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Stop!
Don’t
Cut that Wire! That’s a Chevy Volt!
by John
Ransom
March 23, 2012
The “Grab
the Cat” scene from the movie Lethal Weapon 3 is being played out in
training
rooms across America thanks to a generous $4.4 million grant from the
Department of Energy.
If you’re
not familiar with the scene, first responders, Detectives Riggs and
Murtaugh,
are trying to disarm a car bomb, while a cat plays nearby. Riggs
doesn’t know
which wire to snip, so he just snips one at random. As he watches the
bomb’s
timer begin to hyper-accelerate, he realizes that he’s cut the wrong
wire. He
casually says to his partner Roger Murtaugh, “Hey, Rog?”
“Yeah,”
says Murtaugh.
“Grab the
cat.”
The men and
the cat escape in the nick of time.
Well that
scene, minus the explosion, is just another of the unintended benefits
brought
to us by the award-winning designers of the Chevy Volt.
Unlike
old-fashioned lead acid batteries, the Chevy Volt lithium battery
contains
enough of a punch that it can kill you- and anyone else who is not
grounded- if
first responders cut the wrong wires or even the right ones, as Stephen
Smoot
reminded us last week on Townhall.
After
taking us through the procedure first responders are suppsoed to use to
cut the
wires, Smoot writes:
“General
Motors also warns that ‘cutting these cables can result in serious
injury or
death.’”
Don’t cut
that wire! No, it’s not a North Korean nuke. It’s more dangerous: It’s
the
power train of the Chevy Volt
Nothing
like making first responders’ jobs more hazardous. Give that car an
award for
design innovation!
“Besides
attending to and rescuing the injured, first responders must now be
aware of
the potential hazards the new alternative-fuel technology may pose,”
says
Energyboom’s transportation correspondent Jace Shoemaker. “In order to
keep
both passengers and rescue crews safe, first responders must be aware
of the
potential for electrical shock, dangers of unintended vehicle movement,
the
challenges of charging stations and fires.”
According
to the National Fire Protection Association, which is sponsoring
training for
first responders through the Department of Energy grant, “Training
programs
will help first responders ascertain whether the car is disabled or
not,
provide information about how to power down vehicles, demonstrate how
to safely
disconnect the high-voltage system, and show safe cut points for
extrication.”
Before I
even get in a vehicle, I always try to identify the safe cut points for
extrication. My family and I make a game of it on the way to Grandma’s.
“Anyone who
can guess the safe cut points for extrication gets to sit near one!” I
say.
“Hurray,
I’m going to live…assuming I don’t get electrocuted or crushed by
unintended
vehicle movement or burn up in a lithium-coolant fire,” says the winner.
In
response, General Motors- after a year of sales- is considering ways to
allow
first responders to discharge the battery so they can have a safe
working
environment.
“I can’t
conceive that they didn’t have a standard operating procedure in place
for
handling a wrecked vehicle before the car went on sale,” said Clarence
Ditlow,
executive director of the Center for Auto Safety in Washington
according to
Bloomberg. “NHTSA and GM should have established protocols in place
before it
went on sale.”
Yeah, well
that’s all fine and good in the real world, but the Chevy Volt is a
government
program. It’s not about results, it’s a “journey of personal discovery.”
“In all
instances when there’s an accident, you have to have a protocol,” says
Dan
Akerson, GM’s chief executive officer, writes Bloomberg. “That was a
good
lesson that came out of this.”
Wow.
Akerson almost sounds like he has done this before.
Maybe
that’s a lesson he learned as the last company he was CEO of, XO
Communications, went into bankruptcy.
In 1999,
just three years before bankruptcy, mediabistro reports that Akerson’s
average
monthly compensation at XO was $15,045,578. That’s $180, 546,396 for
one year’s
compensation.
That’s
quite a safe cut point for extrication if you’re a CEO of a failing
company.
Don’t get
me wrong, I’m not one of those OWS types who think CEOs should make
minimum
wage. But since all of us are shareholders in GM, and since XO did go
into
bankruptcy and since Akerson was the knucklehead who decided two years
ago to
increase production capacity of the Chevy Volt by 50 percent, you do
have to
wonder if the guy has the extra capacity to learn anything.
Akerson’s
flagship offering, the Chevy Volt, has all the safety features of the
Pinto and
the Corvair, housed in the elegant styling of the Gremlin with a 25
mile range-
if you don’t use heat and air conditioning.
Just
exactly why are we putting first responders or anyone else in danger
for this
vehicle? So that the Volt can win the first Nobel Prize in auto design?
So it
can be Time Magazine’s Man of the Year?
Really?
Speaking in
my role as GM shareholder and innocent bystander, let me be the first
to
respond by saying “Grab the cat.”
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