Four times a week on average, an e-bike or e-scooter battery catches fire in New York City. Sometimes, it does so on the street, but more often, it happens when the owner is recharging the lithium ion battery…
“These bikes when they fail, they fail like a blowtorch,” said Dan Flynn, the chief fire marshal at the New York Fire Department. “We’ve seen incidents where people have described them as explosive — incidents where they actually have so much power, they’re actually blowing walls down in between rooms and apartments.”
Okay but are there 30 times more E-Bikes in NYC? Because their popularity has really shot up. Why do journalists tell half stories? Scanning that there were no number on how many are being used in the city.
snippet
As of Friday, the FDNY investigated 174 battery fires, putting 2022 on track to double the number of fires that occurred last year (104) and quadruple the number from 2020 (44). So far this year, six people have died in e-bike-related fires and 93 people were injured, up from four deaths and 79 injuries last year
I think e-bikes were legalized in New York in 2019. Then came the pandemic. Both resulted in large increases in e-bikes (and fires). There was another fire this weekend, this time on the 20th floor of an apartment building.
I originally read the title of this as "E-fries and was prepared to find a story aboutt McD
About Citi Bike: Company, History, Motivate | Citi Bike NYC.
Anyhow, the NYC Citibike program started in 2011, so it’s been around for over a decade. Much as I hate to admit it ( ) I have to agree with Leap1 on this one. If you scan the above link, the program has ballooned into a vast infrastructure and the absolute metrics quoted in the article should be looked at on a relative basis. That said, I wonder if the maintenance cycle of the bikes has kept pace with their growing numbers.
There is discussion about banning e-bikes in some locations in NYC. There are already some restrictions in Europe.
“In London, for instance, government officials banned e-scooters from the city’s buses and subway system in December 2021, citing fire safety concerns. Two months later, both e-bikes and e-scooters were banned from the Palace of Westminster, where Parliament meets.”
In London, lithium battery fires are the fastest-growing fire risk, with 57 e-bike fires and 13 e-scooter fires this year, according to the London Fire Brigade.
In New York, lithium battery fires have killed 13 people so far this year, including four people in a blaze that started in an e-bike store in Chinatown on Tuesday.
Thing is, some ICE cars have earned a reputation for self-ignition. At Ford, it was the cruise control/brake interface that would start the fire. Now it’s Ford’s battery monitor circuit. On Hyundais and Kias, it is the ABS module. These cars can ignite when parked and turned off. The OEM’s suggestion is to not park the car in your garage.
After reading about e-bike fires, I went out and got a fire extinguisher specifically designed to handle such things, and put it on the other side of the door, in the hallway leading to the garage. [You’re not supposed to put fire extinguishers where “a fire” will make it hard to get to them; my first idea was to put it right near the bike, but then realized “if the bike’s on fire, I can’t reach the extinguisher!]
There’s no way Mrs. Goofy is going to store the bike outside, so this seems to be the only solution. Also, connected (Nest) fire alarm in the garage near the bike.
The other things to do are to buy good quality products with batteries that are tested to be safe. AND to only use chargers that are truly compatible with the device. I’ve read that a lot of the fires are causes by chargers that don’t work properly with the batteries they are charging. That’s probably why EV makers build the charger right into the car itself - so their own software can control how charging takes place, currents, timing, tapering, etc.
The bike came with its own batteries and charging apparatus, but the guy at the bike shop told her “Don’t leave it plugged in”, which tells me that the controlling software is suspect. Now she comes back from a ride, plug in for an hour or two and puts enough charge on it to hold in the middle, and on the mornings of her ride goes out and plugs in again to bring it up to 5 lights.
But seriously, how do they sell a bike where the charging apparatus doesn’t know to taper and quit?
Are there any mandatory standards regarding battery and charging quality, circuits, safeguards? Imports certification and random inspection? Any correlation on the fires with product origin, brand, OEM, etc?
Seems like a typical cost optimization going below what is safe to build.
They sell because they are cheap. I remember when the toy “hoverboards” came out. All ChiCom product. They demonstrated a tendency to burn houses down.
Repeated story for those who missed it before:
Ayn Rand, Rand Paul, and Paul Ryan walk in to a bar.
The bar tender serves them adulterated alcohol, because there are no regulations.
Maybe. The bike was a couple grand, so “cheap” it wasn’t. But then the consumer doesn’t really know about “cheap” until they get it home and read the story in tomorrow’s paper about the house that burned down, I guess.
That’s quite surprising. I suppose the really cheap ones don’t bother with proper battery management. Battery management is meant for three things - safety, battery performance, and battery longevity.
My car (Tesla) recommends leaving it plugged in at all times, except obviously while driving … LOL!
A n Australian insurer has reported seeing a 440% increase in claims for lithium-ion battery fires in the last three years. Data from insurer Allianz shows the cost of these claims increased by 900% from 2020 to August this year. The huge rise in the cost of insurance submissions is due to an increase in high-value commercial property claims, according to Allianz.
Good question. Different sources seem to have different numbers, but the total number of EVs in Australia looks to have grown from 34K in 2020 to 126K in mid-23. This is a 270% increase. Insurance claims grew 440%, so it may be the increase in total number of lithium batteries.
