Another Day, Another Chevy Bolt Fire, This Time In Georgia

It's another 2019 Bolt - is this problem more common for that particular model-year?

Bolt EV fire Cherokee County GA

Andrei Nedelea

By: Andrei Nedelea

Sep 14, 2021 at 8:19am ET

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While General Motors is working with battery supplier LG even more closely than before to find a fix for the Chevy Bolt EV and Bolt EUV spontaneous combustion issue, cars are still going up in flames. The most recent that we know of is a 2019 Bolt that caught fire in a garage in Cherokee County, Georgia, and if firefighters didn’t show up on the scene as quickly as they did, it would have spread to another vehicle and the garage itself.

Luckily, nobody was injured and additional damage was minimal, even if the vehicle was not supposed to be parked indoors.

This Bolt owner was either unaware of or just ignored GM’s recommendation to keep the vehicle outside overnight, in order to minimize additional damage caused by a possible fire. This particular Bolt was parked alongside a 2017 Ram pickup, which according to the Cherokee County Fire & Emergency Services, had some smoke-related damage.

Bolt EV fire Cherokee County GA

Battalion Chief of the local fire department, Ricky Collett, said that

Firefighters worked hard to keep the fire from spreading to the house that was next to the garage.

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In the meantime, GM is working around the clock to fix the problem and have defect-free battery packs to replace the defective ones in the affected Bolt EVs and EUVs. Currently, the automaker has found that the source of the defects were battery plants in Korea, as well as in Michigan run by LG Energy Solution.

But even though GM has issued an official recall for all the vehicles it believes to be affected, as well as instructions to help minimize risk until the problem is sorted (keep batteries at a certain level and not park the vehicle inside overnight), it has not announced an official fix yet. The estimated total number of affected vehicles is in excess of 140,000 units.