It’s most typical for fires to start when the battery is being charged. For it to catch fire just sitting there either means it was damaged or was some shoddy, not-certified, battery that shouldn’t have been sold in Canada.
This could have ended up much worse.
Will Toronto follow NYC and mandate UL certification for ebikes and their batteries? Maybe not based on a single event, but it’s possible.
Don’t Canadian electronic devices already require certification? https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/home-safety/electrical-products.html
There are many different certifications UL has, I know the UL 2271 battery certification won’t be a standard one for most products.
mandate UL certification for ebikes and their batteries?
How is that monitored/enforced? I recall many e-scooter manufacturers out of Alibaba were using fake UL certification on their batteries, and no doubt they do the same for e-bike batteries.
But do riders have to remove their battery and produce the UL sticker when riding?
I would imagine that it’s enforced at the retail level, retailers must sell only UL certified units.
You’ll never fully get around people ordering cheap crap off Alibaba.
Pretty sure cheap crap is also a problem with Amazon.
So frustrating. It’s the cheap crap that’s bursting into flames. So of we are going to spend millions on these rules, have consumers pay more for certified products, yet still have these junk batteries floating around in public, are we really getting ahead?
The number of low grade AliExpress / Amazon dropship special ebikes I see on the streets is pretty high. As someone fairly deep into ebikes, it’s scary knowing how, many of those batteries are built. Shit cells, shit welds, shit BMSes, shit housings… This might require a national level import regulation to rectify I’m afraid.
