The FINANCIAL — General Motors Co. is developing ways to discharge the battery in Chevrolet Volts after accidents to prevent fires like the one that followed a government crash-test of the plug-in hybrid car in May.
GM is working on safety practices with the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and will make them public when completed, Rob Peterson, a GM spokesman, said. The automaker has taken longer to develop a plan than Nissan Motor Co. did for its Leaf electric car. Both the Volt and Leaf went on sale in December 2010.
"I can't conceive that they didn't have a standard operating procedure in place for handling a wrecked vehicle before the car went on sale," said Clarence Ditlow, executive director of the Centre for Auto Safety in Washington. "NHTSA and GM should have established protocols in place before it went on sale."
The procedures are intended to keep rescue workers, dealers and auto-salvagers safe and head off potential fires that may jeopardise the safety reputation of the Volt, which is the focus of GM's marketing. "In all instances when there's an accident, you have to have a protocol," Dan Akerson, GM's CEO, told reporters. "That was a good lesson that came out of this."NHTSA is scrutinising the safety of lithium-ion batteries that power all plug-in electric vehicles after a Volt caught on fire three weeks after a May 12 crash-test. GM believes that a coolant leak helped carry an electrical charge to something flammable inside the battery, Peterson said. If a lithium battery is pierced by steel, a chemical reaction will start raising the temperature and can result in a fire.
The company now has a process in place to draw down power in the battery so it won't catch fire after a collision, Jim Federico, GM's chief engineer for electric cars, wrote on a company website.
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