The Wayne County Airport Authority has banned motorists from parking certain Chevrolet Bolt electric cars at the Detroit Metro Airport over concerns they could catch on fire.

Matt Morawski, director of communications for the authority, told Michigan Capitol Confidential the policy is designed to prevent fires from Bolts that have not received recommended repairs outlined in a recall notice from General Motors.

The ban, he said, is in place as officials assess parking policies for EVs.

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“This work is being done under an environment of changing regulatory and technological requirements,” Morawski said.

The Detroit Metro Airport website states, “[F]or customer safety, Chevrolet Bolt electric vehicles that have NOT been repaired by the recent recall are prohibited from parking at all DTW facilities.”

GM and LG in 2021 “identified the simultaneous presence of two rare manufacturing defects in the same battery cell as the root case of battery fires in certain Chevrolet Bolt EVs” and conducted recalls of 142,000 “select 2020-2022 model year Bolt EV and EUVs.”

GM encouraged owners to obtain “new Advanced Diagnostic Software” to monitor the vehicle’s battery and limit the charge to 80%. The 2021 recall followed two previous Bolt recalls and a lawsuit.

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In November, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration posted another recall of 107 Bolts that included vehicles that were covered by the 2021 recall.

“The installation of advanced diagnostic software may have failed,” according to the NHTSA post cited by the Detroit Free Press. “As such, the high voltage battery could catch fire when charged to full or nearly full capacity.”

At least 18 Bolts have caught on fire while parked, and GM has confirmed that at least 13 of those fires were caused by defective batteries, according to the news site.

GM has discontinued Bolt manufacturing.

Jason Hayes, director of energy and environmental policy at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, contends the concerns at the Detroit airport and repeated recalls are the predictable results of government policies moving faster than developing technology.

“When governments force products into the market before they have been adequately tested and vetted, you often end up with bad (or even dangerous) results,” Hayes wrote to Michigan Capitol Confidential in an email.

Former President Joe Biden leveraged mandates and financial incentives in a government forced transition to EVs that has been widely opposed by the public, and Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has followed his lead in Michigan with unrealistic goals and massive taxpayer funded business incentives for the EV industry that have failed to achieve promised results.

Theodore Bolema, with the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, echoed Hayes’ perspective on government, rather than consumers, driving the transition to new technologies.

“When the government tries to artificially speed up the adoption of a technology by pressuring manufacturers to accelerate their development of new products, there will be more unanticipated problems and less opportunity for manufacturers in the industry and related markets to address the problems before products hit the market,” he wrote to MCC in an email.

Through September 2024, Michigan had 50,284 registered EVs, or about 2.5% of Whitmer’s goal of 2 million EVs registered in the Great Lakes State by 2030, according to the State of Michigan Community EV Toolkit.

At that pace, Michigan would need to register nearly 31,000 EVs per month every month since September to meet Whitmer’s goal.

Whitmer has also mandated a shift of all 14,000 state-owned vehicles to electric by 2040.

So far, state agencies have 30 EVs, with Michigan State Police signing a lease for their first Ford Mustang Mach-E AWD for $1,062 per month, Michigan Capitol Confidential reported.

Several EV companies in Michigan, meanwhile, are laying off workers and scaling back plans following President Donald Trump’s win in November. Trump immediately moved to repeal the Biden-Harris administration’s EV mandate, a move applauded by Michiganders who attended his inauguration in January.

“There should be no mandates at all,” Ken Thorne, a Newaygo County resident who attended the inauguration, told Bridge Michigan. “I’m not going to be forced (into) what vehicle I drive.”