Electric buses have a battery from a probably reputable supplier, with a decent BMS.
Escooters often come from AliExpress.
There is a difference.
Also it’s not even a choice. Busses are not mass produced vehicles they’re regulated individually made commercial vehicles, and when the bus manufacturers say ‘were not building manual transmissions as of X date’, that’s it. It’s not happening anymore. Same with ABS, and now electric, unless you want to start manufacturing busses yourself, it’s not gonna be a choice by then.
It’s not just that; it’s that a regulator signed off on the bus, the city has liability insurance on the bus, and the bus manufacturer will themselves be accredited and insured.
It’s insane to ban e-bikes though since most of those come from reputable sources who are internationally recognized bike manufacturers. The people who made my electric bike also make professional bicycles for Olympians. Pretty sure the battery is reliable and isn’t going to explode.
My bike has fallen into a swimming pool while switched on (don’t ask) and nothing happened. Literally it didn’t even register anything had happened it just carried it on.
My bike has fallen into a swimming pool while switched on (don’t ask)
You’re not the boss of me. What happened?
The bike felt the battery heating up and wanted to cool down
That’s why I never buy sapient vehicles. That and the whole “is this slavery?” issue.
I want my vehicle to be sapient enough to moan when I whip it
Yours may be fine.
Barry Shitpea’s £100 dodgy 2000W temu special may not. And you can’t expect a bus driver to inspect every bike to only let reputable brands on.
My coworker bought one for $500 shipped. I highly doubt that battery has been properly inspected, especially since just buying a battery with similar capacity costs more than that.
The problem is telling the difference between a good bike (noting that even Samsung screwed that up with the Note 7…) and these: https://www.cyclingweekly.com/news/fire-brigade-calls-for-e-bike-battery-clampdown-after-london-man-suffers-life-changing-burns
Didn’t see them banning powerbank or batteries from powertools, and both also allowed on plane.
Allowed in carry on but not checked bags, for the same reason.
One is allowed, one is straight out banned.
One is high up in the sky, one is on the land.
And both of your sentences rhyme.
How is it better for those batteries to malfunction in the passenger compartment instead of the storage compartment of the plane? I don’t understand that.
Cabin crew on aircraft have fireproof bags and rather effective fire extinguishers. Dealing with a battery in the cargo hold isn’t possible.
If you want to carry a battery on an aircraft it generally has to be less than 100 (sometimes 160) watt-hours, whereas e-bike and other batteries are often 10x that.
Aircraft typically have a limit of 100 or 160 watt-hours and require that the battery be separate or the whole device be small (think laptop sized) so that you can dump it in a fireproof bag.
An e-bike has a ~1kWh battery that is probably strapped or zip-tied in place and there’s probably no serious firefighting equipment.
Stop and dump it at the road side?
I think it’s worth considering banning that type of battery, but a whole category of vehicles? There could be good reasons to ban the whole category as well but then state that, instead of making up some shit about batteries.
No one has the time to check every escooter against a long list of battery supplier every time one wants to board.
Sure, but you can ban imports and make them illegal to own just like any other thing. You can’t prevent all crime but that’s no reason not to try.
the bus company can not ban imports
ಠ_ಠ
Hey just wanted to let you know, I’ve read every single post in this community and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future every night before bed when I use lemmy to claw some precious time back from the eternal grind.
Thanks for posting.
I’m glad you’re enjoying these. I’ll keep logging in to post greentexts until I forget.
Where do you find these? I go on 4chan and it’s mostly porn…
I’ve just been saving random greentexts for years that get posted elsewhere. It’s much better than trying to sift through the porn and other garbage yourself.
I second this, it’s nice to come here every few days and read through all the new posts. :)
People used to say the same about cellphones.
I remember one episode where a girl in the bus was texting and some old lady got up to tell her that “it will go into the engine”. The old lady was terrified.
That reminds me of something.
Also on a bus. There was a group of girls on the bus and they were having a big loud argument about whether or not one of the group would receive a text from her partner or friend or whatever because “how would the text know where they were, as the bus is moving”.
A valid question. Luckily a lot of work has been done to address it.
Pretty much the first thing that needed to be solved when moving from 1-way pagers to 2-way phones. Pagers could just get a broadcast analog signal and determine themselves if they were the intended recipient. 2-way needed more bandwidth and a dedicated communication channel to a specific device, so broadcast wasn’t feasible. Thus, phones would send a registration signal that a tower would pick up, and that specific tower would handle all communication to that phone. If another tower got the registration signal, communication would switch to that tower.
Interestingly enough, there was a period (for a fairly long time) that if you were travelling too fast, you could either a) not be able to register on a network, or b) overwhelm the network with registrations - part of the reason why phones had to be turned off on airplanes
My city bans bikes from buses because of the space they take up. Scooters and folding bikes are ok only if they’re folded up small enough not to be obstructive.
The really shitty thing is that bikes are allowed on trains. But if the trains are unavailable and get replaced by a rail replacement bus…because it’s a bus, you can’t take your bike.
Most of the buses where I am have a bike rack attached to the exterior, I’ve definitely taken that for granted.
