London Fire Brigade says e-bike and e-scooter fires are the capital’s fastest growing fire risk.
Friendly reminder to take care of your batteries and don’t buy cheap knock-off shit: It’s not worth the risk.
Batteries being sold without a BMS or without temp cutoff is insane.
This will continue to happen until acquiring a new, safe battery is easier and cheaper.
When someone wants to get a new, safe battery for their e-bike and they get told one of the following:
- a) They are told their battery is special order and might take weeks or even months to arrive.
- b) They are told their battery is not available anymore or not available in their region.
- d) It will cost $500-$800+
they’re almost certainly going to investigate ways of getting their battery sooner and cheaper. Most people don’t even know (or care) how batteries work let alone what a BMS is and why it’s important. They’re not going to know that the battery they bought is fire waiting to happen.
I’d like to see governments go after distributors of these crappy batteries and also to go after actual e-bike manufacturers for not making proper replacements more easily available. There are so many perfectly functional e-bikes that are just abandoned, scrapped, or landfilled because you can’t get batteries for them anymore. And then there are proprietary battery systems which are another problem entirely.–
How many cars catch fire per year vs how many e-bikes catch fire?
the owner had bought the e-bike from an online marketplace
Well, if we don’t want the e-bike industry to kill the e-bike industry, we should probably have regulations permitting only certain dealers from selling these.
Authorized, inspected, and certified.
And only tested and certified batteries and chargers should be sold.
Or force manufacturers to make replacement batteries easily available
This would be a major step forward. I doubt it will happen, since manufacturers are making these batteries specific to frames and wherever else they can hide them.
Forbidden petards.
