Consumer Reports Says Electric Cars Have More Problems

 

In a comprehensive survey covering vehicle model years 2021 through 2023, the publication Consumer Reports found that electric cars, SUVs, and pickups had among the worst reliability ratings compared to either all-internal-combustion-powered vehicles or IC-powered hybrids (not plug-in hybrids, which were also problem-prone). 

 

Results varied by brand.  Tesla, the largest seller of all-electric vehicles, rose in the reliability rankings from 19th out of 30 automakers in last year's survey to 14th out of 30 in the latest study.  This reflects an overall tendency that is probably the main cause of reliability problems with electric vehicles (EVs):  inexperience.

 

The first time you do anything, you're not likely to do it perfectly.  Young people sometimes don't understand this basic principle of life, and it leads to unfortunate consequences.  My mother once sent me to take tennis lessons when I was about ten.  When I discovered I couldn't serve like a pro right off the bat (or the racket), I promptly lost all interest and closed myself off to a lifetime of tennis enjoyment. 

 

The same thing that is true of individuals learning how to do new things is true of automakers learning how to make EVs.  An Associated Press article on the Consumer Reports survey quotes Jake Fisher, their senior director of auto testing, as saying the situation is mainly "growing pains."  No matter how detailed and accurate computer models and laboratory prototypes are, a manufacturer can't simulate the myriad of unlikely situations that will arise when a product is made in units of thousands and sent out to the great unwashed public, who will do a lot of crazy durn things that the maker could never think of. 

 

This sort of thing has been going on with internal-combustion (IC) cars since before 1900, and the automakers are supremely experienced with what can go wrong with that technology.  It may be surprising to learn, but the reliability requirements of military-grade technology are nowhere nearly as rigorous and demanding as the requirements for hardware used in the automotive industry.  Jet aircraft are inspected and serviced every few hundred hours.  But Grandma just drives her car until it breaks, and expects that to happen very rarely. 

 

Combine that consumer expectation with a radically new powertrain, control system, and body, which is what EVs represent, and you're going to have problems, even entirely new types of problems.  The issue of autonomous vehicles is formally independent of EVs, but as some of the most advanced autonomous-vehicle systems are found in EVs such as Teslas, the two often go together.  And autonomous driving is only one of the multitude of new features that EVs make either possible at all, or a lot easier to implement.

 

An EV is more of a hardware shell for a software platform than anything else, and reliability standards for software are a different kind of cat compared to automotive reliability expectations.  Software is at fault in many issues involving EVs, although it can increasingly cause problems with IC cars as well.    

 

The hope expressed by many EV makers is that consumers will recognize the higher problem rate as something temporary, and won't allow it to tarnish the overall reputation of the technology.  This depends on the age and psychology of the customer to a great and imponderable degree. 

 

Just last night, for instance, I was talking with a friend who bought his first Tesla about five months ago.  If he's had any problems with it, he didn't mention them.  I asked about charging times, and he said it was no problem.  He can charge his Tesla at his house overnight, and he knows where there are supercharging stations that will do it in only 30 minutes.

 

His attitude reminds me of a scene in the Woody Allen movie "Annie Hall."  In a split-screen scene, Alvy Singer's therapist asks him, "How often do you sleep together?"  Singer replies forlornly, "Hardly ever.  Maybe three times a week."  In the other half of the screen, his partner Annie Hall gets asked the same question by her therapist, and Annie says with annoyance, "Constantly.  I'd say three times a week."

 

My friend, a power engineer and Tesla enthusiast, sees charging an EV in thirty minutes as wonderful, hardly any time at all.  Someone like me, who is a dyed-in-the-wool IC traditionalist, can't help compare that half hour to the five minutes I usually spend at the gas pump, and the Tesla suffers by comparison.

 

The true-blue EV proponents will undoubtedly overlook or tolerate minor issues with their vehicles and rightly regard them as temporary stumbling blocks that will grow less frequent as the makers learn from their mistakes and improve reliability overall.  The big question is, are there enough such proponents to support the overwhelming market share growth that the automakers hope for, and that the federal government is standing by to enforce with a big stick if it doesn't happen?

 

The same AP article notes that the initially explosive growth of EV sales has slowed by about half in the last year.  It's a genuine open question as to where EV sales will stabilize, if they ever do, with regard to IC sales.  The problem that the automakers face is that as things currently stand, they must comply with the so-called CAFE standards for overall fleet fuel economy, or else pay heavy fees for non-compliance.  And the Biden administration has proposed steep increases in the fleet-mileage numbers that will require a large fraction of all cars on the roadways to be EVs in the coming years. 