I’ve heard that they used to have those here. But that they took too long to put your bike onto, causing buses to fall behind schedule. So they got rid of them.
What? They take less than ten seconds.
When I was younger, every time I tried to use one, it was full. There’s such limited space that it becomes unreliable.
Damn, how I long for one of these.
Funnily, here in my City in Germany, they only banned E-Scooters because of the battery exploding thing but E-Bikes are okay
I was until now unaware that there were places where (non-folded) bikes were allowed on buses. On trams and trains sure, but buses have such limited space that I can’t imagine a bike being transported in them.
I have seen in more than one place a bicycle rack attached to the front of the bus to allow a few bikes
Not much more difficult to accommodate than wheelchairs or prams. Actually easier in many cases because the operator or probably more fit and the object more insensitive to placement.
The shape can be unwieldy because of the length, though.
My city has bike racks on the front of buses. Bikes can go on trains but not during peak commuting times.
Trains used to be the same here (with the exception that you could always take your bike on the train during peak hours in the non-peak direction, it was only peak direction that was banned), until they were trying to get people back on public transport after/late during the pandemic. Then they started allowing it even in peak hours, with some weird limitations like a maximum of 2 bikes per car, and only in the first or last car of the train.
I’ve lived in a few cities with exterior bike racks on the busses.
A few years ago the same thing happened to me. There was someone who wasn’t doing to good, on top of the station building on the next stop along throwing tiles and other things off. The operator got some replacement busses, that I couldn’t get as I had my bike. So I just sat there with someone else who could get on as they had their dog. For about 4-5 hours. Sucked allot as I was tired, the dog was cute though.
in defense of the bus, the battery pack in the bus is likely heat shielded and isolated to prevent fires from being a massive risk.
Yeah and it is high quality and regularly inspected but if you bring random aliexpress chinesium scooter who knows what kinda shortcuts were used to get it under 300 dollars
maintained by a small child
By kids for kidstm
They always say the best gifts are the ones your kids makes you, Chinese parents must get some great stuff.
we love a good child labor battery pack
Aliexpress is now a beacon of quality compared to the terrible stuff available on Temu. The worst part is that people buying a spare battery for their eScooter won’t do the research and will just be happy to get a “good” deal, until it explodes in their sleep…
I cannot have my own nuclear reactor, but the state can build nuclear power plants, wheres the fairness, wheres the freedom
You just need to stop telling yourself you can’t do things and do whatever you want. A child could build a nuclear reactor, so what’s stopping you?
the threat of jail time.
Also cancer.
Just don’t tell them about it. They don’t have to know about. Like my skull collection for example.
Tbf the manufacturing standards for plenty of e-scooters and -bikes can be pretty iffy sometimes, and people abuse them in ways that can increase the likelihood of issues. I concede that the vast majority of electric personal transportation devices that go up in flames usually happens during charging. A public transportation bus has to meet higher standards than a mono wheel scooter off of AliExpress.
(Imo they should be allowed on, but I can see the point in not doing so)
I’m not gonna say bike batteries explode all the time but I will say I worked at an ebike company and they had an entire department dedicated to handling exploding battery lawsuits.
Honestly, they should only allow devices with removable batteries, and they could have a bucket of sand outside the bus that holds those batteries. Kind of like how bicycles are attached to the front, you’d drop the battery in and then board the bus.
mmmm sandy battery, i love when my batteries have sand in them, surely this wouldnt cause problems.
“I don’t like sand. It’s coarse and rough and irritating… and it gets everywhere.”
~ Enerkin Ionwalker
there it is
But what if the battery starts burning while the bus is moving, on the road… Like in the middle of a desert (…wait… but still…)?
That’s what the external bucket of sand is for. It’ll smoke and the driver will notice in time to safely get everyone off the bus. They could then likely just detach the bucket and reboard if everything looks fine.
Meanwhile, TSA: no water bottle for you. Bring a cell phone, laptop battery, and a spare 20,000 mAh backup battery (of dodgy provenance no less)? Sure no problem.
Loved this when I was vaping and would travel for work.
Give me a ton of shit over my variety of juices, in 30mL bottles in my 3-1-1 bag…but the half dozen loose 18650s? Not a problem.
(They weren’t totally loose, I had silicone sleeves on them and would rewrap them if they showed a little wear on the wrapper. I used mechs and RDAs, I wrote the newbie guide to rebuilding on reddit…I was pretty safe about it).
Slight difference in build quality, wouldn’t you say?
It does happen. Not like the bus driver has time to check the battery has all its relevant safety certs.
Yes, but at least someone is actually checking the bus battery.
Oh yeah sorry that what I was implying. Somebody is checking the the public service vehicle. Nobody’s checking the private battery bought on eBay
Me with an e-scooter charging at home:
I was looking up e-scooters and a bunch of 1-star reviews pointed out how their battery caught fire.
Could have been fake reviews by competitors but either way, it freaked me out.
A lot of them will be fine but some of them are cheap knockoffs and they have unsafe wiring. It’s not actually the batteries themselves as they’ll probably be the same batteries it’s the way the batteries are connected up that makes them more likely to explode.
Unless you are Samsung in which case it 100% was the batteries at fault not the wiring.
