e-bike battery fires pose a deadly problem, and there's no quality standard for them

Last month, an intense (but quickly extinguished) fire erupted in a storefront on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The cause was a lithium-ion battery on an e-bike. Four people died.

A detailed report published recently in The Atlantic arrives at a scary conclusion: Lithium-ion batteries, which pack a substantial amount of power in a small package that fits neatly in an electric bike, can spontaneously explode, and the U.S. is being flooded with e-bikes and scooters. And there’s no easy fix, the story says, for this expanding problem.Safety standards for these and related products, author Caroline Mimbs Nyce points out, are pending but are currently hit-or-miss, or nonexistent. Nyce takes pains to focus her story on e-bikes, which are obviously more ubiquitous than full-size electric vehicles and currently in the news, and may lack some of the battery protection technologies built into cars and SUVs.

“For the foreseeable future,” she writes,”more e-bikes will explode, and more people may die. 'That’s the simple and horrifying truth right now,' William Wallace, the associate director for safety policy at Consumer Reports, told me. Unfortunately, when it comes to e-bikes and the like, we are stuck in a kind of battery purgatory.”