Well, of course not, says Ray LaHood:
Three House Republicans, describing themselves as “deeply troubled,” asked the Obama administration Thursday to explain why it didn’t disclose a fire in a crash-tested extended-range electric Chevrolet Volt for several months — and whether the White House asked a safety agency to delay the release.
“We are deeply troubled by the fact that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has deliberately suppressed public knowledge of the safety risk posed by the Chevrolet Volt,” said the letter from Reps. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, and Mike Kelly, R-Pa.
It was sent to NHTSA Administrator David Strickland.
U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood denied any suggestion that his agency deliberately kept the information under wraps for months.
“That is absolutely not true,” LaHood said.
“We will continue to share any information we find because we want to make sure consumers and first-responders have the most up-to-date information.”
LaHood and Strickland declined to say if any previously unreported fires have been sparked in the government’s Volt tests.
They also declined comment on the status of additional testing.
In June, three weeks after a government crash test, a Volt caught fire. NHTSA didn’t disclose the fire took place until November, when Bloomberg News reported it.
After a second round of tests of battery packs, a fire was sparked on Thanksgiving, seven days after the test crash. NHTSA opened a formal safety investigation after the second fire.
“The way that people found out about (the first fire) is we reported it,” LaHood said.
Actually, LaHood brings up an interesting question: do first responders have to treat a chemical fire in a Volt differently than they would a fire in a regular car?
I think the mere question deserves the “Have you no shame?” treatment
How dare you question the timing? How DARE you?
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jefferson101 on December 9, 2011 at 8:19 pm said:
They didn’t delay reporting it. They just didn’t tell you about it.
Because, unlike a half dozen supposed brake failures in someone else’s automobiles, at a proportion of one/ 250k or so, a half a percent or so flammability problem isn’t important if Government Motors built the vehicles in question.
Good Grief! You’d think that they were intentionally ignoring a problem because it made them look bad or something like that. And we all know that the .Gov would never do anything like that.
What kind of unpatriotic radicals blame the Government for everything? Some folks ought to be arrested and put into a re-education camp until they can see the difference between unwarranted panic by the citizens and unwarranted panic by the Government. You must trust your leaders!
Heh.
Starless on December 10, 2011 at 8:42 am said:
Where do you get the “a half a percent or so flammability problem” statistic?
jefferson101 on December 10, 2011 at 1:29 pm said:
They’ve only sold six thousand of the things. A half a percent of that would be 30. That may be a bit on the high side, even allowing for unreported fires, but I’m crunching the numbers in my head.
It’s still a far higher proportion than the number of “sudden acceleration” cases over which they had massive fits before it proved to be an operator malfunction rather than a vehicular one.
Starless on December 10, 2011 at 7:50 pm said:
I’ve only heard of the three fires at NHTSA.
Either way, you consider that they’ve had the full support of the federal gov’t — both financially and having Roy the Hood trashing and investigating one of their major competitors — and they’ve had the advantage of that same competitor laying the groundwork for hybrids in the market for them and they’ve still only managed to sell 6k of them. With the EV-1, they could plausibly argue that consumer prejudice was holding the market back, but now they have absolutely no excuse for their miserable performance.
I don’t know if the fires are statistically significant or not, but it’s the icing on the cake for a program which has been an abysmal failure for GM, Obama, and us.
And allow me to take this opportunity to remind everyone of how Cash for Clunkers managed to both suppress the market for car purchases during an economic downturn AND destroy thousands of perfectly useful cars.
Well done, President Hopenchange!
jefferson101 on December 11, 2011 at 2:00 pm said:
Someone else apparently is seeing it about the same way I do:
http://www.coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/2011/12/dispatches-from-the-corporate-state-a-study-in-contrasts.html
Starless on December 11, 2011 at 2:39 pm said:
“fragility of Volt sales”–that’s a good one. I have another one: “fragility of Solyndra solar panel sales”.