E-bike batteries have caused 200 fires in New York: ‘Everyone’s scared’ | Hacker News Reader

E-bike batteries have caused 200 fires in New York: ‘Everyone’s scared’

theguardian.com

21 pointselorant24 comments

Wait till these people find out about cars.

EVs usally burn worse than regular cars, their batteries are very hard to put out. In a combustion engine the tank is relatively small and easily sealed off from air supply, the same isn't true for the large batteries of EVs.

If the battery packs in EVs wasn't sealed off from air it would spontaneously start to burn. So...

The reality is that ICE vehicles burn at a rate almost 10 times that of BEV vehicles.

>If the battery packs in EVs wasn't sealed off from air it would spontaneously start to burn. So...

I think you are missing the point here.

>The reality is that ICE vehicles burn at a rate almost 10 times that of BEV vehicles.

I am not clear what you mean by "rate" here. Incidents? Speed of burning down? From being involved with firefighting I can tell you that EVs are very difficult fires, which are significantly harder to combat than regular car fires.

This is nothing like the current usage of cars.

This is more like if everyone suddenly started fueling their cars in their kitchens.

My NYC apartment had a 3 story garage underneath it, but with modern engineering standards you could probably burn a car to ash and not get much more than a few whiffs of smoke in the lobby

These scooters and bikes are bursting into flames in people's apartments, and unlike cars, no one is engineering around their storage and charging. Often times these things burst in flames in the main living area, completely blocking off escape.

If you actually look at the landscape for these devices, it's clear that this isn't fear mongering. There are boatloads of poorly designed bikes arriving in the city that are liable to go up in flames because they were designed with the bare minimum in safety features.

Your car went through millions of dollars of testing to be allowed on streets, that's why Pinto-like situations are not a dime a dozen occurrence. These bikes go through getting a fake UL sticker slapped on and not much more.

Right, car fires are not a good comparison because you don't park your car in your hallway, or leaned up against your bed, or hanging inverted a foot from the ceiling.

Some people spend a lot of time locking themselves directly into these little inferno chambers. The only fire deaths I've directly seen were in cars. Naturally they are more visible than houses, but also so common that they don't make the news.

A car fire in NYC is news.

Taking 1% of US statistics for NYC, there should be around 1100 car fires, with 4 deaths. I'm not sure those deaths would be clearly identified as a car fire as opposed to a generic fatal accident. A fire in a tunnel, basement parking lot or engulfing multiple cars, OTOH.

Car fires are mostly caused by old cars overheating under heavy use. This gives the owner a chance to pull over and let the car burn.

Bike fires are mostly caused by overheating while charging at night. This gives the owner the chance to die in their sleep.

I wonder if insurance will (maybe it has) begin factoring in e-(transportation) for home and other insurance policies.

I expect that the pushback will come from insurance companies; a letter from the insurance company saying "we won't cover you if an e-bike catches fire" becomes a letter from the landlord saying "we will evict if you store an e-bike in your apartment."

Something I've been wondering: Is there something special about E-Bike/Scooter batteries to be causing fires? Or is it just the relative size and/or numbers (edit) and rougher usage? I haven't heard of a rash of lithium car starter or uninterrupted power supply batteries causing fires, for example. Or even home solar batteries (which I assume would have better protections, but that can be an answer too).

Many of the e-bikes and scooters are sold out of small shops in NYC's various Chinatown areas. Typically the shops are run by local small business owners who have direct connections to factory owners overseas who are willing to sell to the NYC shop owner at a factory price. As a result these bikes tend to be rather dubious in origin as they were manufactured, imported, and sold without necessarily going through the same certifications that a large business would have required.

On the one hand its a profitable venture for small local businesses, and the vast majority of these e-bikes function fine without big government regulation stepping in and trying to control things. But on the other hand there are a worrying number of scattered incidents of dangerous fires in our very dense city.

I think this is why the article makes such a big deal about trying to track down brands and origins of the burned e-bikes. Is it random events distributed across all the e-bikes, or are there just a few bad sources that are selling particularly dangerous e-bikes? I don't think anyone knows yet.