 

One can question the propriety of government interference in the auto marketplace.  If left alone, the market will let all the EV enthusiasts satisfy their wants without driving up the overall price of cars or causing artificial scarcities of IC vehicles.  Both of these downsides are likely if the government forces Adam Smith's famed invisible hand to deal only the kinds of cars the government wants, without regard to consumer preferences or needs. 

 

Electric cars will become more reliable, but it's by no means clear if consumers will want enough of them to warrant the current pressures to overthrow the century-long reign of IC cars. 

 

Sources:  The AP article "Consumer Reports:  Electric vehicles less reliable, on average, than conventional cars and trucks" appeared on Nov. 29, 2023 at https://apnews.com/article/electric-vehicles-consumer-reports-gasoline-vehicles-charging-eed9c3b8d86c1f7708b7c6e2d4dbf55e.  I also referred to IMDB for the "Annie Hall" quote at https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075686/characters/nm0000095, and for CAFE standards at https://www.npr.org/2023/07/28/1190799503/new-fuel-economy-standards-cars-trucks.

Magic Two-Thirds: The Proposed EPA Electric-Car Mandate

 

On Apr. 12, the Biden administration announced a new set of proposed Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rulings that would require by 2032 two-thirds (67%) of passenger vehicles sold in the U. S. to be "zero-tailpipe emission" types.  In practice, that means electric cars.  Lower fractions of service and transport trucks would also have to be electric by then.  As reported in National Review, both automakers and consumer advocates criticized the move, saying that the industry is not ready for such a radical shift, and that the result will be higher prices for consumers and shortages of largely foreign-produced materials such as lithium and cobalt. 

 

These proposed rules would be in addition to the Department of Transportation's so-called CAFE standards, a set of fuel-economy requirements that have had the unintended consequence of making U. S. automakers rely mainly on production of larger vehicles (e. g. pickups and SUVs), because of the perverse incentives put in place by the standards.  Unintended consequences always follow mandates like this, and unless the EPA changes its collective mind, there are sure to be problems we can only dream of now caused by such an extreme requirement.

 

For one thing, we are already seeing stresses on the electric grid caused by the rather exotic requirements of rapid-charge stations for electric cars.  The most powerful stations, the "direct-current fast charging" (DCFC) ones, can draw up to 350 kW and charge an all-electric (battery-only) passenger car in as little as 20 minutes.  In doing so, however, it uses as much energy as an average household uses in three days.  Multiply this high-peaking intermittent demand by several million, and you can understand why Californians have already had requests from their state leaders to restrict charging of EVs on hot days when the grid is stressed already.  Mandating that two-thirds of new car sales must be electric will only make this problem worse.

 

More generally, this proposed ruling is a good example of the kind of thing that I mentioned in last week's blog:  the tendency of government leaders to propose progressive-sounding climate-change-prevention measures to go into effect long after they are out of office.  By doing this kind of thing, they try to have their political cake and eat it too.  They get kudos from their supporters for being on the right side of history, but avoid the all-too-real negative and unintended consequences of their proposals, which may never see the light of day in any case.

 

The public is not stupid, on average, and there are signs that outside of Washington and certain elite enclaves, anyway, the constant hyperventilating about climate change is losing its luster for the average voter.  In Vaclav Smil's book How the World Really Works, Smil points out the huge gaps between the aspirational goals set by international meetings such as the Paris Climate Accords and the realities on the ground of how the world's economy relies on giant systems that must use fossil fuels both now and in the immediately foreseeable future. 

 

No one to my knowledge has proposed a battery-electric cargo ship, for example.  The reason is that so much space and weight would have to be occupied by the batteries that the negligible amount of freight transported would be unprofitable.  The only non-fossil-fuel power that is practical for large ocean-going vessels is nuclear energy.  There are only about 160 nuclear-powered ocean vessels in the world, and the majority of those are nuclear submarines operated by the military.  While nuclear energy is a viable option for ships, many ports prohibit nuclear-powered vessels from entering out of safety concerns, and so a sea change (so to speak) would have to occur for nuclear energy to make a dent in shipping.

 

And nuclear energy is simply not an option for air transport, so until much better battery technology is developed, airliners are going to be burning fossil fuels.

