Cautions over Plug-in Conversions

Because I have three little monkeys rambling around, I take safety concerns with any auto very seriously. You can have a perfectly working, brand new car and wind up dead because some jerk-off does the wrong thing. (A great reason not to be on the road more than you have to be.) But there are a thousand things you can do to make your chances of being hurt less.

Two hybrids fitted with plug-in conversion kits caught on fire this summer. One from Hybrids Plus, and one from CarCals. The Green Motorist brought up the safety concerns of conversion kits – not just DIY but ones installed by reputable companies. Felix Kramer, founder of CalCars stopped by and left some comments.

The truth is that many cars catch fire every year and sometimes you can’t figure out the reason why. The CalCars conversion incident was traced back to a component that failed and the battery pack caught on fire, but the Hybrids Plus conversion hasn’t been figured out. They think it may be a wiring issue, but there’s a chance it didn’t have to do with the conversion kit at all.

Given the number of these things on the road, and given the number without any failures, I don’t see this as a problem sweeping the industry (yet). It’s important that we are looking at these from a critical standpoint though and not just patting the back of progress. Hopefully, major automakers have put a significant amount of their budgets into safety precautions and admittedly this has been part of the battery issue, but it’s not the only one and – for me – at this time, I think of these incidents more as flukes than sign of a chronic problem.

Sources: The Green Motorist, CalCars