Hundreds of e-Bikes Have Been Starting Fatal Fires, Should You Be Worried?

Living in the big city means taking into account a daily commute, whether for work, school, or errands. Far from ideal, city infrastructure means that said commute will have to take place on public transport or some form of two-wheel urban mobility solution, unless walking for hours on end is your idea of fun. Zapping across the city on a bike has been "a thing" for decades, but today, most of those who do choose to ride a bike to and from work do so on an electric variant. It's cheaper, more fun, greener, and more efficient.

What's there not to love, right? The fact that they're "deadly dangerous," apparently.

The developments of 2020 prompted an unprecedented boom on the market of e-bikes and other types of electric two-wheelers. People still needed to move about the city, but they had to do it in a way in which they'd no longer share their private space with anyone outside their bubble. E-Bikes, e-scooters, and ride-sharing programs for both have since become standard across the world - with the exception of those cities where they're explicitly banned, like Paris or London.

In a city like New York, electric micro-mobility solutions are everywhere, literally in the hundreds of thousands. E-Bikes and e-scooters are a fixture with delivery services, rental fleets, and daily commuters, and they're widely praised for being cost-effective, more time efficient, and with a much smaller carbon footprint than other means of transport available. They're also being singled out as deadlier than these, too.

The number of fatal fires caused by e-bike batteries is on the rise and has been so proportionally with the number of devices available. On June 20, in yet another fire at an e-bike shop, four people were killed, two more were severely injured, and there was considerable property damage.

This was no freak accident, either: the cold hard facts are that 13 people perished in e-bike batteries fire in 2023 in NYC alone. We're halfway through the year, and there have been 108 incidents of this kind already, a small but marked increase over previous years.

E-Bike batteries are to blame for each and every one of them – lithium batteries, to be more exact, the kind that's used in most of today's e-bikes. Commissioner Laura Kavanagh calls them "incredibly deadly" because they're unpredictable, cause much fire when they ignite and burn fast. "It can often be too late, as soon as the fire has begun," she says. Once such a battery catches fire, the only thing you can do is take yourself and your family out to safety and call 911. A fire extinguisher won't work in putting out the flames from a lithium battery, so there's no sense in trying.

The numbers and the facts show that there's serious reason for concern where e-bikes are concerned. But proper context is a must.

Lithium batteries have been a safety issue since the early '90s. You'll surely remember the fires and subsequent recalls of Samsung phones, Dell notebook computers, or hoverboards, which were also linked to lithium batteries. The problem with these batteries is, and has always been, mismanagement of the battery and rarely a factory defect.

It's true that there's pressure on manufacturers to squeeze more power into smaller batteries because consumers want more range. In turn, this makes the batteries more prone to ignite when not handled properly and has earned them their unpredictable reputation. That's not to say they can go off whenever unless there's a factory defect.

The issue with lithium-ion batteries seems to be that of improper use, at least regarding the recent e-bike fires. Using aftermarket or unsuitable chargers, overcharging the battery, and even using batteries that come from unverified makers that do not match the requirements of the bike they're being used with leads to hard wear and tear and ultimately to that one catastrophic failure that gets one cell to ignite.

Indeed, the number of e-bike battery fires is very high in NYC, but that's only because the number of e-bikes here is sky-high. Private ownership means that most people will charge the batteries in residential buildings with no special charging areas with fire hazard measures.

There are safety considerations with lithium batteries, but they're no more serious or pressing than with any other piece of electric gear, household appliance, or gadget. The more bikes, the higher the number of incidents – but these incidents are related to sub-par units that either fail to meet safety standards or bypass them altogether.

If you own an e-bike or an e-bike for each member of the family, you shouldn't dread going to sleep thinking that it might just blow up at night. You're not living with a ticking bomb that could go off at any minute without warning. What you should do instead is follow the safety guidelines, which are just that: not common sense rules, but rules to ensure your safety.

They're always mentioned in the owner's manual of your bicycle, so read it carefully when unboxing. Never charge the battery overnight, never leave it unsupervised when charging, always charge the battery the exact number of hours specified by the maker, never tinker with or fix the battery yourself (leave it to the pros, as the saying goes), and never leave the battery in a hot, humid, or too cold environment.

The list goes on. You should replace the battery with a new one from the same maker at the first sign of trouble or at the end of its estimated charge cycle. Buy only UL-certified batteries or the equivalent for EU states. Don't MacGuyver your way around the battery, the drivetrain, or the motor of the bike.

"Lithium batteries are generally safe and unlikely to fail, but only so long as there are no defects and the batteries are not damaged or mistreated," Steve Kerber, vice president and executive director of Underwriters Laboratory's Fire Safety Research Institute, says. Incidents will happen, but they're exceptions, and they stem from mistreatment of the batteries. So the issue with the rising number of incidents is directly related to the increasing number of e-bikes around us and not some kind of harbinger of doom.