I mean I’m glad it didn’t happen to me, but a billion people are carrying around billions of Lithium-ion batteries. Those batteries sometimes catch fire because Lithium is highly flammable. It’s gonna happen.
Yeah, and when it does, the manufacturer of that lithium bomb should pay for it.
And not just to compensate the victim, but to make the cost of negligent manufacture higher than the savings it brings to the company in engineering, QA, and production.
Numbers are not an excuse. There is over a billion cars in the world, most filled with highly flammable gasoline that actually burns inside them. Yet none are spontaneously exploding.
Self-immolating headphones - small speakers that you put on your head, mind you - are an egregious abuse of safety, public trust, and all reason. By an ostensibly "luxury" brand, no less.
There is no "but" about it. If they can't make safe headphones, they should not make headphones period.
OP, please report them to CPSC here: https://www.saferproducts.gov/IncidentReporting
They absolutely are. 170,000 a year in the US alone. Some are even due to known design faults. A few years ago Ford recalled almost a million pickups due to a fire risk, and then recalled half of them again because the first fix caused another fire risk.
The probability of injury or death from a vehicle fire is probably much higher than the risk of injury from wireless headphones.
https://www.consumernotice.org/personal-injury/vehicle-safet...
What's your point? Mine was that Bose should do the same thing with their headphones, and they won't do it out of their own accord.
Also consider that there are billions of porcelain dishes made in the world, and somehow, they don't self-explode. If headphones are different in that regard, they should be, at the very least, clearly labeled as such - which is not the case.
If you're concerned about exploding lithium ion or lithium polymer devices in your home the only recourse available to you is not to buy any.
If you do that you should also be aware that corded devices also catch fire sometimes though. You should avoid those too.
Maybe just avoid electrical systems entirely.
Did you ever pause to think why that's the case? That wasn't the case 100 years ago, when Radium was a fun new chemical to paint your teeth with.
We are pretty close because of government regulation, warnings, and yes, lawsuits that punish the companies for being negligent on safety.
>Obviously manufacturers should attempt to minimize the risk but they'll never reduce it to zero.
And obviously, the manufacturers need incentives to do so. Safety warnings aren't just for the consumer - they also make safer products more marketable. And penalties for not doing due diligence won't happen by themselves unless the consumers take an active position, report safety violations to CPSC, and sue to recover the damages.
Someone has to enforce the rules. In the US, the enforcement is shifted to the consumer and the legal system. We have CPSC, NHTSA, FAA - and their reach is still limited, the justification being that it should be up to the courts.
The risks from burning wood in your living room are higher. My wife got burned badly when she was a small kid. We have freezing temperatures 7-8 months a year in this country. So heating requires a lot of energy and with a lot of energy there is always higher risk, whether electric or not.
What has this got to do with exploding ICE cars?
> What's your point?
I think GPs point was pretty clear. You made a completely unfounded claim, ICE cars don’t spontaneously explode, despite the fact that evidence shows they clearly do, and do so at a rate higher than headphones or EVs.
Nothing is perfectly safe, that is how lithium batteries fail. You should know so you can properly deal with problems.
There is an annoying trend among people that expect everything to be perfectly safe. It seems to be a symptom of an overly sheltered existence.
Yeah, how overly sheltered to not expect your headphones to not catch on fire and kill you. It's a symptom of not believing when someone pisses in our eyes and tells us it's raining. Especially when it's happening on our own dime.
>Nothing is perfectly safe, that is how lithium batteries fail.
Then lithium batteries should be banned from headphones.
>You should know so you can properly deal with problems.
Good point! And where would the customer learn about this? From HackerNews?
Last time I checked, Bose devices didn't come with a self-combustion warning.
And until they do, my point applies.
When was the last time you actually read a product manual? Many of them actually are full of warnings about how things fail. I have no idea about Bose headphones, I definitely threw away everything but the headphones immediately.
