November 14, 2025
My car has taken its hatred of road trips one step farther -- now it's breaking down before I can even leave town.
As I sit here a couple weeks before my Thanksgiving trip to Ohio, my car is at the dealership being diagnosed. It puts up the message "service high voltage charging system" on the dash and refuses to start charging when plugged in. That's... bad.
My assumption is that it's the BECM -- the battery energy control module, which keeps all the battery's cells in good shape and prevents me from overcharging or over-discharging the battery. It's a known failure point, to the degree that GM extended the warranty on that part to something like 15 years and 150,000 miles.
The only difficulty (Assuming I'm right) will potentially getting the part in. GM is really trying to forget that the Volt exists; they stopped making the part for a couple years and it took quite a bit of public outcry to get to the current situation with the longer warranty period. Combine that with the EGR valve fuckery I wrote about last winter and despite it being a good vehicle overall I couldn't recommend it to anybody.
It hasn't soured me on electric vehicles, but I'll never own another GM after this one finally conks out completely.
Now presumably, once they diagnose the problem (and assuming I turn out to be right about it being a warranty repair) I'll presumably get a rental car to cover me while it's in the shop. Meantime I'm stuck in the house because instead of giving out loaners nowadays they call an Uber for you and drop your ass at home.
Yeah, really not liking GM right about now.
Edit, Monday morning: So, looking at Google before I took the car in, there were two possibilities. One was the BECM like I said above, which GM would pay for. The other was the battery pack's coolant loop, which I'd have to pay for as a standard maintenance item. I'll let you guess which one it was.