 

None of this is to deny that the emission of carbon dioxide by human activity contributes to changes in the climate.  But the uncertainty and variation in how climate is going to change, and how much our burning of fossil fuels will affect that change, make it unreasonable to impose mandates that produce undue burdens on the majority of a population.

 

Suppose that tomorrow, all new internal-combustion-engine passenger vehicle sales in the u. S. were banned.  In a few years, our transportation infrastructure would go a long way toward resembling that of Cuba, where a very few favored individuals can buy new cars, but everyone else gets by with ancient patched-up vehicles that are many decades old.  As my wife and I have learned, today's well-made cars (most of which tend to be Japanese) with care can last twelve or fifteen years, so as long as we could buy gasoline we could deal with such a mandate.  But I can easily imagine the government leveraging the self-driving capability of new electric vehicles to ban older non-self-driving types from certain areas, beginning with urban regions and spreading gradually to the suburbs.  So you would have an even greater divide between rural and urban than we do now:  urbanites zooming around drinking their lattés and reading their smart phones in their self-driving cars, and impoverished rural citizens driving their gas-guzzlers and hunting down bootleg gas stations in small towns in the countryside.

 

It is a weird and unsatisfactory picture, to say the least.  But something like this would result if the Biden administration had the courage of its convictions and imposed rules soon enough to deal with some of the adverse consequences they generate.  And putting off the rules won't make them any better.  It will simply delay the inevitable disruptions that unreasonable government mandates cause, without visiting the consequences on those whose bad idea it was.

 

Perhaps sanity will prevail, and the outcries over the proposed EPA rulings will persuade the unelected bureaucrats in that agency to modify their demands.  That already seems to be happening with previous climate-change commitments that are "honored more in the breach than in the observance."  But sometimes that's a good thing.

 

Sources:  I referred to these articles on the National Review website:  https://www.nationalreview.com/news/biden-unveils-strictest-ever-emissions-standards-in-bid-to-remake-auto-industry/ and https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/04/bidens-draconian-electric-car-mandate/.  I also referred to the websites https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/non-power-nuclear-applications/transport/nuclear-powered-ships.aspx and https://www.statista.com/statistics/198227/forecast-for-global-number-of-containerships-from-2011 for shipping statistics. 

Electric Cars and the Sound of Silence

 

Electric vehicles (EV's for short) are not so common where I live that they are even an every-day encounter, although being within 30 miles of the Austin Tesla plant, we do see Teslas fairly often on the highways.  But a problem that had never occurred to me about electric cars is currently being intensively studied by most car makers, and the result will affect how cityscapes sound in the future.

 

If an electric car moves faster than 20 MPH or so, its tires make enough road noise so that it's not that much quieter than most modern internal-combustion-engine (ICE) vehicles.  But at speeds lower than that, but fast enough to cause injuries in collisions with pedestrians, you simply can't hear them.  The electric motors are nearly silent.  And for visually-impaired and blind people who rely on the sounds of ICE vehicles to navigate, this can be a real problem.

 

As reported by John Seabrook in a recent New Yorker article, way back in 2003 a friend came by National Federation of the Blind activist Deborah Kerr Stein's house driving a new Toyota Prius, which in its battery mode was so quiet that Stein couldn't hear it at all even as it passed within a few feet of her.  She thought at the time "We've got a real problem."

 

After numbers of experiments with different electric vehicles and investigations into pedestrian accidents involving electric vehicles, it turned out that not only blind people, but sighted pedestrians also had problems noticing electric cars because they were so much quieter at low speeds than ICE vehicles.  Statistics reported in 2011 showed that hybrids and EVs showed a 35% greater chance of being involved in collisions with pedestrians and a 50% greater chance of collisions with bicyclists. 

 

This evidence was used to persuade Congress to pass and President Obama to sign the Pedestrian Safety Enhancement Act in 2012, which called for a "sound or set of sounds for all vehicles of the same make and model."  The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) took six years after that to devise technical specifications saying how loud and in what frequency ranges these sounds must be, and now the various car manufacturers who either sell or think about selling EVs must comply.

 

Seabrook interviewed numerous sound designers and engineers at GM, Renault, Ford, and other makers, and many of those interviewed were looking forward to contributing to an entirely new aspect of automotive history:  artificial characteristic sounds. 

