My wife had a car that was driven most days and lived in an attached semi-heated garage when not driven. Every now and then we would come out in the morning to find the new-ish battery dead. Give it a quick charge, start the car, and all would be well for another couple of months. Lather rinse repeat. Never could figure out the pattern to its misbehavior.
I had a habit when going to bed of sticking my head out the door from house to garage to ensure the outer garage doors were closed. At least on the nights I was home and remembered.
Did that one night and found the dome light on in wife’s car. All car doors fully closed, light switch not in the override-on position. When I closed the car door after my inspection, the dome light remained on as always for a minute then faded to dark. A fancy “feature” intended to help you get from car to house without fumbling in the dark.
Checked with the dealership. Oh yeah, that’s a known glitch in the software; sometime the fade-out timer gets stuck & leaves the dome light on until the battery dies. Bring the car in and we’ll flash its computer with new software.
Sure be nice if they had told people about this or done the update as a routine matter the last time they’d had the car.
Same with my truck. At first when I connected the battery I thought maybe on seeing power the car turned it’s interior lights on, but they were still on a few minutes later after I got everything secured away. Sure enough, mechanical switches were “on” for the map lights.
I had a car that did that, but it was a different problem. Instead of a simple push button, the VW had some sort of fancy circuitry in the door latch to decide if it was closed. It failed open, so the car always thought the door was open. That meant that a door chime would sound for the first 8 minutes of any trip. It also meant that the interior light would never turn off. Fortunately it had Auto/On/Off, so I could just put it in “off” until I could get the latch fixed.
Many years later, the new door latched failed closed. The car always thought the door was closed. Generally not a problem, except the headlight warning chime would not sound. That only bit me once, but just by chance I saw my lights were on before the battery ran down too much to start the car.
I keep getting official recalls on the Tesla, that are really just over the air software updates.
The 2000 truck has much simpler software, which has probably never been updated. That doesn’t mean it is bug free. The headlights can be set to on, park, and auto. There is at least one bug where under some conditions when the headlights are in auto, and are illuminated, they can be turned off by switching them to “on”, but then can’t be turned on again until the car is restarted. The moral is, don’t mess with the headlight switch while driving at night.
It sure makes sense that GM is going to want an EV variant of each of their major sub-brands. But the idea of converting each sub-brand into a range of vehicles seems kinda silly to me. Did they learn nothing from the savings they got from killing Oldmobile and (soon?) Buick?
IMO now’s the time to have fewer distinction-without-a-difference products, not more.
My understanding is the savings from killing the Oldsmobile brand was from no longer having a separate dealer network. I’ll bet that if they establish Corvette or Escalade as new brands, they will only sold at the same existing dealer network.
That testing is a bit odd, maybe if I’d read more than just the yahoo summary of the IIHS tests it would make sense. They took old cars, loaded them with weight to make them as heavy as EVs, and then found they performed poorly in crash tests.
Old cars perform worse in crash tests than new cars. Making those old cars heavier will make them perform even worse. That does not translate to the safety of new EVs.
The Tesla Model 3 is almost 4,000 pounds, which is very heavy for a sedan. Yet, it was (at the time of testing) the safest car the NHTSA had ever tested. They concluded the occupants had a lower chance of injury in a Model 3 than any other car. The Model 3 is even an IIHS top safety pick.
They were testing the launching system, not the cars. There’s no valid data coming from these tests, they just wanted to make sure the car launcher was up to the task.
OK, that makes tons more sense. Usually IIHS is pretty good, so I was wondering why they would say EVs are bad at safety, when they weren’t actually testing EVs. Hopefully increasing the weight the launchers can handle will also allow them to test medium duty trucks, and other larger vehicles.
And, of course, it will be very important to know if any manufacturers are building 9,500 pound EVs on platforms only engineered for the safety of the original 6,500 pound ICE vehicle.
My car weighs 3500 lbs. I know there are plenty of vehicles on the road heavier than mine right now, but the trend is in the wrong direction for my safety.
I hope they come up with new crash tests focused on the batteries, not just for immediate obvious damage, but for damage that could lead to a later fire. If we get a few EV fires in parking garages they are going to get banned from them, and some like the Bolt have already been banned from home garages. We need to stay on top of that before the problem causes widespread decline in EV acceptance.
Jalopnik has an interesting article on why so many new vehicles are SUVs that look pretty much the same. It says that federal emissions regulations are looser for “non-passenger vehicles” which are defined as any designed to transport more than ten passengers, have temporary living quarters, have an open cargo bed, have cargo space greater than their passenger volume or are capable of off-highway operation. Many or all of today’s SUVs are designed to meet the “off-highway operation” standard (the article includes the specific requirements), which is why they all look much the same.
my guess is the (commercial) life-expectancy of a parking garage is in the 50-70 years … (so a long investment horizon)
my guess is in 5-7 years from now a significant portion of urban vehicles will be EVs …
my guess is parking garages are mostly found in urban centers
they will not opt to stay 50% (and sharply rising %age) unoccupied
they will just deal with it …
I mean it’s not that ICE-vehicles-fires are unheard of (my first google hit mentions 170-190.000 vehicle fires in the US p.a. - thats about 500 ICE fires per day!
those numbers are down from 450.000 ICE fires (1,200ish per day?) in the 1980ies … and they still let cars into parking garages
those pesky ICE burns just don’t make it into the news so much, it seems
The problem is that lithium fires are extremely difficult to put out, and burn very hot. Also, lithium fires are spontaneous and can happen while the car is parked and unattended, whereas most gas fires happen during accidents, fueling, etc. Not a lot of gas cars just start burning in a parkade.
As I said, GM issued a safety bulletin telling Bolt owners not to park in their garage. I’ve never heard of such a thing with gas cars.
I’ve read that some fire departments in Connecticut are planning to use car fire blankets to smother fires in cars, especially electric ones. Here, for instance, is one manufacturer.
I think this is the best thread to share this video that had me laughing. Only about 3 minutes, and definitely watch with the sound on. Each little segment is “customer states car sounds like…” and each one is correct (first is elephant).
