'It's unnerving': Chevy Bolt owners want buybacks after 141,000 vehicles recalled for fire risk

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Nathan Gardner loved his 2019 Chevrolet Bolt electric vehicle when he bought it three years ago, but now it sits outside his home "like a firebomb," he said.

He wants General Motors to buy it back. So do Bolt owners Wendy Fong, Stan Goldberg and Durham Smith. They find it unsettling to own a vehicle even GM has warned could catch on fire.

“It’s unnerving at the very least," said Smith of Lake Wylie, South Carolina. He owns a 2022 Chevy Bolt EUV. "How can we possibly put a car in our garage that might catch on fire? I don’t feel secure parking a car outside given our tree coverage.”

Last month, GM expanded its second recall on Bolts to include all model years through 2022 – that means Smith's Bolt too, which he'd bought just 15 days earlier. The recall, which affects about 141,000 vehicles globally, is due to battery defects that could start a fire. There have been a dozen Bolts that have caught fire while parked, although GM has not confirmed that each of those fires was caused by defective batteries.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/unnerving-chevy-bolt-owners-want-162515050.html

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1. Why Are Those Chevy Bolt Batteries Catching Fire? Here's One Theory

GM has offered few details about its investigation into the battery fires, but has issued a terse statement that talks about a torn anode tab and a folded separator. ArsTechnica wanted to understand more about those issues so it contacted Greg Less, technical director of the University of Michigan Battery Lab. Less calls the situation a “perfect storm” that brings together several unrelated issues in a way that creates a problem no one could have foreseen.

The Bolt’s battery packs are made up of pouch cells, which are essentially layers of cathodes, anodes, and separators that are flooded with liquid electrolyte and encased in a flexible polymer pouch. The torn anode tab, he says, would create a projection in what should be an otherwise flat battery. The projection brings the anode closer to the cathode. “And that would probably be OK if the separator was where it was supposed to be,” he says.

But in problematic Bolt batteries, the separator wasn’t where it was supposed to be. Separators are placed between the anode and cathode to prevent the two electrodes from touching. A torn tab wouldn’t necessarily be an issue on its own because the separator would prevent any projection from bridging the anode-cathode gap. In cells with a folded separator, though, the gap would be missing from at least part of the battery. If the anode bridges the gap, Less says, “you have a short, and it’s all downhill from there.”

https://cleantechnica.com/2021/08/27/why-are-those-chevy-bolt-batteries-catching-fire-heres-one-theory/

Instead of just buying proven batteries from a battery company, they had to be "innovative" and co-develop proprietary technologies for the Bolt.