 

For most of the time that people have lived with ICE vehicles, we have unconsciously learned to associate certain kinds of sounds with certain vehicles.  Seabrook even unearthed an acoustic engineer who could tell the make and model of a car just by the sound of its engine idling.  To me, most cars with their engines running just sound like cars, but the one exception that comes to mind is the exhaust noise made by the old-style VW Beetle produced from the 1950s to the 1990s or so.  It had a characteristic high note that made the sound unmistakeable for anything else.  But for the most part, automakers regarded sounds made by the car as something to be minimized, and many smaller vehicles going above 30 MPH or so don't make much more sound than an electric vehicle does.

 

But now we're going to have to get used to the different sounds devised by car makers to characterize their individual EVs.  Presumably, the EVs on the road now meet these requirements, but Tesla, the current leader in numbers on the road, has had run-ins with the Feds regarding some acoustic options that were installed for a time.  After a 2020 software update, Tesla drivers could play goat bleats, ice-cream truck music, and various less presentable noises through the external speakers installed in every Tesla.  The NHTSA clamped down on it and thereby earned the title "fun police" from Elon Musk, but Teslas are presumably still compliant with the Pedestrian Safety Enhancement Act.

 

This set of developments presents a relatively rare case in which a potential engineering problem was noticed and headed off before the number of potential problem vehicles got too large to deal with conveniently. This benign outcome was enabled by an alert "mediating institution"—the National Federation of the Blind—which was accustomed to dealing with governments and helping to draft legislation.  And it has the side benefit of making EVs safer for everybody else too, as many accommodations for the disabled tend to do. 

 

The mediating institution in this case is a privately owned and operated organization, and the profession of engineering has many such entities dealing with largely technical matters:  setting standards, organizing new protocols for new technologies, and so on.  Those who would want all such operations conducted by government agencies need to consider the fact that one of the strengths of American society is its proliferation of vigorous, competent, and useful mediating institutions.  Government power was involved in this case, and many times that is an appropriate outcome, but it was not government by itself that dealt with the problem, but government prompted by the private mediating institution that got the job done. 

 

Fortunately, the issue at hand was not subject to much political pulling and hauling, as neither Republicans nor Democrats wanted to look like they were opposed to helping blind people.  So while a new technology presented a new potential problem to a certain group of people, they noticed it soon enough to deal with it in a way that is not overly burdensome on car makers, and has actually led to a considerable amount of creativity on the part of sound designers.

 

I have not had the opportunity to listen to an EV at low speed to find out if I can hear it coming if I 'm looking the other way, but if I can, I'll have the National Federation for the Blind, the Pedestrian Safety Enhancement Act, and the sound designers working for whatever car company made the car to thank.  And so will you.

 

Sources:  John Seabrook's article "On Alert" appeared on pp. 24-29 of the Aug. 8, 2022 issue of The New Yorker.

Road Taxes: A Drag on Electric Cars

 

As you probably know, most states rely on a tax on every gallon of gasoline sold for on-road use to pay for a good fraction of the expensive job of maintaining roads, bridges, and other transportation infrastructure.  The fraction varies from state to state, but a 2019 Consumer Reports study showed that about 28% of highway funding came from fuel taxes on average, 22% from registration fees, and the rest from a variety of sources such as tolls and bond funding.

 

I don't know when it occurred to me to wonder what will happen to this source of money when most of the cars on the road use electricity instead of gas, but probably not before it occurred to the state legislators, who have mostly decided to pursue a single remedy for this looming problem:  an annual fee specially assessed on every electric vehicle (EV). 

 

My own state of Texas has proposed charging up to $200 per car, and other states either plan to implement such a fee or already have done so.  While an annual fee is simple to administer, it loses a virtue that the gasoline tax had.  Under the old system, if you drove more, or drove a bigger vehicle, you paid more.

 

Beyond that, the same Consumer Reports study showed that the vast majority of proposed or existing EV fees were unfairly high, penalizing EV drivers compared to people who drive old-fashioned internal-combustion-engine (ICE) vehicles. 

 

The way the analysts figured this out was to calculate something they called a "maximum justifiable fee" for each state, which took into account the average vehicle miles traveled, the prevailing fuel economy standard, and the state's fuel tax rate.  This calculation essentially determined the average fuel tax drivers paid in that state, and assuming EV owners drive about as much as ICE owners, it's not fair to charge the EV owners more than the maximum justifiable fee.

