One test vehicle caught fire.
One test vehicle caught fire. Lutz and GM characterizes the crash test as extreme, and not reflecting the real world. I, as the author of the article, tend to disagree with their stance a bit in that cars do roll over after crashes and I believe the NHTSA test is meant to simulate rollovers.
It was one test vehicle, not multiple vehicles. There were further crash tests after they'd done the forensic analysis and had a working hypothesis to the cause of the fire. But they were unable to replicate the conditions (puncture of the battery pack, leading to coolant leakage) and hence did not replicate the fire. This indicates two things - either NHTSA is inept at running their tests, which is rather unlikely, or - that the conditions to cause the fire are extremely hard to come by. You would have to have a crash strong enough to break the battery pack, then create a condition of leaking coolant, or otherwise cause a short circuit. Even then it takes awhile for the battery pack to catch fire.
The Volt was cleared of responsibility in all the garage fires.
It is not nonsense to refer to the number of gasoline car fires. Instead it is a key part of the story-line. Why is there such a hype about a single fire in a single Volt in a crash test, when gasoline car fires are so common they're never reported in the news? This demonstrates that the people pushing the controversy over this one fire, primarily right wingers who are clearly bent on hurting the Administration, have a political axe to grind rather than acting out of altruism warning us about a supposedly unsafe car.
As for factory produced electric vehicles catching fire ... that is somewhat incorrect depending on whether you consider the EV1 to have been produced in a factory. A couple of them caught fire in garages while charging, due to faults in the charging circuit. GM did a recall of the EV1 to fix the issues. However - where have other EV's caught fire? Can you name one? And if you name some of the hobbyist conversion EV's that have caught fire, they were not produced in a factory by a proper manufacturer.