Today I did my commute to work and both the battery and the gas tank icons on the HUD were small and greyed out rather than one or the other being colored and large. I drove the whole way on electric and took a colleague for a spin when it switched over to gas at which time the gas tank icon swung into view large and colored as it should. Does anyone know of a direct line to GM for bug reports?

Try your Volt Advisor

Weird, I saw the same exact thing a couple weeks ago. Went away after I power cycled the car (I wasn't going far enough to kick in the gas), hasn't been back since.

Does anyone know of a direct line to GM for bug reports?

Spending alot of my career on software issues like this I can tell you that while they may consider your report interesting if you really want to make their day and get it fixed figure out how to make it happen again. Behaviors like this tend to lead the developer to the conclusion that yes, something went wrong. Exactly WHAT went wrong often requires them to go through the scenario that leads up to the bug.

Also you bolster any public argument to fix the issue if you can have any Volt owner make it happen to them. Was there anything different about todays commute AT ALL? Something that you don't normally do starting perhaps when you got out of the car yesterday? There was probably something that triggered that behavior (or else you'd see it all the time) figuring out what it was is the holy grail.

It's probably an occasional thread race that hung the GUI. Multithread races are murder to find and fix, because they only occur rarely. I've experienced thread racing with the Audio Cue on boot-up. The Audio Cue gets in a race with another source of audio, and occasionally looses.

While we are on the topic of software bugs, I am homing in on one that I can reproduce. If I turn off the Volt (blue button, radio still on), open the door (radio now truns itself off), and then force on the radio back on (depress lower dial), the Volume Control is stuck on Audio Cue, no matter what. But if I wait a few minutes after getting out of the car before forcing the radio back on (with the car off), the Volume Control works properly. There seems to be some timer in play...

Today I did my commute to work and both the battery and the gas tank icons on the HUD were small and greyed out rather than one or the other being colored and large. I drove the whole way on electric and took a colleague for a spin when it switched over to gas at which time the gas tank icon swung into view large and colored as it should. Does anyone know of a direct line to GM for bug reports?

Push the blue ONStar button and tell them about the problem you are having -while you are having it.
Stuart #B2209

I noticed this this morning on my Volt. I cycled the power and the charge indicator came back up. I was wondering if it was something that happens when you interrupt the charge? I unplugged mine a few minutes before the charge was to be completed. Just a thought.

Most folks have the impression that software defects will reproduce if you just find the right sequence of events. That's sort of true, but here's the thing: advanced software is not just one "program" starting up and running. Often dozens of separate "threads" are launched at essentially the same time. Usually there are fewer processors than threads, so the threads "time-share" the available processors. Think of it a kitchen with four high-speed chefs trying to cook dozens of dishes as fast as they possibly can. By the way, they have only two ovens, and one stove, so they have to share those resources as well. Mind you, these are very good chefs, so 99.999999% of the time, the food is flawless and served on time. Then there's the 0.000001%. Often it's detected and handled. Sometimes the programmers can imagine an unusual potential "thread race" issue ahead of time, and can write specific code to handle it. Even more rarely bad food is delivered (frozen GUI icon or reverse Audio Cue sequence). And then (hopefully never), there are the exceedingly rare occasions when the whole kitchen hangs (BSOD). It's not as much fun to be a programmer these days!!!

It's not as much fun to be a programmer these days!!!

And in a modern car's case imagine the above scenario per kitchen, but with some 33 kitchens all operating at the same time and trying to coordinate the cooking and serving while talking to each other over the phone.

And a party line phone at that!

It's more likely that the Volt also keeps a log and thread dumps, im not sure what platform the volt software runs on but more than likely there is some type of logging turned on that can be turned up/down w and a thread dump that occurs when powering up or down.

The other issue is wheather this is a bug or a glitch, a bug being an actual problem with the program a glitch being a random electrial/electronic spike or dip event, that causes a random problem to occure, minor or major.

Another type of random problems can be caused by events in outer space, such as solar flairs or cosmic radition, a single bit fliping in memory can cause a program to mess up or lock up.

So the standard answer is to reboot and unless the problem returns, forget about it.