgorman 5y ago
    Apple's solution was akin to taking a Tesla going 80 mph on a freeway, suddenly turning on "limp" mode and locking the car to 10 mph, all without informing the user anything abnormal was going on.
  - teruakohatu 5y ago
    EV owners are conscious about range. Tesla would have said that they were limiting range until vehicles are repaired. Apple didn't tell anyone and a slower device is harder to quantify in normal use than not being able to drive the same distance between charges. The EV equivalent would be reducing acceleration slowly over the lifetime of the vehicle with the helpful (to the company) side-effect that new models seem a lot more responsive.
- edge17 5y ago
  Isn't this basically what Apple should have done to avoid their throttling lawsuit? Told their customers to change their behaviors?
  - Closi 5y ago
    Nah, they should have just been transparent about the throttling. They still throttle now after the lawsuit, you can just stop it if you want to. Also an important difference with Apple is that the iPhone throttling wasn’t a safety concern.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
desine 5y ago
To be fair this is the norm for pretty much any rechargeable electronic device. Lithium chemistries in particular are sensitive to damage from over discharging. "5% battery remaining on the display" is pretty much never "5% of available energy available"
- colechristensen 5y ago
  Yes, but raw cells basically stop being rechargeable when you discharge them past a certain cell voltage. They either won’t recharge or are rather likely to burn when you do.
philistine 5y ago
I think practicality is governing each company’s choice; there’s no way GM is capable of pushing an OTA update to change all those cars’ firmware. If they could push an update over cellular, I would bet you GM would do it in a heartbeat.
- andrewoneone 5y ago
  They could easily achieve the same 90% == 100% charging result with “myChevrolet” (onstar). Car sends status update that charge has hit >=90%: stop charge command issued server side. Last I checked, the car sends a vehicle status update every percentage tick on charging so this wouldn’t be perfect but it’d be better than nothing.
- rootusrootus 5y ago
  Both GM and Ford have OTA updates on their modern cars. They just don't do it very often. The upside of Tesla pushing an update every week is they're good at it.
nr2x 5y ago
As a Bolt owner and advocate for right-to-repair/etc - I'd prefer the OTA option for sure.
ineedasername 5y ago
Tesla's approach would limit significant danger to human life & property. I'm going to guess that many Bolt owner may never end up knowing about this issue. I would vote for Tesla's approach, followed by a partial refund for loss of advertised functionality (or a class action)
turtlebits 5y ago
GM's first fix was to go in for a software update that limited max charge to 90%. This of course took scheduling and sitting in a dealer for a little over an hour. I'd much rather have the OTA option.
rootusrootus 5y ago
Tesla did pretty much exactly this to some Model S owners. And got sued over it. I don't know if that has been fully resolved yet. Some people got screwed out of a lot of battery capacity and performance.
drclau 5y ago
Tesla's approach is safer for everyone. Now, if you want to discuss ethics, that's a totally different thing.
JohnWhigham 5y ago
Yeah, this kind of shit just isn't going to work. If I have to be told how how to maintain my fuel source, then these cars with this battery technology aren't ready for mass adoption. They just aren't.

lacksconfidence 5y ago

As long as it included messaging and an admission of fault, that seems significantly safer for the general populace.

raman162 5y ago

I think there's the 5 second cool factor but after that novelty you're probably just as disgruntled as the fact that you lost 35% of the range for your car. I hope the Chevy bolt is a rare case and stories like this don't pop up with the other upcoming electric vehicles. The new lightning F150 looks very attractive.

