Me with an e-scooter charging at home:
I was looking up e-scooters and a bunch of 1-star reviews pointed out how their battery caught fire.
Could have been fake reviews by competitors but either way, it freaked me out.
I keep my scooter at the farthest point from the apartment exit just to be on the safe side. I also haven’t heard many bad things about this particular model (Ninebot G30 Max).
It’s certainly an issue with some of them. I wouldn’t buy a random no name one from alibaba. It might be safe. Or not.
A lot of them will be fine but some of them are cheap knockoffs and they have unsafe wiring. It’s not actually the batteries themselves as they’ll probably be the same batteries it’s the way the batteries are connected up that makes them more likely to explode.
Unless you are Samsung in which case it 100% was the batteries at fault not the wiring.
It can also be due to unsafe charging (over-voltage) or unsafe discharging (over-current, generating too much heat). The actual fire doesn’t necessarily happen immediately during charging/discharging.
Lithium batteries have a very high energy density. When that’s released all at once with a short circuit or very high current draw resulting in thermal runaway, that’s when these fires start. The great news is, they’re self fuelling fires too!
But, most reputable manufacturers, create charging/protection circuits that protect the batteries against such situations. Making them far less likely (but still possible) to happen.
The problem you’re going to get is when there’s disreputable companies, operating in countries with less stringent safety laws that are operating the production, processing and shipping entirely outside of the sight of countries with safety rules. Well, then you get a product with a fake FCC/CE sticker on it, that is very dangerous indeed.
I will not buy electronics from those sites for this very reason. Batteries, chargers and power supplies are usually very shoddy from these companies.
It’s not to say don’t buy stuff made by country X. Because there’s plenty of stuff I have bought made in, these countries but sold by companies that DO make sure there’s some testing done, and they’re not fake stickering everything. But, we all know the companies I’m talking about I think. Also, ebay (because private sellers buy in bulk from these places and then resell them) is something to be careful of too.
A home here burned down. Stay safe kids.
If it’s a cheap one, only charge it while home or somehow isolate it from flammables. Keep a fire extinguisher nearby always.
Also cellphones, laptops, power tools and just about everything.
Gasoline? Don’t let it inside in the house. Ever.
Who is bringing gas inside? I’m struggling to come up with even one legitimate reason to bring gasoline inside.
Eh, I keep it in my garage. If it catches on fire, the fire will spread to the rest of the house pretty quickly.
You don’t often hear about laptops burning. And many of those spend their while lives plugged in
Yes. These are extremely rare. Some models, like iirc a galaxy note and MacBook Pro have been singled out. The surface and airflow also matter. A laptop kept on a desk spends very little time charging at a time and any heat is dissipated efficiently. All devices are designed with the best thermal performance they can have.
There was actually a house fire a while ago not too far from where I live that forensics said was started by a device in a charger at night. For some units and some uses, they still fail.
Anyway. I think the better safe than sorry is warranted.
My favorite thing about my current phone is that I can set an alarm a couple of hours after I should wake, and the phone (trying not to fully charge until the alarm time) never charges overnight above 80% minimizing the chance of a thermal runaway if it happened to be like the note 7, as well as making the battery have a longer life
An extinguisher that can actually handle Lithium fires though. A regular CO2 extinguisher wont do anything against burning Lithium
Please don’t use retarded in this manner
Who are you talking to? The 4chan user that posted this last month on 4chan?
This is 4chan, not something the poster said, 4chan is a cesspit, and this is to be expected.
People used to say the same about cellphones.
I remember one episode where a girl in the bus was texting and some old lady got up to tell her that “it will go into the engine”. The old lady was terrified.
That reminds me of something.
Also on a bus. There was a group of girls on the bus and they were having a big loud argument about whether or not one of the group would receive a text from her partner or friend or whatever because “how would the text know where they were, as the bus is moving”.
A valid question. Luckily a lot of work has been done to address it.
Pretty much the first thing that needed to be solved when moving from 1-way pagers to 2-way phones. Pagers could just get a broadcast analog signal and determine themselves if they were the intended recipient. 2-way needed more bandwidth and a dedicated communication channel to a specific device, so broadcast wasn’t feasible. Thus, phones would send a registration signal that a tower would pick up, and that specific tower would handle all communication to that phone. If another tower got the registration signal, communication would switch to that tower.
Interestingly enough, there was a period (for a fairly long time) that if you were travelling too fast, you could either a) not be able to register on a network, or b) overwhelm the network with registrations - part of the reason why phones had to be turned off on airplanes
in defense of the bus, the battery pack in the bus is likely heat shielded and isolated to prevent fires from being a massive risk.
Yeah and it is high quality and regularly inspected but if you bring random aliexpress chinesium scooter who knows what kinda shortcuts were used to get it under 300 dollars
maintained by a small child
By kids for kidstm
They always say the best gifts are the ones your kids makes you, Chinese parents must get some great stuff.
we love a good child labor battery pack
Aliexpress is now a beacon of quality compared to the terrible stuff available on Temu. The worst part is that people buying a spare battery for their eScooter won’t do the research and will just be happy to get a “good” deal, until it explodes in their sleep…
Slight difference in build quality, wouldn’t you say?
It does happen. Not like the bus driver has time to check the battery has all its relevant safety certs.
Yes, but at least someone is actually checking the bus battery.
Oh yeah sorry that what I was implying. Somebody is checking the the public service vehicle. Nobody’s checking the private battery bought on eBay
That’s like being mad at not being able to ride your handmade car on the interstate
Tbf the manufacturing standards for plenty of e-scooters and -bikes can be pretty iffy sometimes, and people abuse them in ways that can increase the likelihood of issues. I concede that the vast majority of electric personal transportation devices that go up in flames usually happens during charging. A public transportation bus has to meet higher standards than a mono wheel scooter off of AliExpress.
