OT Another e-scooter battery fire

It is not, because many of them use LiFePO4, which doesn't sustain fire in normal conditions. (and a few especially buses use LTO, which is even safer)

Yes you can burn anything with a gas torch - and under those conditions a sealed tank of petrol won't stay sealed forever.

Theo

Yeah right....

Here the rental scooters look nothing like the private ones, so there is no chance of confusion.

Policing the privately held ones however is a different matter.

Also remember that e-bike are legal and are not going away, but crappy batteries and chargers afflict those as well.

Despite all the calls for standards, nobody seems to notice that such standards already exist. IEC 62133-2 which is also incorporated into the EU as EN 62133-2 and the UK as BS EN 62133-2 has stringent testing requirements.

The only thing missing is enforcement.

John

Not just the end-use that causes fires. Even the mfrs are vulnerable

LIFEPO is not LIPO

The official scooter schemes only exist in some locations, there are far more towns beyond the reach of them where illegal use of E scooters is very common. You solution could easily be applied in those and occasionally the police do seize and destroy one, but they cannot keep up with the numbers sold. Your hopes for a solution like you suggest have already been dashed.

GH

In message <v55tcf$3kron$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me, at 08:10:07 on Sat, 22 Jun

Most of the non-hired ones already are (to the extent they can't legally be ridden in public).

Do people take the hired ones home?

If they've got the range I can't see why not. But as they can't be charged at home, that range would have to include the distance to get back to the charging station. It would be very expensive on the simplest tariff (usually priced per minute, or per 10 minutes, etc), but I think that longer hire periods are available. You'd still have to get back to a charging station though to charge them up.

In message <v5hm7k$28j5d$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me, at 19:21:40 on Wed, 26 Jun

So that's a "no".

I don't think the ones round here (MK) have charging stations. When you use one you just leave it where you finished with it, in an accessible public place. The next user will find it there (using the app) and then leave it somewhere else. Occasionally you see a man in a van either picking one up that's been left somewhere where no-one wants it, or that has no charge. They phone home so base knows how much charge is left. The battery packs look interchangeable (and they look identical to the ones on the hire e-bikes from the same company) so I suspect that they just swap batteries rather than recharge in the scooter.

MK normal tariff is 1£ plus 20p per minute for Lime

Greater Manchester made much of the first 100,000km of its bike-hire scheme.

When one looked at the data published by Manchester, and divided the cost of the scheme by the distance travelled per journey, each 1.6 mile trip cost the taxpayer £436. A stretch limo would have cost less.

That phenomenal cost would come down to 4.6p per mile when the total distance cycled under the scheme reaches a billion miles cycled, that is, very unlikely. And there will be other costs incurred in that period, such as replacement cycles for those lost or damaged, and maintenance and upkeep of the fleet.

Not at all. Someone might have a charging station near their work, and "commute in reverse". They leave the scooter on charge while they are at work, and take it - or another one - home at the end of the day.

Blimey!

Someone reckons the London scheme's subsidy is costing about 3£ per journey.

EVs with heat pumps, have the materials to condition their own existence.

EBikes do not. And EBikes don't really have any incentive to make them safe. That's why the design of them is so bad.

China has their own spec-in-hand right now, and we could see a shakeout in the smaller cell makers as a result (unwilling to pay to meet spec, go out of business).

But I don't see a plan to make the bicycle design better and to make certain features mandatory.

Apparently China has something like 350,000,000 bicycles and they also have an *inordinate* number of EBike fires. This new regulation I'm referring to, is mainly to solve their own domestic fire situation. It has nothing to do with AliExpress foreign customers.

Paul

China:

"About 21,000 e-bike-caused fires were reported nationwide in 2023, an increase of 17.4 percent compared to 2022, in contrast with 18,000 fires caused by e-bikes in 2022, which was up 23.4 percent from the number in 2021.

Statistics show that about 80 percent of e-bike fires, which happen in an explosive way in seconds, making them almost uncontrollable, occur while charging, and more than half of them occur during charging at night. Not to mention the fact that modification of the batteries and e-bikes to raise their speed and load capacity far beyond national standards is almost an open business in many cities".

From China Daily in February

But if you analyze everything your city does this way, you'll just end up with a permanent kink in your neck.

Consider how much other forms of transit are subsidized, and today, how poor a job they're doing.

It's better not to be doing this sort of math. It's depressing.

Apparently we have some number of hundreds of buses. And all of them need to be replaced. And (checks wallet) how much do we have available to replace buses ? All the buses have suspension systems in need of work, for a start. They keep the "best buses" for daily usage, but they have been dipping into the "B" buses to make up for shortfalls. The bus suspensions are in bad shape, because we do a poor job on road maintenance (roads damaged by buses!).

Do you see now, how you get that kink in your neck ???

Transit is a giant, circular, cluster-f*ck.

When you look at the Kings fortune in transit systems, while the bicycle experiment looks terrible, if you actually thought about the other money you wasted, you'd be in a rubber room about now.

Paul

Presumably this is the same China that reported its covid death numbers, yet when relatives were allowed to collect their loved one’s remains, the queues for individual mortuaries stretched into the miles. The was reported (by Westerners) at the time.

The figure of 21000 e-bike fires in China is probably one-tenth of the real number.

I would wager the number is smaller, and China in reality is inflating the number to justify the new rules against the fierce opposition to impose those rules. That is how politicians work.

It is said that this was exaggerated, that 'people dropping in the streets' was staged. We didn't see that happen anywhere else.

Likewise for COVID, the very severe lockdown undoubtedly suited the authorities.