This is terribly tragic, and I want to be clear that the headline’s brevity (if you even agree it has some) hides a deep concern for this technology. What I’m about to share is sad. A man enters an elevator carrying what appears to be a lithium-ion e-bike battery, which spontaneously combusts moments after the elevator door closes.
The shot shifts downstairs, where someone discovers him, and he is eventually removed (you see his corpse, and it’s not pretty)
I was hoping it was fake, but I can’t see how it is.
The unfortunate truth is that it doesn’t matter if this was faked. This happens with increasing frequency. People are dying in these fires, and as of 2022, there were little to no regulations on E-Bike batteries in the US (according to Consumer Reports), with instances of fires and deaths rising annually.
That Queens fire [a 9-year-old boy was found dead in the apartment,] was one of 104 fires stemming from batteries for electric bikes or electric scooters, and one of four deaths attributed to those fires, in 2021 in New York City. A December 2021 fire from an electric bike battery in Manhattan public housing, for example, resulted in an adult dying and two children climbing down an exterior pipe from a fourth-floor apartment to escape. By early December 2022, the city’s fire department attributed 202 fires, 142 injuries, and six deaths to such batteries, including one in August that reportedly killed a 5-year-old and her father’s girlfriend.
Though the problem is seen in stark relief in New York City, given its close living quarters and electric bikes’ popularity there, similar reports come from around the world.
The London Fire Brigade says it handled more than 70 fires caused by electric bike and electric scooter batteries in 2021. China, where e-bikes became popular far before they did in the U.S., tallied 10,000 electric bike fires from 2013 to 2017, with more than 200 deaths, according to an official 2018 release. In September, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission released a report in which it identified six deaths from 2017 to 2021 related to fires stemming from e-mobility devices, including bikes, scooters, and hoverboards.
I am not a huge fan of overregulation, but we’ve covered the battery and apartment fire problem in recent years. The libertarian part of me (there’s a little bit in there) thinks that individuals would be responsible for the product of their choices, but human nature doesn’t work that way. People invariably excuse their mistakes or invest more energy in avoiding bad outcomes in which they played a part than what might have prevented it upfront. At the same time, we must be vigilant in preventing impulses or people who think they know better than to imagine everything needs to be regulated because they’ll do that if we let them.
I can’t speak to any property damage in the video above. I’m sure there was plenty of that, but the only human casualty was the man carrying his presumably fully charged lithium cell into what turned into a moving incinerator. Had the fire not killed him, the fumes would have. Another environmentally unfriendly effect of this not-at-all-green technology push.
I’m still waiting for someone to tell me how many EVs you need to sell to offset the emissions from one EV car fire. That’s akin to George Carlin’s joke asking whether God can create a rock so large that he himself can’t lift it.
