Brandin Mercer felt the itch to buy an electric vehicle more than a decade ago when he watched Who Killed the Electric Car?, a documentary about the demise of General Motors' EV1 project in the late 1990s. Last year, he finally found an EV in his price range: a used 2017 Chevrolet Bolt for $17,500.
"I love it. I rave about it to everybody. It has been my favorite car to date," Mercer said. "I never really considered them catching on fire though."
At least nine confirmed battery fires have turned the Bolt from a showpiece for GM's EV aspirations into a black eye for the automaker.
GM last week expanded its recalls of the car to include all of them built since the vehicle's 2016 introduction — more than 141,000 globally — at a total cost of $1.8 billion. GM said some of the batteries, supplied by LG Chem, contain two defects that together can cause a fire. That followed news that GM would replace all five lithium ion battery modules, rather than only defective ones, in Bolts from the 2017 through 2019 model years that had already been recalled.