No we should not ban everything that doesn’t have a zero percent fault rate. This weird angry response is a symptom of this sheltered fear which comes from not understanding that the world isn’t ever going to be perfect. You make really bad decisions when you’re in denial about the impossibility of safety perfection.
And where would they go to fulfil that interest? HackerNews? Or maybe, just consider it, the instruction manual that comes with the device?
>We don’t need cushioned guard rails on literally everything.
Sure. Just labels on self-exploding products saying that they may self-explode.
>When was the last time you actually read a product manual?
Yesterday. I got an Ikea ENEBY speaker. Your ignorance and lack of having interest in the world around you, which includes product manuals, is on you.
"Remove headphones immediately if you experience a warming sensation or loss of audio." [1]
Probably could use a few more words for good measure.
Also, they do not explode. Explode has a specific meaning. Lithium batteries experiencing thermal runaway get rather hot and then burn quite vigorously, but they do not explode.
1. https://assets.bose.com/content/dam/Bose_DAM/Web/consumer_el...
A "warming sensation" is not what the OP has experienced.
When Bose augments this to the following, you may have a point:
>Remove headphones immediately if they spontaneously ignite and start emanating smoke and hazardous chemicals that cause chemical burns to your skin. Failure to do so may result in death. Rinse all exposed skin with running cold water immediately, and see a medical professional ASAP in such case.
You seem to have no problem with this scenario actually happening to someone, so there should be absolutely no reason not to have it in the same manual in these exact words.
A warming sensation is the first thing OP noticed: "I took them off of my charger, put them on my head, and noticed they were suddenly getting very warm".
Taking them off at that point does remove _some_ of the risks.
Very. In the end you're carrying a high energy density power source on your head that would love to just catch fire. Don't they teach kids anything in chemistry these days?
I just love how this comment appears in the same thread as this one:
>That sort of paranoia doesn't help. In fact it may cause psychosomatic symptoms (nocebo effect).
Anyway, if it's common knowledge, there's no harm to put a big label warning about it on the instruction manual, right?
Last time I checked, passing chemistry isn't a requirement for purchasing Bose QuietComfort 35 II headphones, which spontaneously catch fire and cause chemical burns.
Yes. One says “yes lipo batteries can have thermal runaway” and the other comment says “don’t twist yourself into knots by worrying over this one time bad exposure”.
They talk about two different things in two different way. Your comment makes it sound as if they are somehow contradicting each other? They don’t.
I agree with the feeling, but flammable batteries are one of the less risky and stupid thing humans are doing.
I mean, we are literally littering the sky with swarms of useless satellites for the rich hikers in the global north (one example among many of totally idiotic behavior) - I can live with batteries.
(btw. I don't even have a smartphone or a cellphone in general, i know i'm a bit of a radical - and i use only wired stuff, because i find it more practical, durable and ecological - point is, people accept very stupid stuff for their convenience, that's why we are slowly killing our planet and ourselves - your points are valid, but it won't deter people from using dangerous chemicals in their lives, and the throwing them away and poison nature and themsleves)
but they are ruining the sky for 100% of us, for the benefit of some rich techbro that want to check emails in some remote place.
So yeah, big difference in safety, not really a difference in the chemistry.
The above was explained to me by someone I believe knows what they're talking about. But I may have misunderstood; if I have, please let me know!
Manufacturers sometimes use deceptive labeling and given that the form factors are somewhat interchangeable it really is a confusing mess. Unfortunately both chemistries have 4.20V as their 'charged' voltage and 3.0V as their discharged voltages because of the underlying chemical similarities so looking at the voltages won't give you a good idea either.
In the end, the electrode is what matters, but getting to that requires destruction of the cell. One non-destructive way of figuring out if a cell has a liquid electrolyte is to see if you can shift the center of gravity by tilting the cell slowly. If you can then it is most likely a Lithium Ion battery, if you can't then it is a most likely a Lithium Polymer one.
