Parking Facilities Are Still Banning Chevy Bolts Due To Fire Risk

GM recommends that electric Bolts be parked outside until they are fixed, but it seems some parking garages are making sure of it.

By: Andrei Nedelea

Oct 26, 2021 at 5:18am ET

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Knowing that a car could spontaneously catch on fire is far from a comforting thought, but until General Motors rolls out a fix for its Chevrolet Bolt EV and Bolt EUV models, that’s exactly what they may keep doing. GM recommends that before the fix (probably a battery pack replacement) is applied to affected vehicles, owners are being asked to keep the state of charge within certain limits and also not park the vehicle indoors.

And now various parking facilities across the United States are targeting electric Bolts with a ban. Signs have popped up in many places explicitly stating that a given parking location prohibits these vehicles to be parked there, citing obvious concerns about the fire risk and ongoing recall for these models.

People are now reporting such signs going up in places like Nashville, Tennessee, where such a sign is present in the Public Library’s parking garage. Another was reported outside a parking facility in Charleston, South Carolina and another was spotted in Long Beach, California in the parking structure located next to the city courthouse. We also covered an older report from San Francisco too.

There are probably a lot more of these around, but they were not photographed. The ones in Nashville and Charleston were snapped and they explicitly say that for safety reasons or because of the battery fire recall, they are not allowing any Bolts to enter. It also seems that all these are covered parking facilities, places where GM told Bolt EV and Bolt EUV owners not to take their vehicles anyway, but it seems the manufacturer’s recommendation was not enough.

More recently, GM also asked Bolt owners to park at least 50 feet away from other parked vehicles, in an effort to prevent larger scale fires. Back in mid-September, it was announced that GM and the battery pack’s manufacturer, LG Chem, were working together on a solution for the problem, most likely a new battery pack that eliminates the fire risk; all affected Bolts are expected to get this free battery replacement once it becomes available.