E-Bike and Scooters likely have more high density batteries then anything else other then the car.

The cars have to go threw far, far more testing and the cost of getting it wrong is many, many billions. Most car companies make their own batteries and take it seriously.

These E-Bikes and scooters come from China manufactures where the battery come from like 5 levels deep of suppliers.

"Each fire happened, they say it’s an e-bike, but we don’t know which one it is"

Sounds fishy. How do we even know these were e-bike fires?

The person you are quoting is asking the fire department to do extra work, not questioning the correctness of the fire department's conclusions.

The answers he is looking for could just as easily be collected by his group, he just wants the taxpayers to do it for him.

> The person you are quoting is asking the fire department to do extra work, not questioning the correctness of the fire department's conclusions.

Correct. I'm saying that the lack of record keeping/reporting has me questioning the validity of the reported number of fires.

If you tell me your record keeping is poor/vague, I'm not going to blindly trust a statement like: "don't worry these records are accurate".

In my first response, I wasn't sure of your motives and gave you the benefit of the doubt. Now I am sure of your motives.

"Dozens of photographs and pages of supporting evidence lead to the conclusion that the fire started in the battery of the e-bike"

Is obviously fake because it doesn't list the brand of the battery or the bike. No matter that the labels were burned off in the fire and were probably fake in the first place. You want to know where they came from? Ask the owner where he bought it, and then ask that seller, and go up the chain. The owners are much more likely to cooperate with the advocacy group rather than the fire investigator, but never mind that.

Give me a break. "You say the fire was started with gasoline, but unless you can tell me which gas station it came from I don't even believe there was a fire"

Firefighters fight fires. How recognizable do you think a burned up e-bike is? Do you think firefighters have nothing better to do than go through photos of fires with e-bikes involved?

Their report keeping is "poor" because the job of a firefighter isn't to spent hours investigating which model of e-bike might have caused the fire.

Are the pictures of the melted e-bikes not sufficient for you?

Nobody quoted in the article doubts that e-bike batteries caused the fires referred to by the article. They simply don't know which brands made the batteries that caught fire.

The rest of the quote: "What would be more useful, he said, would be if the fire department committed resources to testing and sharing details about which batteries were safe to use, so that workers could make more informed decisions."

> Sounds fishy. How do we even know these were e-bike fires?

Fire inspectors are remarkably good at pinpointing the cause of a fire.

Many moons ago, I had a NiMH-powered portable vacuum go up and set my apartment on fire.

I actually went with the fire inspector afterward (dumb of me as they were suspicious about the fire--never talk to the police), and he was very happy to talk about it.

Walking around was enlightening: "Okay, let's see. Fire started ... somewhere around ... here. See that V-shape on the walls from the smoke? That's like an arrow pointing at the source. Aaaand, yep, there it is. (Pulls out pliers and yanks wire out of the wall) That's the culprit. (pulls stove out) AHA! There's the other battery they couldn't find. Hmmmm, those cabinets fell. Something heavy in those? (Yeah, cast iron fry pans). That would do it. You had some books right there and there. Oh, that's odd. Dense paper doesn't really burn that well. Those books are well burnt--accelerant here. Did you have oil in those cabinets? (Sure did). Okay. Well, looking at this the temperature was about X degrees--wow, we got lucky--this was pretty close to flashing over. ..." This went on for about an hour.

One thing I really learned--don't try to commit fire insurance fraud unless you're on the level of a fire inspector. They WILL know even if they can't prove it.

Assuming it is ebikes that cause these fires, the scary thing is that residents may use water to put out fire without knowing what could happen.

Not just e-bikes but scooters, and I'm convinced the main driver of these fires is delivery apps.

Delivery app riders tend to have bikes with massive batteries to improve range and speed, but under-engineered electronics to cut down on cost.

I don't blame them for trying to make a living but it'd be great if the delivery apps themselves could take a more proactive stance and maybe subsidize some "known good" e-bike brands so they're not creating an army of Alibaba-specials with minimal QC ready to burst into flames.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com