General Motors’ strategy around trying to get its customers not to use Tesla superchargers, in my opinion, is a loss for General Motors and a loss for GM’s electric vehicle consumers. I’m quite disappointed to see General Motors acting in this way.
GM’s telling Chevy Bolt EV owners it’s not responsible for fast charging at non-approved public stations. You get where they’re going with this right? Chris Bruce says for Inside EVs that Chevrolet is recalling every 2017 to 2022 Bolt EV and 2022 Bolt EUV to replace their batteries due to an issue that has resulted in several fires. Now, these recalls started a long time ago. GM has done, 65% of them? It’s taking them a long time, costing them about, I think, $1.2 billion, along with LG Energy Solutions paying the other half so just over $2 billion for one owner. That recall process is causing some problems. The owner says that after getting their new battery pack, The 2021 Bolt EV does not support DC fast charging. Is that true? This person has taken their vehicle back to the dealer twice, and the technicians say that the chargers here their using were the problem, not the car, it’s the charges. I haven’t heard this before from any other automaker, so it’s quite interesting to hear GM trying to blame the charging companies or the chargers themselves. The owner then went on to the Chevy Bolt EV owner’s Facebook Group in hope of finding a solution. Chevrolet responded to him on Facebook in part the automaker’s social media team said, “After discussing the situation, the dealership informed us that after diagnosing the vehicle, they determined that the vehicle works when using a GM-approved charger at both your home and at a certified GM dealership. Please note as this situation is only happening when attempting to use public chargers, GM is not responsible for charging concerns when using non-GM-approved public charging stations.”
Obviously, the owner wasn’t really happy about this, as you can imagine. He says he’s tested the Bolt on three brands of EV chargers from five different locations. Those included charging points from Electrify America and EVGo, a company that General Motors partnered with. Before the battery recall, the owner reported using a DC fast charge every week for around two years. So this problem only started happening after the battery was replaced.
Now I find this weird that this customer did actually use fast charges beforehand, they replaced the battery, and all of a sudden they put in some kind of mechanism to protect the battery. So an EV doesn’t use its onboard charger when using DC charging. The direct current actually goes straight to the battery for level one or level two home charging. The electricity would flow through the onboard technology.
In the Facebook group discussion thread, the customer says that the dealer does not have any DC fast chargers for testing this problem with the bolt. Data from Plugshare says that there’s only level one or two chargers, not DC fast chargers. And this means one system could be functional and the other could actually be broken. Really what GM should have done is tested the EV to see whether or not there was something wrong with it and then considered whether or not they should actually replace it, no I think they should do it. Chevrolet spokesperson said we’re looking into this and we’ll let you know what we discover. But, of course, that was as a result of this story going public. Now, GM said this, “GM aggregates public charging locations into mobile apps for each vehicle brand. GM does not certify individual charging stations nor verify charger operations on a real-time basis but relies on a combination of industry standards, independent safety certifications obtained by charging hardware manufacturers, and our ongoing interoperability testing with charge station operators to ensure a positive customer experience. The advisor misspoke, in this case, our customer care team is in contact with the customer.”
This is a good story. Do you know what this means? If you want something to happen and you own a GM EV, don’t contact General Motors. Get on social media, get on the forums, contact EV websites, and then GM will change their minds, and all of a sudden they’ll provide you with a fix and actually look into whether or not the problem is caused by the car and not by the charges, which is most likely the situation here. So that’s the moral of this story. If you want something to happen, don’t actually go to the dealer or to GM themselves. Go to social media. Now, it’s sad to say that it would be much better if you didn’t have to do that and the same thing has happened with many brands. It’s obviously happened with Tesla. Individual dealers are going to depend on their service levels, depending on their interest levels, depend on how much they care about their customers. If your dealer does that to you, though, I suggest don’t go back to them. Seriously, just go somewhere else. Unless, of course, it’s too far away. Like, if you live in Alaska or something like that, you probably wouldn’t have much choice. Now, is GM really responsible for the charging at other supercharges? Well, I suspect GM is probably a little bit wary of Tesla’s fast charges. Probably trying to say well, you know what? We don’t recommend you use them. You should stick to GM-certified and approved charges. I’m going to guess that Tesla will never be a GM-certified approved charger, ever. That’s probably the way that they roll but I could be wrong there. Maybe I’m just extrapolating.
I haven’t actually heard of any other electric cars or any other electric car owners, I should say. Being told by the manufacturer that they’re not allowed to use charges or certain chargers, especially when it’s multiple chargers here. Now, this customer isn’t saying there’s one particular charger here. They’re saying they’ve had problems with the charging system. The DC fast charging system not working at any DC fast charging stations. And to me, that was the real issue.
Since this happened, I’ve had a few people contact me bizarrely, which had nothing to do with this story whatsoever saying they’ve had numerous problems with their General Motors vehicles. One was a Chevrolet Corvette. Chevy Corvette, sure it was a couple of years old. But when they had it, that was a major problem. In other words, the speedometer actually stopped working, the fuel gate stopped working, and this was when the vehicle was like, less than twelve months old. General Motors just washed its hands of it. Too bad you have to fix it. And this really shocked me. I can’t believe that this would be legit. You’ve got to sue them, basically, to get them to fix things that they should be doing. Now, it seems that there’s a common threat going on here. This is not the first time I’ve actually gone to the forums. I found that this actually is happening regularly. Why is the media not reporting on this? Has this happened to you? Have you heard of this happening? Is this a story that I need to talk about more? Do I need to actually bring this to people’s attention? I don’t know. Email me. I’m keen to know. Is this an isolated issue or is there more behind this?
