Concerns around the dangers of e-bike fires have been steadily mounting, with the latest data indicating that London has seen a 60% rise in e-bike fires this year alone.
As reported by the Evening Standard, the latest figures around the growing number of fires caused by e-bike batteries were presented at a London Assembly meeting for the fire, resilience, and emergency committee. Attended by representatives of the London Fire Brigade (LFB), the National Fire Chiefs Council (NFCC), and Electrical Safety First, the meeting saw key figures discuss the emerging risks around e-bike fires and lithium-ion batteries, what action was being taken to address the rising number of these fires in London, and if residents living in high-rises had adequate fire safety guidance due to their potentially high risks.
Deputy Commissioner for the LFB, Dom Ellis, told the committee that e-bike fires had the potential to become a “societal blindspot” unless consumers were warned about their dangers. Statistics published by the LFB as part of its #ChargeSafe campaign state that, on average, firefighters have been called to an e-bike or e-scooter fire once every two days in 2023, suggesting that fires involving lithium-ion batteries are the “fastest growing fire risk in London”.
Dom added: “With e-bikes and e-scooters the amount of energy in those battery packs is sufficient to really compromise a good-sized double bedroom in 10–15 seconds and it's the intimacy of the risk that’s the key concern here.
“Because people have these charging in their hallways, or a lot of the gig economy people, of course, they’ve got them in their bedsits, in their HMOs. So, it’s at the end of their bed, and they’re probably charging while they sleep, because they’ve just done a 14-hour shift and they need to get back out there again,” he said.
Dom warned that one major issue was consumer reliance on “retrofit kits”, which were unregulated and had not been tested for fire safety.
Dan Parsons, the director of Fully Charged, which is an e-bike retailer, said that people resorted to such DIY models because of their affordability and that employers needed to instil a duty of care: “It’s very difficult to go out to a gig economy rider and say you must spend x number of hundreds or thousands of pounds on an electric bicycle so that you can go about your work.
“The reason that these guys and girls are choosing electric bikes, home-made kits, is that it’s inexpensive for them to assemble and to put together, and they can deliver more in less time and generate for themselves – but they are putting themselves in danger by doing that.
“So, I do think that the gig economy employers have a responsibility and duty of care of those individuals, to ensure that they aren’t necessarily condoning the usage of those badly assembled products.”
Calls for the government to introduce a regulatory framework were also raised, highlighting a sense of urgency to counter the rise in the number of fires, particularly as the use of e-bikes and e-scooters grow in popularity around the UK.
These sentiments were also shared following the aftermath of a fatal blaze in Cambridge that led to the death of a 31-year-old woman and her two young children. Thirty firefighters from Cambridgeshire Fire and Rescue Service (CFRS) tackled the blaze at a two-storey maisonette in the early hours of 30 June. Although the two children were rescued from the property by crews, they later died in hospital. Investigators later concluded that the fire may have been caused by an e-bike battery that had been left to charge.
The tragedy has led to renewed calls for the government to fund safe e-bike subsidies and improved import controls to ensure unregulated products are removed from the market.
Following his extensive work on thermal runaway and thermal propagation in lithium-ion batteries and electric vehicles, Professor Paul Christensen, the founding director of Lithuiumionsafety Ltd Consultancy, has produced some guidelines on Light Electric Vehicles (LEVs) and the risks posed by lithium-ion batteries. This follows LFB’s guidance on how to charge lithium-ion batteries safely.
Simple guidelines to follow when charging LEVs include only buying LEVs from known and trusted companies, only using the charger supplied with the LEV, ensuring that your LEV has a battery management system to automatically stop it from overcharging, and not to charge LEVs indoors.
Professor Christensen told Sky News that the dangers of lithium-ion batteries were not just restricted to LEVs: “The penetration of lithium-ion batteries into all levels of society has far outstripped our knowledge of the risks and hazards.
"We're seeing an increase [in incidents] because we're seeing a lot more of these batteries in all sorts of devices. Not just bikes, but from radio-controlled aircraft, e-cigarettes, and grid-scale battery storage systems."