 

Well, guess again.  Of the 28 states the report studied which had either a proposed or existing fee for EVs, only 8 wound up charging EV owners less than the maximum justifiable fee in a projected 2025 case study.  All the rest charged more, and three proposed fees (those in Missouri, Arizona, and Texas) that were more than twice the maximum justifiable amount. 

 

As of today, Texas is still mulling over the proposed fee, so at this point, all the EV drivers in Texas are freeloading on the gas-tax-paying majority.  But the legislatures won't let this go on indefinitely, and it's not clear how the situation will be resolved.

 

The federal government has recently muddied the waters further by making hundreds of millions of dollars available for EV infrastructure, mainly more charging stations.  While EV owners will be grateful for this boon, it throws a big monkey wrench in the economics of charging EVs, which is already skewed by such things as Tesla Motors' offer of free charging for the lifetime of some of its cars, although that policy appears to be fading into the sunset.

 

Nobody pays Exxon or Valero to build a new gas station, so if we're looking at fairness in the energy-supply area, the fossil-fuel people could call foul in the case of federally-subsidized charging stations.  So that makes the picture even more complicated.  If you own an electric vehicle, you may have received free electricity to charge it in the past, you may drive up to a government-subsidized charging station now or in the future, but you may get socked with an annual fee that makes you pay more for road maintenance than your ICE-driving friends.

 

The ethics of paying for public-use infrastructure such as roads, gas stations, and charging stations gets political pretty quickly.  But we can think of some extremes that almost everybody would say are wrong, regardless of their political persuasion.

 

It would not be fair, for example, to let EV drivers totally off the hook with regard to road maintenance, and simply increase the gasoline tax on those few retrograde ICE-driving troglodytes who insist on warming up the planet, until they simply quit in disgust—or bankruptcy.  I say it wouldn't be fair, but I can imagine that this squeeze-'em-dry solution might appeal to certain progressive sectors who would like to see all fossil fuel use cease tomorrow. 

 

On the other hand, if we make fairness the paramount issue, it would seem that those who use the roads more ought to pay more.  And those whose vehicles are harder on the highways should pay more than people who drive Mini Coopers or motorcycles.  Most new vehicles are equipped with wireless Internet connectivity, electronic odometers, and GPS sensors that can easily be made to calculate how many miles have been traveled and on what kinds of roads.  The technology exists to come up with some kind of road-use fee schedule that would truly proportion one's taxation to the actual amount of use one made of various state and city roads. 

 

From a libertarian point of view, this approach would have the virtue of extreme fairness.  The gas tax never was more than a rough-and-ready attempt to do this kind of proportioning at a time when more exact methods were unavailable.  Under this scheme, if you drove a certain weight of car on a certain road, you would pay the same amount whether it used electricity or gasoline.

 

The problem with this idea would be its unpredictability.  In effect, every road would now be a toll road, and the more you drove, the more you'd pay.  But if the maximum justifiable fee is less than $100 on average, most drivers might not even notice it, especially if it was paid once a year along with the registration fee.  Somebody would have to pay for the software, but software is cheap once it's written.

 

I don't know how this is all going to turn out, but fairness seems to have been neglected up to now, and I hope justice prevails, or at least gets a word in edgewise.

 

Sources:  The 2019 Consumer Reports analysis is available at https://www.atlasevhub.com/resource/rising-trend-of-punitive-fees-on-electric-vehicles-wont-dent-state-highway-funding-shortfalls-but-will-hurt-consumers/.  The information on Tesla's free-electricity offer is available at https://electrek.co/2021/07/21/how-to-tell-if-your-tesla-qualifies-for-free-supercharging/. 

Will Solid-State Batteries Bail Out Electric Vehicles?

 

Last week, the U. S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration issued a recall for electric-vehicle batteries made by LG Energy Solution of South Korea.  Fires have been caused by some of these batteries, which are used in Mercedes, Hyundai, and General Motors products, among others. 

 

The problem is that rare manufacturing defects can cause overheating and fires.  An Associated Press article describing the recall notes that recalls made voluntarily by individual manufacturers for these batteries date back to February of 2020.  In November of that year, GM began recalling over 140,000 Chevrolet Bolt EVs to replace possibly defective LG batteries, and LG paid GM $2 billion in compensation. 

 

The insurance industry obviously has a stake in this matter, and a small survey conducted by its Highway Loss Data Institute showed that the rate of fires for electric cars is about the same as it is for gasoline-burners:  0.2 per 1,000 insured vehicle years.

