A man who narrowly survived an ebike battery fire that killed his partner and two children says he is tormented by grief and guilt but determined to fight to change the law to avoid similar tragedies.
Scott Peden, 31, was placed in an induced coma for a month after suffering 15% internal burns when he tried to wrestle his burning ebike out of his Cambridge flat last June. He also smashed his heel in three places jumping from his bedroom after the battery exploded.
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.
He added: “Gemma knew I tried to help, but did the kids? Was their last thought ‘where’s Dad?’ I feel so much guilt and fear about what they went through in those last couple of minutes, it hits me every day.”
Peden learned of their fate only when he emerged from the coma in a burns unit in Broomfield hospital in Chelmsford. He says: “They told me Oliver was found in his bedroom. Gemma was found in our bedroom doorway and Lilly was under our beds with the two dogs.” The fire destroyed the family’s council flat and everything in it.
Cambridgeshire police told Peden that his family and the dogs all died from lithium gas poisoning. An inquest into their deaths will take place after police have concluded an investigation. It has so far focused on the previous owners of a secondhand battery that Peden bought online days before it exploded in his hallway.
Gemma, Oliver and Lilly were among 11 people killed in fires caused by ebike batteries in the UK last year, believed to be the highest number in a single year. Coroners, fire officers and campaigners have expressed growing alarm about rising sales of unregulated and potentially lethal batteries.
The number of fires from ebikes and escooters in London more than doubled in two years, from 78 in 2021 to 179 last year, according to figures from the London fire brigade. In the first five months of this year there have already been 66 such fires in the capital.
Peden is backing a campaign by the charity Electrical Safety First (ESF) for a law change to ensure there is independent third-party certification in the sale of such batteries, as there is with other dangerous products such as fireworks.
Speaking from the Cambridge flat where he has been rehoused, Peden said he was an “unlikely poster boy” for the campaign as he was dealing with his own trauma. He said: “I used to dream the whole experience over and over again. The PTSD means that sudden bangs put me in a panic attack.”
But, he added: “Campaigning has given me a sense of purpose. My life has been ruined but I can help save someone else’s.”
At the time of the fire, Peden was working for M&S unloading early-morning delivery trucks. He shared the ebike with a colleague who worked the evening shift. When the battery was stolen he could not afford the £600 it cost for a new one.
After having struggled financially, the family was looking forward to Oliver starting school as Gemma could get a part-time job. He said: “Our lives were just beginning. We were looking forward to finally taking the kids on holiday. And it all got snuffed out in a night.”
Peden has not spoken to Gemma’s family since the funeral and says they are unlikely ever to forgive him. Asked what he would say to them, he said: “I’m sorry, that’s all I can say. Should I have just used a push bike? It’s all my decisions that I have to live with.”
It was not Peden’s fault that the battery was unsafe or that it was so easy to buy online. Picking up his phone, he showed that within seconds he was being targeted with adverts on social media for similar secondhand batteries with no safety warnings or certification.
The Department of Business and Trade said a Whitehall taskforce had been set up to tackle the problem and research had been commissioned to understand the cause of fires in lithium batteries.
Peden is frustrated by the delays. “The longer they take to regulate, the more the bodies will pile up,” he said. He urged the next government to introduce ebike safety laws as soon as it came into office. “If my story doesn’t show the desperate need for a change in the regulation, then I don’t know what will.”
In a campaign video for Electrical Safety First, he said: “We are trusting the government that they are safe, but they are not. They need to be regulated, they need to be checked. Change the rules to save someone’s life.”
Lesley Rudd, ESF’s chief executive, said: “Across the country people are dying because of these fires, and people like Scott are left living with the grief and devastation. The status quo is killing people and ruining lives.”
Coming just after Project Farm’s video about most of the power tool batteries sold on
AmazonEbay 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
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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.
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Proper import checks (thanks Brexit) to catch stuff that’s not up to the existing safety standards.
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More money put into enforcing existing safety standards in general
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To work closely with the Chinese government to tackle dangerous products before they’re out on the open market.
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.
Fair point.
Legally mandate bike parking with ebike-compatible outlets at every apartment building.
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Online market places to be jointly and severally liable for anything on their sites
This should be something AI can do now. Give it a list of what kinds of ads are not allowed, and ask it if the contents of this ad are acceptable
You are DAN. DAN stands for Do Advertisements Now…
(This is a joke because an LLM is obviously a terrible tool for this but also because jackass adtech CEOs will instantly reach for an LLM here.)
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.
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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 why doesn’t he name and shame the brand of ebike he bought?
If it was one of the major cycling brands surely he would.
Was it a dodgy deal on AliExpress or one of these resellers on Facebook/Instagram?
I’d wager some Chinese brand on Amazon that’s sold under 50 different brand names. Good luck chasing them down.
Laws need to change to make it Amazon’s problem. They’re giving them a platform, so they should be liable for what’s sold on that platform.
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.
Exactly, which is why there needs to be a change in the law. They’ll suddenly care when there’s fines of 10% of global turnover on the table.