Lithium batteries have a very high energy density. When that’s released all at once with a short circuit or very high current draw resulting in thermal runaway, that’s when these fires start. The great news is, they’re self fuelling fires too!
But, most reputable manufacturers, create charging/protection circuits that protect the batteries against such situations. Making them far less likely (but still possible) to happen.
The problem you’re going to get is when there’s disreputable companies, operating in countries with less stringent safety laws that are operating the production, processing and shipping entirely outside of the sight of countries with safety rules. Well, then you get a product with a fake FCC/CE sticker on it, that is very dangerous indeed.
I will not buy electronics from those sites for this very reason. Batteries, chargers and power supplies are usually very shoddy from these companies.
It’s not to say don’t buy stuff made by country X. Because there’s plenty of stuff I have bought made in, these countries but sold by companies that DO make sure there’s some testing done, and they’re not fake stickering everything. But, we all know the companies I’m talking about I think. Also, ebay (because private sellers buy in bulk from these places and then resell them) is something to be careful of too.
It can also be due to unsafe charging (over-voltage) or unsafe discharging (over-current, generating too much heat). The actual fire doesn’t necessarily happen immediately during charging/discharging.
It’s certainly an issue with some of them. I wouldn’t buy a random no name one from alibaba. It might be safe. Or not.
A home here burned down. Stay safe kids.
I keep my scooter at the farthest point from the apartment exit just to be on the safe side. I also haven’t heard many bad things about this particular model (Ninebot G30 Max).
If it’s a cheap one, only charge it while home or somehow isolate it from flammables. Keep a fire extinguisher nearby always.
An extinguisher that can actually handle Lithium fires though. A regular CO2 extinguisher wont do anything against burning Lithium
Honestly, don’t bother with an extinguisher. The best solution is to put it in a bucket of sand on a concrete floor or something. It’s probably safer to just let it burn out than to try to fight the fire.
Also cellphones, laptops, power tools and just about everything.
Gasoline? Don’t let it inside in the house. Ever.
You don’t often hear about laptops burning. And many of those spend their whole lives plugged in
Yes. These are extremely rare. Some models, like iirc a galaxy note and MacBook Pro have been singled out. The surface and airflow also matter. A laptop kept on a desk spends very little time charging at a time and any heat is dissipated efficiently. All devices are designed with the best thermal performance they can have.
There was actually a house fire a while ago not too far from where I live that forensics said was started by a device in a charger at night. For some units and some uses, they still fail.
Anyway. I think the better safe than sorry is warranted.
My favorite thing about my current phone is that I can set an alarm a couple of hours after I should wake, and the phone (trying not to fully charge until the alarm time) never charges overnight above 80% minimizing the chance of a thermal runaway if it happened to be like the note 7, as well as making the battery have a longer life
Assumably the bus company would be buying the bus from a company with better quality control then the Chinese ones. There were some knockoffs “hover boards” that catch on fire and that Chinese bus fire.
Battery Management Systems aren’t some new, developing technology. We know how to safely manage Lithium battery, it’s just the certain manufactures are cheaping out on the battery packs and BMS. People didn’t all stop using their phones because of the Note7 fires. People didn’t stop driving cars because of the Ford Pinto. They need to get over their EV fears and be more discerning
Hilariously most of the electric buses are Chinese. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yutong https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BYD_Auto
It’s the quality control and the fact that the buyer is a continent or ocean away. If a western company has hired a Chinese manufacture, they can get a good product if they stay on top of plant inspections. If not, the Chinese manufacture will start cutting corners. If you’re a western buyer, buy from a western company even if a majority of parts were made in China. If you manage to import a whole car from Alibaba and something goes wrong, you’re SOL.
Cheap eBike batteries have and do set on fire though. Sounds pretty terrifying.
There is a clip circulating recently of a guy in China carrying his e-bike battery into the elevator. Than that thing explodes and the guy dies in a sea of flames. Yeah carrying a cheap high capacity li-ion pack into a enclosed space is not a good idea.
To be fair, there may not be another option if he needs to get that to his flat and there’s no ground storage.
Horrifying.No stairs?
And perhaps it’s time for apartments to provide battery charging on the ground floor. Have a fire door or something where the people are, and enclose it in concrete. That way it quarantines the risk, while promoting EVs.
Quality control exists to ensure li-ion batteries don’t spontaneously combust, or at least not as often. Same reason why old timey film reels were kept under very carefully controlled environments, those things can also spontaneously combust. Any place that allows QC to be skirted will result in accidents and deaths like that elevator guy.
There’s a video circulating few days ago of electric scooters on a truck delivery catching fire. The funny thing the fire happened right under an Ioniq 6 billboard.
Now that’s a great green text
In Northern Ireland during the Troubles, people put (time)bombs on busses and when the bus driver heard about it, he just went and lifted it off the bus and put it in a ditch at the side of the road and informed the police. Couldn’t be bothered with evacuating the bus in the middle of nowhere.
Probably shaking his head and mumbling "I don’t have time for this shit"along the way.
Electric busses not always have batteries, they’re also busses that connect directly to the power source like trolies
