General Motors' new electric car, the Chevy Volt, has won top customer satisfaction ratings, but it's getting plenty of demerits from the federal government. Days or weeks after the government conducted side-impact tests on Volts, the cars' lithium-ion batteries caught fire, and the government is investigating why. (The same type of battery has been blamed in the past for flaming, over-heated laptops.) Anxious to defend the car's reputation, GM is saying the cause of the fires is still unknown. Still, the automaker is taking the unprecedented step of offering to buy back the vehicles from any owners worried the cars are unsafe. Do the Volt's batteries make it dangerous?
The safety concerns are undeniable: "Fortunately for Government Motors, fires in the Chevy Volt haven't killed anyone," says Henry Payne at National Review. But with vehicles erupting in flames after crashes, it's pretty obvious that "carrying around massive, 16 kWh lithium batteries" can be risky. Engineers should be able to identify what went wrong and fix it, "but the reputation of Washington’s preferred green vehicles may not be repaired so easily."
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