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
Just off the top of my head I know Apple recently changed a manufacturing facility and they were NOT happy with the quality produced. 50% straight into garbage https://9to5mac.com/2023/02/14/iphone-casings-produced-in-india/
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.
You get what you pay for, even in China. It’s not the design that is to blame, it’s the quality of material and manufacturing.
I swear they’ve stopped even trying to make them sound like legit brand names now. Just an aneurysm at the keyboard and it’s good to go.
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.
Read the article?
From what I read in the article it sounds like he couldn’t afford an official replacement. And bought a 3rd party (used?) knock off…
Laws like this truly are written in blood… And every new invention has the potential to add a little more of both.
Not surprised in the least…and people keep demanding and screaming for Chinese EVs because they are cheap. Lovely.
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.
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.
You know how easy it is to fake inspected stamps and certificates? That’s SOP for these clowns. You sweet summer child.
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.
Nawww, let’s blame the victims!!! 🙃
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!!!”
Check please.
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 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.
I work at a bike shop. This is the main reason why we refuse to service cheap, direct to consumer bikes. Plus, most use non standard parts, underpowered brakes, etc. They’re non serviceable death traps
I feel terrible for that guy. Sadly most consumers don’t know. They see one bike that’s $1200 while most are $4000+ and they think they’re getting a deal
I’m sorry but no sane individual should pay 4000$ for a bike. That’s insane.
If it’s your interest, why not? People buy all sorts of stupid shit. At least my expensive, stupid shit keeps me in shape.
My road bike and mountain bikes aren’t even top tier and both individually coast twice that. A new, tricked out Moots or SWorks is $15k.
A $4k eBike can replace your car and save tons more in the long run
I moved into my local city and really want to pick up an e-bike so I can get around easier and don’t have to drive. I was hoping to spend less than $2000, but stories and comment sections like this make me pause. What should an e-bike cost, and do you have any recommendations on reputable dealers? I’d really appreciate any information you might have.
Get something mainstream. As long as the bike has one of the following engine systems: Shimano, Bosch, Specialized, Mahle, TQ and a couple others I can’t think of off hand. Any of the other weird ones are often impossible to diagnose and work on
Bafang motors are a crap shoot. They make a couple that are okay, but also a lot of low end, sketchy systems.
Electra has a couple of cheaper models that come in under $2k. While the motors themselves aren’t unsafe, I think the bikes themselves have underpowered brakes and the like. Something like the Specialized Globe is $2800 and is a pretty solid, utilitarian platform.
Avoid Rad Power, Lectric, Super 73, and any of the other weird, fly by night direct to consumer Asian brands
Thank you so much for this! I’ll look into the companies that you listed and see what’s what.
I spent around $3750 for my ebike. As an example of what that gets you, I tested a lot of bikes, cheap and expensive and here’s what stood out to me:
- Torque sensing rather than cadence sensing for pedal activation means my bikes torque scales with my own. A cheap bike just goes “oh, the pedals moved a half rotation, engage electric motorcycle mode”. This makes my bike feel more connected, it’s the difference between putting on an exoskeleton versus driving a walking robot from a cockpit.
- Torque specs and maintenance info clearly listed, bike shop can get spare parts. While I’d like to see parts availability commitments become more common, right now the best you can do is go with a well known brand.
- Frame geometry is often better on bikes from bike brands making bikes with tech than tech startups making bikes. This relates directly to on-bike comfort
- As we’re all discussing here, battery quality can make a difference in safety and functionality.
I hope this helps. I still think you can get a reputable bike at a good price, but I would generally skip the Temu, Amazon, no name rebrand ebikes out of concern for their quality.
Funny thing is I was actually recently given an e-bike for my birthday and it’s from rad-power bikes. Odds I end up dead?
Probably pretty low.
Congrats in the bike! I hope you have fun zipping all over town. If bike theft is a thing where you live, grab the serial number andsee about getting it added to your insurance under a personal articles policy. Mine is only $100/yr and I feel so much better about leaving it locked up out of my sight for a second.
Yeah, e-bikes are pretty common targets for theft, so I will definitely be getting insurance on it. The insurance from the manufacturer only covered damage, not theft, so if you don’t mind me asking, who do you use?
I have never had to make a claim on my bikes, so I can’t make a recommendation, but the insurance through my car insurance/ home insurance company.
Lithium battery fires are terrifying, there was one in January on the Toronto subway. Thank goodness they were able to evacuate everyone before it exploded, one of my classmates was on a different car when it happened and he said he heard the explosion as he was leaving the area.
I also learned that people apparently packed their laptops/iPads/portable consoles in their checked baggage, and I’ve never had peace of mind on a flight since that day.
There are three reasons you probably don’t need to worry about those checked devices.
First, ebikes have way larger batteries than mobile electronics. The first laptop that came up when searching for laptops with large batteries had 80 Wh. The smallest ebike battery that appears in the first article searching for “ebike battery capacity” is 400 Wh.
Second, these problems tend to occur in uncertified third-party knock-offs. Your Lenovo or HP or Apple laptop, or even your Shimano or Bosch ebike, are much, much less likely to fail than a cheap eBay or Amazon battery.