Bose aren't luxury: they're premium mediocre. They're expensive - overpriced in fact - but have a supremely competent marketing team who are probably responsible for mopping up a good portion of that premium.
That doesn't make this incident any better or more excusable but it does go some way to explaining why it happened: the product is poor quality and cheaply engineered.
You get what you pay for, and with Bose you are paying to be hoodwinked by flashy marketing and "brand equity".
I'll probably swap to Sony next, but when I bought them there wasn't really a viable competitor.
It is a shame that Bose's lead in noise-cancelling isn't matched in the quality of their sound.
I'm quite impressed with them. Both the noise-cancelling and sound quality are better than the QC35s I used to use.
Thanks, "premium" (also in scare quotes) is the word I was looking for.
Take into account the probability of a costly failure, and increase the price to account for it. And compensate victims to a certain extent, but quietly. I suppose they would fight any publicity of such incidents, since that would have a huge impact on sales, I have read a few such stories, and usually they disappear from the news pretty soon, likely because the victim agreed to be quietly compensated. I could be wrong.
Yes they do, and this is why we have CPSC and lawsuits: to increase the cost of failure to the point where it's not a wise business decision to allow one to happen.
Nothing is 100% fool-proof, but the difference between 99.9% safe and 99.99% safe is 10x decrease in incidents.
Yes, the OP prefaced with a number of common reasons this might happen that do not apply in his case, but that does not mean the root cause is faulty manufacture.
Hell, it's possible that a high-energy particle from space hit the battery in his headphones in just the right spot and that's why it exploded. Would you hold Bose responsible in that case?
Yes, and it's not my business to find out. It's the job of CPSC and investigators to find the reasons. Which is why I insisted the OP should file a report.
And as for establishing certainty, I'm not a judge or a jury, whose job it is to do so. Which is why I suggested the OP should take it to court.
>Hell, it's possible that a high-energy particle from space hit the battery in his headphones in just the right spot and that's why it exploded. Would you hold Bose responsible in that case?
I can't hold Bose responsible, the courts and CPSC can. Since it's also possible that OP was, you know, correct in his assessment, this case should get their attention.
The problem here being.. that Bose loses money?
Or maybe, just maybe, they figure out a way to make headphones that are both safe and marketable?
The idea of free market includes the notion of failing in the free market. Which is exactly what Bose did here.
1/1,000,000 chance of getting chemical burns is fine by me.
That's fine by me too, and Bose should market the headphones with the description "1/10^6 chance of getting chemical burns".
Then the people who don't find it fine by them can make a rational choice about buying or not buying that product.
See, the public has this unreasonable expectation about wireless headphones being as safe as wired ones. Silly public. Can't fathom why they would think that way, with all the warnings of potential chemical burns in the product manuals.
Oh wait.
That decision is, indeed, up to Bose.
But should they choose to continue making a headphones that have a 1-in-N-million chance of exploding, this should be clearly indicated on every pair they sell.
So that their competitors who choose to invest in safety would be able to reap the fruit if their labor in the free market.
Also nobody has died so...
You are aware that wired headphones exist, right?
Also, quite a leap from "Bose shouldn't make headphones that explode while being used, like QC-35 II" to "if we ask for that, this will make all headphones heavy enough to cause neck problems and cost North of $600".
Self-exploding headphones were not a problem we had for most of the time headphones existed. There's no reason to introduce it, nor accept it.
>Also nobody has died so...
Oh, so someone has to die instead of merely being injured for you to care? That's hardly compassionate, but understandable.
How about we settle for the middle ground of the following being included with each pair:
"BOSE Quite Comfort QC 35 II. You might experience bodily injury during normal operation of this product. Also nobody has died, so..."
Lithium-ion are the best we have right now, and they "explode" (catch fire I think is more accurate) when damaged.
Do I want better battery chemistries that are more robust? Of course.
Am I going to hold this against Bose or any other battery-powered device manufacturer until we do? No.