(Imo they should be allowed on, but I can see the point in not doing so)
I’m not gonna say bike batteries explode all the time but I will say I worked at an ebike company and they had an entire department dedicated to handling exploding battery lawsuits.
Honestly, they should only allow devices with removable batteries, and they could have a bucket of sand outside the bus that holds those batteries. Kind of like how bicycles are attached to the front, you’d drop the battery in and then board the bus.
But what if the battery starts burning while the bus is moving, on the road… Like in the middle of a desert (…wait… but still…)?
mmmm sandy battery, i love when my batteries have sand in them, surely this wouldnt cause problems.
“I don’t like sand. It’s coarse and rough and irritating… and it gets everywhere.”
~ Enerkin Ionwalker
I cannot have my own nuclear reactor, but the state can build nuclear power plants, wheres the fairness, wheres the freedom
Just don’t tell them about it. They don’t have to know about. Like my skull collection for example.
You just need to stop telling yourself you can’t do things and do whatever you want. A child could build a nuclear reactor, so what’s stopping you?
In Northern Ireland during the Troubles, people put (time)bombs on busses and when the bus driver heard about it, he just went and lifted it off the bus and put it in a ditch at the side of the road and informed the police. Couldn’t be bothered with evacuating the bus in the middle of nowhere.
Probably shaking his head and mumbling "I don’t have time for this shit"along the way.
Meanwhile, TSA: no water bottle for you. Bring a cell phone, laptop battery, and a spare 20,000 mAh backup battery (of dodgy provenance no less)? Sure no problem.
Loved this when I was vaping and would travel for work.
Give me a ton of shit over my variety of juices, in 30mL bottles in my 3-1-1 bag…but the half dozen loose 18650s? Not a problem.
(They weren’t totally loose, I had silicone sleeves on them and would rewrap them if they showed a little wear on the wrapper. I used mechs and RDAs, I wrote the newbie guide to rebuilding on reddit…I was pretty safe about it).
Assumably the bus company would be buying the bus from a company with better quality control then the Chinese ones. There were some knockoffs “hover boards” that catch on fire and that Chinese bus fire.
Battery Management Systems aren’t some new, developing technology. We know how to safely manage Lithium battery, it’s just the certain manufactures are cheaping out on the battery packs and BMS. People didn’t all stop using their phones because of the Note7 fires. People didn’t stop driving cars because of the Ford Pinto. They need to get over their EV fears and be more discerning
Hilariously most of the electric buses are Chinese. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yutong https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BYD_Auto
It’s the quality control and the fact that the buyer is a continent or ocean away. If a western company has hired a Chinese manufacture, they can get a good product if they stay on top of plant inspections. If not, the Chinese manufacture will start cutting corners. If you’re a western buyer, buy from a western company even if a majority of parts were made in China. If you manage to import a whole car from Alibaba and something goes wrong, you’re SOL.
Cheap eBike batteries have and do set on fire though. Sounds pretty terrifying.
There is a clip circulating recently of a guy in China carrying his e-bike battery into the elevator. Than that thing explodes and the guy dies in a sea of flames. Yeah carrying a cheap high capacity li-ion pack into a enclosed space is not a good idea.
To be fair, there may not be another option if he needs to get that to his flat and there’s no ground storage.
Horrifying.Quality control exists to ensure li-ion batteries don’t spontaneously combust, or at least not as often. Same reason why old timey film reels were kept under very carefully controlled environments, those things can also spontaneously combust. Any place that allows QC to be skirted will result in accidents and deaths like that elevator guy.
There’s a video circulating few days ago of electric scooters on a truck delivery catching fire. The funny thing the fire happened right under an Ioniq 6 billboard.
My city bans bikes from buses because of the space they take up. Scooters and folding bikes are ok only if they’re folded up small enough not to be obstructive.
The really shitty thing is that bikes are allowed on trains. But if the trains are unavailable and get replaced by a rail replacement bus…because it’s a bus, you can’t take your bike.
Most of the buses where I am have a bike rack attached to the exterior, I’ve definitely taken that for granted.
When I was younger, every time I tried to use one, it was full. There’s such limited space that it becomes unreliable.
I’ve heard that they used to have those here. But that they took too long to put your bike onto, causing buses to fall behind schedule. So they got rid of them.
What? They take less than ten seconds.
Damn, how I long for one of these.
I was until now unaware that there were places where (non-folded) bikes were allowed on buses. On trams and trains sure, but buses have such limited space that I can’t imagine a bike being transported in them.
I have seen in more than one place a bicycle rack attached to the front of the bus to allow a few bikes
My city has bike racks on the front of buses. Bikes can go on trains but not during peak commuting times.
Trains used to be the same here (with the exception that you could always take your bike on the train during peak hours in the non-peak direction, it was only peak direction that was banned), until they were trying to get people back on public transport after/late during the pandemic. Then they started allowing it even in peak hours, with some weird limitations like a maximum of 2 bikes per car, and only in the first or last car of the train.
I’ve lived in a few cities with exterior bike racks on the busses.
Funnily, here in my City in Germany, they only banned E-Scooters because of the battery exploding thing but E-Bikes are okay
A few years ago the same thing happened to me. There was someone who wasn’t doing to good, on top of the station building on the next stop along throwing tiles and other things off. The operator got some replacement busses, that I couldn’t get as I had my bike. So I just sat there with someone else who could get on as they had their dog. For about 4-5 hours. Sucked allot as I was tired, the dog was cute though.
More likely that’s the insurance company’s call
