Coming just after Project Farm's video about most of the power tool batteries sold on Amazon Ebay being hard-to-detect counterfeits, missing their safety features, and containing unlabelled cells which are also missing their safety features.
Fucking yikes. Those looked like eBay pages, was there a separate video on Amazon? I know Amazon is shady but hopefully not as shady as those eBay fraudsters.
The packaging looked so similar it'd be nice to know how to determine it is real or not. I guess open the case and check the batteries.
Amazon ist just as shady. The additional issue with them is that they pool inventory from their own and from marketplace sellers that they do logistics for. Let's say they source genuine batteries from the OE manufacturer and some marketplace dude will have his stock at the Amazon warehouse, which is counterfeit goods.
Chances are then that when you order from Amazon themselves, they pick one of the counterfeit units from the marketplace seller because they're stored in the same shelf and Amazon does the shipping.
I cannot give you good advice on where to purchase original batteries for a good price online, but I know that Amazon should not be your first choice.
that'll be my lesson about posting videos from memory! updated. The youtube comments did mention Amazon and other shops too.
Yeah, the takeaway did seem to be, at the very least, to check whether the cells inside are branded - although in many cases they were packed in a way that you can't tell without destroying the internal plastic structure.
obviously wouldn't have helped the poor cyclist, who could only afford the non-genuine batteries.
Ah, gotcha. I don't quite trust Amazon to do a great job, either. I just know they are official distributors for some of these brands so I wonder if my mistrust is unfounded.
Safest thing to do is buy from the manufacturer approved resellers, that can even be on eBay as they often have a presence there as well as their own site.
This is really horrific. But as this was second hand I'm not sure how having "independent third-party certification" in place would help, unless you could either get something you bought certified afterwards, or it was illegal to sell secondhand without said certification documents (but then you still run the risk of forgeries or after purchase alterations).
It points towards a bigger problem to me, that of dodgy imports in the first place. We need
Online market places to be jointly and severally liable for anything on their sites. No more shirking responsibility by saying it's on their sellers.
Proper import checks (thanks Brexit) to catch stuff that's not up to the existing safety standards.
More money put into enforcing existing safety standards in general
To work closely with the Chinese government to tackle dangerous products before they're out on the open market.
How they do it doesn't really matter how they do it, just that there's laws in place to make them do it. It's also more than that, if there's people with fake goods on their platforms and they're not doing enough to tackle it they should be fined into oblivion.
In addition: Teach people to put them in storage/garage/basement and not the house or apartment hallway. Not even non-electric bikes. Because even if they ain't the cause of the fire they still hinder egress when you gotta go fast.
Not all homes have a safe place where you can do that. And I even recall one story of a family that built a small shed in their front yard so they could store their bikes—not even for safety, but just the convenience of not needing to awkwardly drag the bikes up and down narrow stairs every dat—and the council forced them to remove it.
Apartments need to be required to have secure bike storage, and houses need to be allowed by right to build small bike sheds.
Edit: it was Ireland, not the UK. I guess because most of the stories about cycling I hear that aren't Australian are from the UK, my memory just lumped all of the British Isles together.
I hadn't bought a bike for years, and a few years ago managed to pick up a cheap second hand bike for £60. It wasn't a bad bike, but obviously nothing special. After the lockdowns, when every man and his dog seemed to take up cycling, I looked at getting a cheap new bike. The cheapest ones I could find were a few hundred pounds.
I looked at ebikes earlier this year, and the magazines and websites reviewing the cheap bikes were setting a minimum price of £1500 to avoid the cheaply made junk. Even second hand bikes were going for £800+
To put this in perspective, I can get a second hand motorbike for the same price range, and a car for around £1000. Obviously these are not going to be the best motorbikes or cars on the road, but they run, and will last for at least a few years.
They're putting out bikes that are well into nice used car territory, it's absurd. Shit, some of them are even brand new car prices. A lot of these manufacturers are smoking crack.
I've seen this argument a lot, and I don't understand it. Few people are buying those high end bikes, and no one is forced to buy one. Using that as justification that the prices are out of control is just weird to me.
There is an argument about prices to be made. I just looked up the base model Specialized Allez with 8 speed Claris, and it retails for $1200. A few years ago that would have been an ~$800 bike, I think (albeit likely with rim brakes instead of disc). I don't know what all is driving the prices, inflation is certainly a factor.
But that conveys the issue way better than complaining about super bikes that cost $15k. The barrier to entry for a newbie has gone up that much.
I'm super into mountain biking, and never bought a new bike in my life. The last one i bought was the most expensive bike i ever owned by a long shot, it was practically new and it was like a third of what it would've been new. Dude who sold it said he likes it, but it was bad for climbing, because it was too heavy. He showed me his brand new bike. On the way home i thought: so the carbon bike with aluminium swing arm is too heavy? So i looked up his new bike, which was like £8000-£9000 pounds and was roughly 600 grams lighter than the bike i bought off him. Bike prices might be insane, but i often feel like it's the people's own fault. Cyclists buy absolutely everything no matter the cost it seems.
My friend told me that his boss saw my ebike when i bought some bread and had to get one himself. He's an out of shape baker, and he bought himself a 10k e-ountain bike. That's more than i paid for my ebike, my downhill bike and the enduro i ride almost daily.