I'm not entirely sure why this got downvoted (bit of a personal gripe with YC (anonymous down voting/spamming without a direct comment).. buuuut
This idea is only 'silly' if you think of it as a large amount of lead lining.
In this day-in-age, I'm sure the idea of a material/substance around it that stops combustion when something like this happens is surely not out of reach.. I'm as far away from a chemical engineer as you can get, but, if it requires oxygen to burn, maybe some incredibly strong substance around it to contain the chemicals if the battery expands. Or some to absorb oxygen around it.
I dunno, maybe I'm incredibly naive, but it feels like something that, if a portion of the companies that manufacturer/use the batteries put effort into something, it's something that could be made _more_ safe in some way?
Surely the idea of the world putting some effort into producing a material that can help stop this happening isn't completely stupid...?
HN, the forum of innovators who are vehemently against innovation if it's for the sake of consumer safety.
I mean, come one people, it's a business opportunity. Figure out how to make non-self-exploding headphones, with a guarantee, and crush Bose in the free market on that selling point.
Sigh.
Bit of a stretch to say you're "pro-innovation" in this context.
Because we are on HackerNews, where the consequences of their own actions only exist for individuals and not the corporations they hope to be CEOs of one day.
I didn't realize that I'd need to argue, in 2021, that selling people dangerous products as safe is, in principle, wrong, but here we are.
To people asking "What did the OP expect", the answer is: whatever the instruction manual said on Page 1. And it surely didn't say: "WARNING: MAY KILL YOU DURING NORMAL OPERATION".
Once it does, we can have a discussion about everything else.
Tbh it probably wouldn't take much to get that added to the boilerplate warnings of every battery product sold, just in case.
Heck, wired headphone makers will get a boost from that.
The cosmic particle idea isn't completely outlandish, but it's impossible to prove, and it's statistically far more likely that it was a human failure. Given the rarity of spontaneously exploding batteries, I'd bet dollars to donuts that the particles are responsible for less than 1 in a million incidents, so yeah, the company should be liable. That's the cost of business, and on a humanistic note, making things better for the guy would just be the good thing to do.
Unless the device was mishandled in some unusual way, the manufacturer should bear this burden because they are/were in the best position to implement mechanisms to avoid the harm, from improved QA to a better design and, ultimately, to rhe informed decision not to sell the device.
Nothing is perfectly safe. People should deal with it, and remember that they don't live in a fairy tale.
I hope statistics exist on how many of them burst into flames. I'd like to compare it to the number of people who choked on a cereal breakfast, or fell from a stairway at home, or other such random accidents with normally benign things. I suspect that the headphones will be no worse than many other common household items, including the low-tech ones.
Including the business of selling self-exploding headphones.
Corporations should deal with it, and remember that they don't live in a fairy tale where they can pull off shit like that off without consequence.
Can't make safe headphones? Leave it to someone who can. Free market or something.
(In case you're not getting it, it's not about living in fairy tales, it's about increasing the cost of failure to corporations to a high enough point that they will put some money into safety instead of pocketing it.)
NASA has a hard time doing this for their vehicles that are intended to be in deep space.
Whether it can be done within the constraints of mass, volume, and expense that keep the headphones competitive is another (hard) question.
Thing is, small lithium bombs do less damage than large ones. Now Bose makes a point of advertising the long battery-life of these devices; 20 hours, they say.
Doesn't that mean that Bose is profiting from the long battery life, while failing to mention that their competitors sell cans with smaller ear-bombs in them?
Not anymore.
Well, at lease EVs are spontaneously catching fire.
What negligence?
I wrote this not to shame Bose. But to highlight the risk of personal wearables and lithium ion technologies.
Please, don't cut Bose any slack. They deserve to be shamed.
If someone were to make a self-exploding car, they'd be out of carmaking very fast. If Bose can't make headphones that don't self-ignite, they should not be making headphones.
Consider that Bose is breaking the law if they don't report this incident to CPSC[1].
