GM still owes its customers and the press an answer for what is the manufacturing defect that made the Chevy Bolt EV spontaneously catch fire. A new blaze on May 1 reminds us that the final solutions the company came up with arrived late for another family. Ironically, the Bolt EV burned to the ground in a place called Ashburn.

There’s very little information about the fire apart from what the video above and the Ashburn Volunteer Fire Rescue Department provided. The video came from a person named Bobby Busche. It was shared on the Montgomery County Facebook page. For the record, Montgomery County is in Maryland, which made us wonder why a video from Ashburn, in Virginia, crossed the state borders – and it if really happened where Busche said.

Luckily, the Ashburn Volunteer Fire Rescue Department also shared a post about the fire. We had it here until AVFRD decided to delete it. Thankfully, the internet never forgets, even if the pictures are missing. They confirmed it was the same case; we'll try to retrieve them.

Chevy Bolt EV Burns To The Ground In A Place Called Ashburn

As you could see, the first warning about the fire came at 11:26 AM on May 1. Both the Loudoun County Fire and the guys from Ashburn received news about that. The Dulles South and Moorefield fire stations send their fire trucks there to extinguish the fire. It seems no one got hurt, but we cannot say the same about the two-story house and the garage where the Bolt EV was.

We are now trying to contact the EV owners to discover if it was charging, if they have made performed the temporary software recall that GM recommended, and how the automaker is handling the situation.

If the charging limitation was in place, GM will probably have to reimburse all expenses the fire brought. If the software recall was not performed, the company will have a legal argument to avoid liabilities. If you happen to know the owners and can bring more light to what happened, please get in touch.

Again, our concerns about the reason for the Bolt EV fires are even more pressing. Saying a manufacturing defect causes them is not enough. Saying a software safeguard will be enough to prevent it demands a leap of faith from affected customers, especially when Hyundai decided just to replace the defective battery packs it had. The ball is with GM.

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