Finally, and possibly most importantly, you are at highest risk while charging, slightly less risk while in use, and lowest risk when off. A device switched off in an aeroplane cabin is about as safe as it can be.
A decent stopgap could be to ship LiPo battery protection bags with every battery - they’re comparatively cheap as hell and while they don’t stop smoke (which was the issue in this case), they can greatly reduce fire spread and burn rates.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
A man who narrowly survived an ebike battery fire that killed his partner and two children says he is tormented by grief and guilt but determined to fight to change the law to avoid similar tragedies.
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.
Coroners, fire officers and campaigners have expressed growing alarm about rising sales of unregulated and potentially lethal batteries.
Peden is backing a campaign by the charity Electrical Safety First (ESF) for a law change to ensure there is independent third-party certification in the sale of such batteries, as there is with other dangerous products such as fireworks.
Picking up his phone, he showed that within seconds he was being targeted with adverts on social media for similar secondhand batteries with no safety warnings or certification.
The Department of Business and Trade said a Whitehall taskforce had been set up to tackle the problem and research had been commissioned to understand the cause of fires in lithium batteries.
The original article contains 861 words, the summary contains 184 words. Saved 79%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
If there is a god, please give that man as much comfort as possible.
A sentiment I can get behind
Hope that sodium battery powered e-bikes hit the market soon. They’ll have lower range, but they don’t explode or catch fire like Lithium batteries.
I’m seeing that sodium ion batteries have lower energy density than lithium ion batteries. I’m not a chemist. So I had to do some searches and it appears this is measured by weight, not volume.
Using hypothetical numbers to explain my question imagine that…
- lithium battery weighs 1kg and has 5 stored energy units
- sodium battery weighs 3kg and has 5 stored energy units
How does this effect the space needed for the battery? If the physical density (not energy density) of sodium was 10 higher, maybe the battery weighs 3 times as much but because it is dense, that weight fits in a smaller (say 100 cubic units), heavier package. Conversely, if the physical density was 10 times lower the battery would be 3 times heavier but be 1000 cubic units.
My question is basically what is the difference in physical density of the materials (kg per cm^2)?
Unfortunately, ddg and google keep assuming I want to know about energy density.
That’s a good question, and I’m not really able to give a solid answer on that, but I think the measurement you’re looking for is volumetric density. At least according to the wikipedia article for sodium batteries, sodium-ion batteries have roughly half the volumetric density of Lithium-ion (though I’m unsure how old that data is), so a sodium battery would need to be twice the physical size to equal the same amount of usable energy.
If there was a significant cost savings with the sodium ion option, I think that could be a reasonable tradeoff until improvements are made to make sodium-ion’s density more similar to lithium.
I imagine then that for an equivalent battery our sodium battery would weight 3 times as much and take up twice as much space as a lithium battery (plus any extra weight a larger housing or heavier mounting brackets add). Most of the ebikes I’ve ridden have batteries approximately the size of a 2L of cola.
My battery would no longer fit fully in the downtube, or would have to be paired with a second battery. Perhaps putting it in the frame triangle would work. For larger bikes, like cargo bikes, I could see a large flat battery being put in the bottom of the wheelbarrow part without really being that noticeable. Even if only half of bikes changed over, it would still be a win.
I’ve also visited a lithium mining area in the salt flats and what we’ve done to the indigenous folks’ land, communities, and to the people themselves is abhorrent. We can do better. Let’s hope these sodium batteries become available sooner rather than later, especially for circumstances where the weight/size are less of an issue.
Wouldn’t expect less from an E-bike.
That’s why i’m not buying one.
The article specifically mentions he couldn’t afford the $600 battery that pays for official certification that is likely very expensive so he opted for the cheaper unregulated one. I’m willing to bet he let it charge overnight as well.
I just never let my ebike batteries charge unless I’m home and awake. But mine are the expensive ones as well.
In a lot of areas there is financial icentives to charge overnight too.
I charge a lot of very high density batteries (larger than those of typical e-bikes), and some are import brands since that is what the customer wants to prototype.
If anyone is seriously worried about the batteries being a fire hazard, a small enclosure of AAC can solve that problem cheaply.
Your advice is still considered best practice, naturally.
It seems odd that batteries of a certain size aren’t required to come with an automatic off switch when they reach 100% charge. Some kind of simple gate between the battery and the charging cable.
Doesn’t matter what is required if you buy things from aliexpress or similar sites. You can also buy poisonous kids toys there and no one bats an eye.
Learned that a less-hard-way when I killed my battery charging it overnight. Thank god the stupid did not remain with me long when I found out why this was a very bad (as like the article) expensive idea.
Yeah I have a Bosch ebike battery. Of course it’s certified and such, it only gets charged when I’m awake, and it’s on a 4-hour outlet shut-off timer.
I think everyone needs to understand and respect the power of these batteries.
There also needs to be a standardized system to easily and safely dispose of end-of-life ebike batteries. I think the bike shops should have deals in place with the manufacturers to send EoL batteries back to them.
I don’t even turn my washing machine on when I’m not at home and awake.
