The Perplexing, Deadly Electric Bike Problem

At 29, Lanesha Hayden finally had a home of her own. She’d saved for years so her family could afford their own rental, choosing a ground-floor apartment in a three-story building in the Queens borough of New York City. One August day in 2021, Hayden noticed a family moving into the building’s basement, which the landlord rented though it wasn’t a legal dwelling. Around 2 a.m. the next day, Hayden says she heard “a loud explosion.” She ran to her apartment door. To get more news about ebike battery charging, you can visit magicyclebike.com official website.

“I saw nothing but black smoke; it was dark,” Hayden says. “I immediately realized something was going on because the tenant who’d just moved in that day, who started the fire, was screaming in the basement, was saying ‘Fire! Fire! Fire!’” Hayden alerted her partner and two daughters, and rushed them outside. Barefoot, they watched as firefighters helped nine other people escape down a ladder.

Firefighters searched the basement, where the fire started, and found a 9-year-old boy, Remi Miguel Gomez-Hernandez, already dead. By midmorning, firefighters had pinpointed the fire’s source. A lithium-ion battery from an electric bike was charging when it burst into flames, setting a room on fire.Hayden says she can’t get the idea of the little boy’s death out of her head: “My kids could have been that kid, so I feel for that family.” More than a year later, she’s still dealing with the aftermath: The fire left her family temporarily homeless and without any material items. “It was all gone,” she says. “We didn’t have no shoes; we didn’t have no coats; wintertime is coming, and we didn’t have no clothes or anything for the kids,” she says. “To this day, we’re still trying to pick up where we left off.”

It’s particularly hard for her to process the idea that all this destruction stemmed from an e-bike. “To lose something to an object, which probably could have been avoided, was very traumatizing,” she says.That Queens fire 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.

Specific data on the brands causing these fires isn’t available, but fire experts say they suspect that low-quality batteries from fringe players are often to blame.

Incidents across the U.S. make regular news: A Bend, Ore., garage fire sparked by an electric bike battery; a Utah retirement-community home fire from a charging electric bike; a Baltimore apartment-garage blaze from an electric bike with its motor on fire. Indeed, the president of the National Bicycle Dealers Association, Heather Mason, says that 10 percent of its members—bike shops—report having “some sort of thermal runaway in their store” from a battery.