 

If the best you can say about electric car fires is that they're no worse than fires in gas-powered ones, that's faint praise. 

 

The underlying problem in electric-car battery fires is the technology.  You may not be aware that the liquid or gel electrolyte in the type of lithium battery used in electric vehicles cannot be exposed to air without catching fire.  This is one reason that manufacturing such a battery is so tricky.  Back when photographic film was the only way to take pictures, manufacturers figured out how to make hundreds of square yards of sensitive film every day in total darkness.  But it wasn't easy, and the fact that film never got as cheap as, say, toilet paper, had an incalculable effect on the entire industry.

 

Unless the electric-car business manages to break free of liquid-electrolyte batteries, it may find itself stuck in a similar rut.  Except for the battery, an electric car is markedly cheaper to make than a fossil-fuel one.  The electronics and the motors are much simpler than the corresponding parts of a gas-powered car.  But right now, the cheapest electrics on the market are many thousands of dollars more costly than an average gas model because of the darned battery, and so the vision of replacing most of our gas-guzzlers with electrics remains just that:  a vision.

 

On the technological horizon is a development that could change all that:  the solid-state battery.  Michael Faraday himself (1791-1867) discovered that solid materials such as silver sulfide could act as electrolytes, which means that ions can move about through them under the influence of electric fields.  But up to now, truly solid electrolytes (as opposed to the liquid or gel-like products used in most batteries today) have resisted commercialization for a number of reasons.

 

A significant milestone in the development of solid-state batteries happened when John Goodenough, who was one of the original developers of current lithium-battery technology, announced in 2017 that he had made a solid-state battery with a glass electrolyte.  According to some sources, solid-state batteries could have up to 2.5 times the energy density of current lithium batteries, although it is not clear whether this is a volume or mass energy density.  Either way, it would mean that for the same size or weight battery, a car using a solid-state battery might have a longer driving range than a gasoline car with a typical gas tank. 

 

No one knows yet how to make solid-state batteries cheaply.  Thin-film technologies such as vacuum deposition are sometimes used, and while there is concern that such technologies may be difficult to scale, vacuum deposition in other manufacturing areas has been applied to rolls of plastic and other large-scale manufactured goods.  So it's more a question of investment and effort than fundamental technological obstacles, I suspect.

 

Several automakers, notably Volkswagen and Toyota, are investing heavily in solid-state battery technology.  But they have the obstacle shared by all automakers that any product engineered for automotive use has to be a lot more durable and reliable than anything used in the military or even aerospace fields.  Do you thinkmilitary tank drivers go ten thousand miles without needing any service, or astronauts think they'll be able to ride their rockets for ten thousand launches without having any problems?  Yet we start a car several times a day for years and expect nothing to go wrong. 

 

It's that kind of standard that every electric-vehicle battery is expected to meet, and the wonder is that they have come this far.  Pardon an old technologist for making a statement that is more intuitive than fact-based, but when I look at a typical EV battery that consists of several thousand individually-manufactured, hermetically sealed, and electrically insulated cells, I see a technology that is fundamentally immature.  Digital computers remained the expensive province of a few wealthy institutions until manufacturers learned to take the many thousands of largely similar components and integrate them onto a chip.  I suspect that electric cars will also remain in the realm of the wealthy until solid-state batteries bring the core cost down to the point that people will want to buy them, not because they're afraid of global warming or want something to match their Patek Phillipe watch, but because they're cheaper and easier to run than gas-powered ones. 

 

In the meantime, we're going to have to put up with recalls like the ones for the LG batteries that catch fire on rare occasions, because it seems to be the nature of liquid-electrolyte lithium cells to do that once in a while.  The best manufacturers can do is to watch their processes and inspections rigorously and hope that a better technology will come along that will let them make batteries more like people make computer chips these days, rather than like photographic film was once made, under difficult and unique conditions that are hard to maintain for long.

 

Sources:  I referred to an article on the NHTSA recall carried by the Apr. 6, 2022 Austin American-Statesman and other outlets of the AP, such as ABC News at https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/us-agency-opens-probe-electric-vehicle-batteries-83882398.  I also referred to articles on solid-state batteries at https://www.dnv.com/to2030/technology/are-solid-state-batteries-the-holy-grail-for-2030.htmland https://www.samsungsdi.com/column/technology/detail/56462.html?listType=gallery, and the Wikipedia article "Solid-state battery."