Briefs for Thursday

DETROIT – General Motors is telling owners of some older Chevrolet Bolts to park them outdoors and not to charge them overnight because two of the electric cars caught fire after recall repairs were made.

The company said Wednesday that the request covers 2017 through 2019 Bolts that were part of a group that was recalled earlier due to fires in the batteries.

The latest request comes after two Bolts that had gotten recall repairs caught fire, one in Vermont and the other in New Jersey, GM spokesman Kevin Kelly said.

Owners should take the steps “out of an abundance of caution,” he said. The steps should be continued until GM engineers investigate and develop a repair, he said.

“We are moving as quickly as we can to investigate this issue,” GM said in a statement.

In April, GM announced that it had developed diagnostic software to look for anomalies in the batteries of 69,000 Bolts worldwide.

If problems are found, the company will replace faulty parts of the battery.

Kelly said owners who haven’t had the recall repairs done should still take their cars to dealers to get the fixes.

In November, GM recalled the electric vehicles after getting reports of battery fires.

Two people suffered smoke inhalation and a house was set ablaze.

At first the company didn’t know what was causing the problem, but it determined that batteries that caught fire were near a full charge.

So as a temporary fix, owners and dealers were told to make software changes to limit charging to 90% of a battery’s capacity.

Twitter makes ‘fleets’ disappear after idea fizzles

Twitter is disappearing its disappearing tweets, called fleets, after they didn’t catch on.

The company began testing tweets that vanish after 24 hours last March in Brazil.

Fleets were designed to allay the concerns of new users who might be turned off by the public and permanent nature of normal tweets.

“However, we haven’t seen an increase in the amount of new people joining the conversation with Fleets like we hoped,” Twitter said in a statement Wednesday. “So as of August 3, Fleets will no longer be available on Twitter.”

Kayvon Beykpour, head of consumer product at Twitter, stressed that this is part of how the company works.

“(Big) bets are risky and speculative, so by definition a number of them won’t work,” he tweeted. “If we’re not having to wind down features every once in a while, then it would be a sign that we’re not taking big enough swings.”

Fleets are reminiscent of Instagram and Facebook “stories” and Snapchat’s snaps, which let users post short-lived photos and messages.

Such features are increasingly popular with social media users looking for smaller groups and and more private chats.

But people use Twitter differently than Facebook, Instagram or messaging apps – it’s more of a public conversation and a way to stay up to date with what’s going on.

Fleets, it turns out, did not make sense.

There was also a matter of the name.

Called fleets because they were fleeting, the word is also a brand name for an enema – something many people pointed out on Twitter when the feature launched.

From wire reports