Engineers need a union. I'm sure this was a bean counter decision and not something they wanted to do.
Battery packs can be expensive and have huge margin if you make them (mechanically) fit only 1 year of 1 model of 1 brand. Which is exactly what Dyson seems to be doing.
Designing BMS'es so that the batteries (safely) fail as quickly as possible is not hard.
I don't like that my Bosch e-bike batteries have closed-source schematics, software, and chargers (i mean really, what the fuck am I going to steal Bosch), nor that the software that runs on the bike is utterly locked down to the point where I can't even pay for a copy (it's available only to e-bike dealers and none of them have leaked it as far as I can tell), but unfortunately, I have no trust in my fellow schmuck to not accidentally or negligently build bombs when they rebuild their battery packs, nor would I trust them not to do stupid shit with the e-bike software like remove speed limiters.
I barely even trust myself to rebuild packs, and I kinda-sorta know what I'm doing, which is just enough to get myself into trouble. I still look at the two packs I have rebuilt with a side-eye, months and years on from when I built them.
I’m not going to lie, this is the first thing I would do if I could flash e-bike software.
I'm tired of being treated like an idiot consumer because someone, somewhere, fucked up their Li-ion battery.
Battery fires are not hotter. An EV battery fire and ICE car fire actually have fairly similar heat energy profile. ICE cars are a bit more intense. There’s a study from Sweden that set fire to similar ICE and EV cars and measures the energy. A gasoline tank will typically store a lot more raw energy than an EV battery.
They are self oxidising if the electrolyte burns away. That’s true. The anode and cathode is shorted and you get thermal runaways. That’s why it’s a bit of a challenge to fully put out a battery fire. Next gen solid electrolyte batteries fixes that to some degree.
Of course you can extinguish a battery fire with a fire extinguisher, or just water. The problem is that thermal runaway will make the battery really hot again, which will reignite anything flammable around the battery. So you need to keep it cool for a long while, generally by spraying or submerging it in water.
We actually had an issue with this at Robocup one year, where one of the teams charged their battery at 3C and then blew it up. We didn't have a Class D extinguisher within reach, so we blasted it with a CO2 extinguisher while someone ran to get a class D extinguisher. The battery kept burning after blasting it with the CO2 extinguisher, but at a much reduced pace, and the perpetrating team took a selfie with their burning battery.
Humans will lie and cheat for profit but at the same time humans also build locked batteries. It's just that nowadays we take away responsibility of people and their choices and we don't want to deal with the fact that when someone is buying a shitty poorly built copy, they are the ones at fault because of their greed.
You could very much have an open market (and should) it's just that people would rather believe there is nothing wrong when they buy something that is suspiciously cheaper than it should be.
Greedy corporations are at the origin of the problem precisely because they try to extract too much for their stuff, selling it at what is an unreasonable price.
You cannot at the same time blame people for their poor choices out of greed and at the same time re-enforce the same behavior in corporations, that's nuts.