And if you have a spare minute (which you seem to, given that you wrote the post and comment), please file a consumer safety report[2] and report the Bose QC-35 II headphones as unsafe product.
It is a simple form, and it is the way to make sure that this doesn't happen again to someone else. Aside from that, consider filing a lawsuit to get compensated for the damage to your physical health. Talk to a lawyer that can take your case pro-bono.
Thank you for the time you took to report this here, and I am very sorry that Bose screwed you over like that. Please let me know if I can help with the CPSC report to prevent them doing this to others.
[1]https://www.cpsc.gov/Business--Manufacturing/Recall-Guidance...
I fully agree with the rest of what you're saying, but that's simply not true.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/08/04/tesla-f...
https://www.inquirer.com/business/cars-battery-fires-fear-la...
>“We don’t think every vehicle has this rare manufacturing defect,” General Motors spokesman Dan Flores said. “But we can’t take a chance, so we’re recalling all the vehicles.”
I mean, that comes pretty close to be out of electric car making.
The same should happen to Bose. A total recall of all wireless headphones they ever made would be a good start.
-------
PS: I'm spending more time in headphones than I do in my car; it's fair to hold them to the same standard.
Now, if you have energy to simply talk to a lawyer, I suspect it's going to be a slam-dunk case (I'm not a lawyer). They shouldn't get away with offering you a new pair of headphones to replace the one that almost killed you, and caused bodily damage.
If someone threw acid on you in the street, it would be considered assault, and they'd spend years in jail if found and charged. We really don't need to let corporations get away with the same.
Intentionally?
Bose engineers surely understand the risks inherent in their batteries.
Depends on whether Bose engineers were unaware of risks of lithium batteries to the extent that they didn't put any warnings on the product, safe from a recommendation to "remove" the headphones if the user experiences a "warming sensation".
Could it be the case that Bose thought that "warming sensation" is the worst that could happen? Let's see what the comments here say!
>In the end you're carrying a high energy density power source on your head that would love to just catch fire. Don't they teach kids anything in chemistry these days?
>I mean I’m glad it didn’t happen to me, but a billion people are carrying around billions of Lithium-ion batteries. Those batteries sometimes catch fire because Lithium is highly flammable. It’s gonna happen.
>Nothing is perfectly safe, that is how lithium batteries fail. You should know so you can properly deal with problems.
>Well, at lease EVs are spontaneously catching fire.
>Everyone is aware of the risks, there were a bunch of stories about airplane cell phone fires a few years ago.
>lithium battery fires are really nasty, and that's why he got a chemical burn. LiPF6 is a contact irritant, PF5 it decomposes to is a gas, and also a respiratory irritant, and HF PH5 decomposes in the air is a dangerous poisonous acid. This is what everybody visiting a lithium battery factory is told on safety orientation. In case there is fire in the factory, run, preferably until you are few blocks away.
I don't even know what to think. I guess they just didn't know.
I highly doubt that, but don't let the paranoia get to you and start thinking of all the bad things that could've happened, because they didn't. In fact, I'd say the fire retardants in the plastic did exactly what they were supposed to do, given that you only mentioned smoke and not actual flames.
It probably does emit some very nasty gases while it does that, plastics are, as a rule, not nice to be near when they are burning or exposed to flames, all kinds of nasty stuff can come out of them, including dioxins.
- What happened: exactly what you said, you can replace this as 'item X with a lithium-ion battery'. This is an event that could happen to any lithium-ion device, is scary and is something that we should be aware of and is scary
- Bose's customer support is abysmal at handling it (I wonder how first-line support for other companies would be)
Thanks for sharing the post, I'm sorry it happened to you and I hope you burns recover very soon!!
Great point!
So what I'm hearing is that Bose should recall all wireless headphones they ever made, and continue selling their new products with appropriate warnings.
In fact, I think it will be a great improvement of their slogan:
BOSE. Better sound through research. Scary, and something you should be aware of is scary.