I paid $30 for a used mountain bike that I rode for years. The trick was that I bought it from a bike co-op that sold used bikes, so knowledgeable people had already looked it over and fixed it up and they offered cheap stands/tools/help for any work you needed to do yourself. Did many 25-mile round-trips from Northern Virginia to work in D.C. on that thing.
I wish things like that were more popular here. It's rare to hear about any sort of co-op, and they tend to be in the cities rather than out in the sticks where I am.
When he was pushed back by the flames and toxic fumes he called to his partner, Gemma, 31, and children, Lilly, eight, and Oliver, four, to jump from the same bedroom. “She said: ‘I can’t get out.’ That’s the last words I heard. I don’t know what happened,” Peden said.
That's fucking awful. I feel those words would haunt me for the rest of my life, which may not be that long if I had to live with so much survivor's guilt.
It has so far focused on the previous owners of a secondhand battery that Peden bought online days before it exploded in his hallway.
Anyone know how EU regulations look like for this?
That's fucking awful. I feel those words would haunt me for the rest of my life, which may not be that long if I had to live with so much survivor's guilt.
It's impressive that he's using this to work so hard for change.
So let me get this right, since I‘m not from the US and don‘t understand all the laws nor what exactly was happening here.
This DEA officer is seeking immunity, not because he killed a suspect or a criminal, but an innocent mother. Well, it was an accident and he was speeding and not paying attention to everything and anyone but not because he was in pursuit, but he was trying to catch up with the rest of his team.
Yup, we need to explicitly abolish it. I'm happy to pay good officers more if that's what we need to attract good public servants, but I have no sympathy for the power-hungry officers who abuse qualified immunity.
Saying that it's some chinese brand is super funny. They make like 80% of batteries. I often heat people saying they don't want some chinese led's, they want the good stuff. Do people think there is a guy called Philip who solders led's in his basement in Michigan?
Well you're correct but some brands actually QC (quality control) their products and others do not. This filters out a lot of issues, just having a real human look everything over
Obviously, damn near everything is made in China, but there's a difference between an item designed by a reputable company and and manufactured in China and one that is made shoddily by a Chinese shell company that's practically untraceable.
I don't know about the UK, but at least in Australia Amazon would be responsible at least for the cost of a replacement. Which is small comfort in a case where it's done significant damage and even killed people, but in cases where it was a faulty product that failed in a mostly harmless way it's pretty good.
(I don't know one way or the other whether they could be held liable for more than that.)
They absolutely don't care. They've pivoted from an online retailer, into a courier with a storefront taking an obscene percentage.
It wasn't enough that they ruined the high street, they even ruined their own shopping experience. It's literally just AliExpress with better delivery times. You get more trustworthy stuff on eBay.
It was not the ebike, it was a secondhand battery. It might've been an original, but bad battery, it might've been tinkered with by the previous owner, it might've been a Chinese knock-off. I doubt he knows at this point, and it's probably difficult or even impossible to determine from the wreckage.
Wow, that's great to hear! I'm way north of the border (like, Canada), and even though I haven't noticed anyone wearing these, I tend to be an early adopter of just about anything. LOL You should see the looks I had when I used "bar mits" on my bike over the winter. 😂
👆This.
It’s not going to affect this particular bike’s value too much in either direction. If you think the paint prep is worth the effort then go for it!
From a practical standpoint, you might want to consider at least cleaning up any exposed steel and applying a little clear coat.
For sure, I've already started scrubbing the rust away from the chrome using aluminum foil and I'm genuinely impressed by how well that works. The rims and fenders were badly peppered with rust and now look almost new.
The answer to people storing their ebikes in their houses and getting themselves killed isn't to ban ebikes or make ebikes harder to get. Because then they just drive a car and get someone else killed. The answer is parking minimums. We need secure, convenient, and electrified outdoor bike parking at every residence. It should be the law. If an ebike catches fire outside, nobody's going to die.
It would be a lot cheaper to stop allowing no brand cheap crap with no accountability to be drop shipped from China. There are clear and well defined safety standards for lithium batteries and they're just being ignored. They won't prevent 100% of failures but 99.9% if they're followed.
I don't care about cheap, I care about preventing mass extinction. Bike parking minimums will make e-bikes feasible for a greater range of people and reduce car use.
If it doesn't have a valid CE marking all that shit should be turned back at the border. There's no excuse for deathtraps to be sold in first world countries.
It really doesn't cost much to make this stuff safe.
I'm not talking about checking a stamp. I'm talking about a full inspections of an item taken at random from a batch. And charging them for it.
And unless you have an office in Europe where we can go and arrest you for fraud when it turns out not every batch follows the rules, it will happen to every batch as well.
I imagine most of the batteries aren't LFP due to size restrictions on the bikes, but if the industry could move to that instead of pushing for even more range that'd be a huge boost in saftey
I really don't get people like that one dude. Someone makes a shitty battery and they turn around screaming yOuRe sTuPiD FoR ChArGiNg sUcH A DaNgErOuS ThInG In yOuR HoMe.
Can you imagine this poor dude? Lost his wife and two children. He's got to live with that. And the internet is screaming "you're stupid!!!"
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