rsj_hn 5y ago
I heard really good things about the EV mustang from Ford. I wouldn't take this to be representative of EVs in general, but rather a remark on GM.
- dylan604 5y ago
  Is it GM or LG for making bunk batteries? TFA clearly states that GM believes they will be recouping this money from LG.
  - clouddrover 5y ago
    Both really. The problem is supposed to have been caused by misaligned robots at LG's factories: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2021/08/misaligned-factory-robot-may-have-sparked-chevy-bolt-battery-fires/ https://arstechnica.com/cars/2021/08/misaligned-factory-robo... But the fault of both GM and LG is that they weren't able to detect the problem sooner.
    - dylan604 5y ago
      So better regression testing on new battery deliveries and better unit tests on the batteries themselves. That's a good item to add to the after action report. Now, what do you do to the battery to make the unit test? Shake it? Heat it? For how long? I guess I'm just not seeing fault at GM here. Trying to get there though.
      - clouddrover 5y ago
        In this case you can x-ray it to see the problem. They were x-raying some, but not enough.
  - rsj_hn 5y ago
    If you're going to outsource manufacture of key components -- like the battery for an electric car, which is the single most important and expensive component in the entire vehicle -- then the buck stops with you for quality control. People inside GM may want to blame LG, but everyone outside GM will blame GM.
- rootusrootus 5y ago
  The Bolt has been around since 2017, and the Mach-E arrived this year. It is way too early to be deciding that maybe Ford will have better luck. Neither company is actually making their own batteries, in any case.
NotSammyHagar 5y ago
I think it would be good. If you drive your car or charge it out of those ranges it can catch on fire. Removing that area of "ordinary things you can do with your car and it might make it burn up" is exactly why that is important to consider. There must be hundreds of thousands of bolts and at least some of those customers have not heard about this. The other side of it is hey you took something away from my car and I don't like that. GM has to deal with this by fixing people's cars and giving them monetary compensation.
- rrix2 5y ago
  Cool, but if i bought a low cost electric car specifically because my commute range allowed for it, for example, until your "bug fixes and changes" OTA was quietly force-pushed and i find myself on the highway with a dead battery, i'm likely to set the fkn thing on fire myself...
  - dvdkon 5y ago
    Obviously the manufacturer should compensate its customers, it's just better to have an EV with worse range than an unsafe EV or even a pile of scrap (if they all got recalled and probablt not fixed).
- genericuser314 5y ago
  > There must be hundreds of thousands of bolts 99,356 in USA & Canada, per this number: https://www.goodcarbadcar.net/chevrolet-bolt-sales-figures-usa-canada-monthly-yearly/ https://www.goodcarbadcar.net/chevrolet-bolt-sales-figures-u... I was curious about this so I looked it up, you might think it is interesting too.
  - NotSammyHagar 5y ago
    Thanks for actual data to correct my guess!
sjg007 5y ago
I don't see how electric cars are any different than mobile phones. So basically this means a 3 year life span in terms of battery performance. Regular combustion cars though also suffer reduced mpg so I am not saying this is an apples to apples comparison.
- asdff 5y ago
  The reduced mpg is not all that much though, maybe 2-3 mpg nothing nearly as significant as driving behavior on mpg. A small displacement honda is going to have good mpg all its life unless something has really fouled up.
  - sjg007 5y ago
    I've noticed a 5mpg decrease with every car I've owned in pretty similar driving conditions over 5-10 years and immaculate maintenance.
    - jodrellblank 5y ago
      That can’t be right, it would leave your cars immobile after like 6 years, and getting half the range out of a tank after 3 years. Cars are good for 20 years still going roughly as far on a tank as they did. I’ll believe 10% loss of mpg over a lifetime, I don’t track that closely, but 10-20% range loss on a tank per year, nahhh.
      - sjg007 5y ago
        Sorry I meant a 5mpg decrease overall not every year. That would fit with the 10% you describe.
    - mcguire 5y ago
      I'm driving a 2013 F-150; it's got ~20mpg since I got it in 2014. The 2004 Corvette still gets approx. 30 (mostly highway), although it desperately needs new fuel injectors.
    - 5y ago
rasz 5y ago
>The new lightning F150 looks very attractive you will be happy to know Ford is using SK batteries after switching away from LG. SK just recently settled for $2billions a case that revealed they stole LG battery technology. Bolt uses LG batteries. LG had a chain of costly recalls and replacements for all of their clients "LG Energy Solutions, the company that makes the battery for the Bolt and Kona EV, has not had a good year. First, they agreed to replace the 82,000 batteries sold to Hyundai for the Kona EV, Ioniq, and Elec City buses. Although the initial rumors were from a faulty battery separator, Hyundai later said that the problem was badly folded tabs. GM emphatically pointed out that they use a different separator, and a different factory. Thus neither of those problems should apply to the Bolt fires. Porsche recently initiated a recall on a loss of power in its Taycan LG batteries, and Ford also moved from LG in its Mustang Mach-E to SK in its Ford F-150 Lightning."

deelowe 5y ago

They should have limited the charge from the beginning. No way the engineers didn’t realize deep cycling is bad for the battery.