Until then, It's safe to assume that people think their products are safe, not scary, because that's how they market them as.
Here's a response I expect. Take this as a model customer service response if you are in the business of selling (potentially) self-exploding devices:
-------
Dear <Customer Name>. Thank you for reporting the incident to us. I have escalated your report to the engineering team.
A representative of our company will be reaching out to you to inquire for further details to find out the exact cause of the malfunction to prevent it from happening in the future.
As our product have caused you harm, I may not assist you further, as all I can do is offer a replacement product. I have therefore forwarded your request to our Consumer Relations team senior specialist <Firstname Lastname> who will reach out to you by <timeframe> with regards to settling this in a manner satisfactory to you. They can be reached directly by <phone x extension> or by email at <email address>.
We take safety seriously, and we are immediately reporting this incident to CPSC, as we are obligated by law. You can do your part at the following web address: https://www.saferproducts.gov/IncidentReporting
Thank you so much for reporting this incident in detail, and helping us make our products safer for everyone!
Do you know how any chemicals got on your arm? Was the smoke itself the likely chemical that your arm was exposed to? (Did it not affect your lungs and eyes?) Or did something drop/drip from the headphones on your body? Or is it that when you grabbed it while it was burning, some part of it that had burned also rubbed your arms? Did your ears feel chemically burnt the same way?
Also, "lipo" batteries are actually the least safe configurations for liion. LiFePo and LiTi are inherently safer, but liion pouch cells are probably the worst even amongst other batteries of the same chemistry. A regular 18650 is very hard to puncture or deform, does not swell and has built in vent ports on the top- a li-po usually doesn't. So they have very little structural integrity, can be easy to puncture (which sometimes lead to internal shorting), have a hard time venting gases when they overheat, and need to be kept compressed to avoid swelling.
The reason they are still used is because of the huge weight savings that comes with not having a heavy steel casing and because they are a lot more modular. That also means they can be made larger and push a much higher amperage. At the very high end you can go up to 200-300 amps per cell vs 30-35 for high current 18650s.
What are suggesting people do? Headphones only function while on your head.
Wisconsin and France have had notable butter fires. So I guess even butter fires can be bad news.
Everyone here, maybe. Almost everyone I know of is certainly not aware of any dangers (or goes with the classic "it will certainly not happen to me, what are the chances of that?").
I still have to remind my relatives not to just throw a charging phone wherever it lands (like under the pillow). The risk of it going off may be small, but the cost would be very high.
No harm warning about these risks on the label, then?
Everyone is aware, so it surely won't hurt the bottom line.
It could be the former. But it could also be the latter, in which case the OP taking legal action might save a few other Bose users some pain and suffering. Which is partly why he should escalate this.
Imagine there are N = 3 safeguards in the product design (note: I have no idea how many there are in reality), and imagine 1 of them is defective across the whole line. That means the other 2 remaining ones would still prevent almost every incident, and you'd indeed need to be unlucky for all 3 to fail. When you observe the first failure, the only thing you can conclude is that, in your particular case, all the safeguards failed. You cannot conclude (with any useful degree of confidence) that there was no common defect across the entire product line, given there are 2 other safeguards to prevent disasters. To figure that out the only practical way (without risking more incidents) is to actually examine the product and the failure mode.
(Now, admittedly I'm oversimplifying a bit here, but the point stands. e.g. if there are 2 safeguards, each with an independent 1/10k chance of failure, and you get 2 failures within the first 20k items manufactured, then you know that's incredibly unlikely without a defect. But even this reasoning only works after the 2nd incident (not 1st), and it still requires you to know the characteristics of all the safeguards... which is not information consumers have immediately available, and neither of which is the case here AFAIK.)
The amount of chemical energy released by burning of the electrolyte, and graphite is many times higher than battery's stored electric energy.
Most of what burns in a lithium cell is electrolyte, and later graphite.
Do you know what the percentage is? Some Googling suggests around 4% by weight or so?