GM offers Chevy Bolt EV owners $6,000 if they promise not to sue over battery fire recall fiasco - ElectrekGeneral Motors has started offering Chevy Bolt EV owners a $6,000 refund as long as they promise not to sue over the battery fire recall fiasco of last year.
In June, GM announced that the 2023 Chevy Bolt EV and EUV are getting a significant $6,000 price cut – this was surprising at a time when most automakers are raising the prices of electric vehicles.
On the other hand, the Bolt EV and EUV were in a strange situation after the major setback of recalling virtually all vehicles ever produced due to a battery fire risk coming from a defect in the battery cells supplied by LG Energy Solutions.
GM ended up doing the right thing and replacing battery modules in all cars, but the automaker has been criticized for delaying the decision to recall the electric vehicles and pushing “software fixes” in the meantime. During that time, several more vehicles ended up going up in flames until GM finally decided to replace the battery modules in August 2021.
That certainly didn’t help sales, but the Bolt EV and EUV were still a good offering at that price point with now good batteries. As we recently reported, the $6,000 price drop made them the best value EVs in America, by far.
Of course, the price reduction has bummed out many existing Bolt EV owners who had to go through the recall and missed out on the lower price.
GM is now offering rebates of up to $6,000 to those owners. It has been sending emails to owners to see if they are eligible, but the fingerprints of the rebate agreement come with an interesting clause that includes not suing GM over “battery defect or recall” (via Jalopnik):
The clause basically turns the rebate into a legal release with compensation.Forever waive and release all claims, damages, or causes of action arising out of my Bolt vehicle, the battery defect, or the battery recalls.
GM offers Chevy Bolt EV owners $6,000 if they promise not to sue over battery fire recall fiasco
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Honestly you can rag on GM, but it was a LG Chem problem and they paid GM for it. Replacing that many packs is a monumental problem and I don’t envy GM in having to get through it. In reality, a very tiny number of cars actually had burned up. I hope everything goes well with Fisker. Glass houses and all. I must say that in some ways I was more impressed with the service and build quality of my 2012 Volt than my Model 3.
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Between the iPace and the Bolt, LG has a pretty shaky track record, IMO. Even if it is a small number of cars, I would not want to own a car that has a small chance to have a run-away thermal event without damage. My garage is right below my bedroom
That's always a struggle when you reley on 3rd party vendors for products/support. I working in the banking sector and that's also our fear. We can be amazing at everything and then a vendor has a backdoor open, creating a security issue, and boom... we have a huge problem. None cares if it was someone elses fault, we are the face they deal with. GM is in the same boat it looks like. Sounds like Fisker ran in that in his first company as well.
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