avhon1 5y ago
It's not that they were deep-cycling the cells before. Discharging lithium cells to 0 volts is very bad for them; the cars definitely restrict the cells from being discharged below a certain point. Rather, the potential for danger due to this rare, hard-to-detect manufacturing flaw is great enough that Chevy is asking Bolt owners to self-impose even tighter restrictions on how low the batteries will be discharged.
pengaru 5y ago
> They should have limited the charge from the beginning. No way the engineers didn’t realize deep cycling is bad for the battery. Have you even read up on the manufacturing faults behind this? It's a cell manufacturing robot alignment problem that went unnoticed, not a deep cycling problem.
- deelowe 5y ago
  Thanks for the correction.

routerl 5y ago

> I can't decide if I like that better or worse. It's a really good question. Let's think about it. As you've outlined it, Tesla's approach prioritizes the user's confidence in the product, rather than the user's knowledge about the product. Naturally, when a product is faulty, the user's confidence in the product is inversely proportional to their knowledge about the fault; the less I know about the fault, the more unshaken is my confidence in the product. So I guess it comes down to this: when a product fails, would you prefer to react with "wow, how unexpected" or "figures"?

e-clinton 5y ago
Apple went with the Tesla model and had a PR mess as well as lawsuits
- bgorman 5y ago
  Apple's solution was akin to taking a Tesla going 80 mph on a freeway, suddenly turning on "limp" mode and locking the car to 10 mph, all without informing the user anything abnormal was going on.
- teruakohatu 5y ago
  EV owners are conscious about range. Tesla would have said that they were limiting range until vehicles are repaired. Apple didn't tell anyone and a slower device is harder to quantify in normal use than not being able to drive the same distance between charges. The EV equivalent would be reducing acceleration slowly over the lifetime of the vehicle with the helpful (to the company) side-effect that new models seem a lot more responsive.
edge17 5y ago
Isn't this basically what Apple should have done to avoid their throttling lawsuit? Told their customers to change their behaviors?
- Closi 5y ago
  Nah, they should have just been transparent about the throttling. They still throttle now after the lawsuit, you can just stop it if you want to. Also an important difference with Apple is that the iPhone throttling wasn’t a safety concern.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

desine 5y ago

To be fair this is the norm for pretty much any rechargeable electronic device. Lithium chemistries in particular are sensitive to damage from over discharging. "5% battery remaining on the display" is pretty much never "5% of available energy available"

colechristensen 5y ago
Yes, but raw cells basically stop being rechargeable when you discharge them past a certain cell voltage. They either won’t recharge or are rather likely to burn when you do.

philistine 5y ago

I think practicality is governing each company’s choice; there’s no way GM is capable of pushing an OTA update to change all those cars’ firmware. If they could push an update over cellular, I would bet you GM would do it in a heartbeat.

andrewoneone 5y ago
They could easily achieve the same 90% == 100% charging result with “myChevrolet” (onstar). Car sends status update that charge has hit >=90%: stop charge command issued server side. Last I checked, the car sends a vehicle status update every percentage tick on charging so this wouldn’t be perfect but it’d be better than nothing.
rootusrootus 5y ago
Both GM and Ford have OTA updates on their modern cars. They just don't do it very often. The upside of Tesla pushing an update every week is they're good at it.

nr2x 5y ago

As a Bolt owner and advocate for right-to-repair/etc - I'd prefer the OTA option for sure.

ineedasername 5y ago

Tesla's approach would limit significant danger to human life & property. I'm going to guess that many Bolt owner may never end up knowing about this issue. I would vote for Tesla's approach, followed by a partial refund for loss of advertised functionality (or a class action)

turtlebits 5y ago

GM's first fix was to go in for a software update that limited max charge to 90%. This of course took scheduling and sitting in a dealer for a little over an hour. I'd much rather have the OTA option.

rootusrootus 5y ago

Tesla did pretty much exactly this to some Model S owners. And got sued over it. I don't know if that has been fully resolved yet. Some people got screwed out of a lot of battery capacity and performance.

drclau 5y ago

Tesla's approach is safer for everyone. Now, if you want to discuss ethics, that's a totally different thing.

JohnWhigham 5y ago

Yeah, this kind of shit just isn't going to work. If I have to be told how how to maintain my fuel source, then these cars with this battery technology aren't ready for mass adoption. They just aren't.