Fly By Night E-bike Kills Someone

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robotcoke@reddit

UL is a private, for profit, organization. They charge an arm and a leg for their certification. This causes many companies to not bother with them.

Someone should make a non profit that offers similar certifications. Then we'd see more companies getting certified and we could weed out the problematic ones.

What I don't want to see is the government requiring companies to get a government certification. When that happens, politics get introduced. And with the level of corruption in our politics, that won't be good for any of us.

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MeximeltExtraCheese@reddit

And UL certified isn’t all that great anyway. I get it, things happen, but I just responded to a fire last week caused by a battery backup. We found it and luckily could still make out the brand name. Looked it up…

“UL Cerified”

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whattteva@reddit

UL Certified doesn't mean "cannot catch fire". It just simply means it will happen at much less frequency. Think one in a thousand instead one in a hundred.

Your average commercial jetliner engines cost 20-50 million a piece and has the highest amount of certification humanly possible. Guess what? Yes, it can still catch fire, it can still backfire, it can still fail in flight. That's why there are two of them.

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MeximeltExtraCheese@reddit

I understand. My point is the same as yours. UL Certified isn’t some golden designation that makes a battery indestructible and as I said: “things happen”.

I just did a poor job conveying the message lol

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whattteva@reddit

The tone of your posts suggests otherwise. Certifications matter because they set as baseline on what is safe and it's generally leaps and bounds better than something that has none. But your post made it seem like there is no difference at all between batteries that are certified vs the ones that aren't.

Would you fly in a private uncertified airplane kit piloted by uncertified pilot? There are many of such private homemade airplanes. You could even make one yourself.

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robotcoke@reddit

Would you fly in a private uncertified airplane kit piloted by uncertified pilot? There are many of such private homemade airplanes. You could even make one yourself.

That's a false equivalency. To suggest something is a unreliable as a homemade product that nobody knows anything about, just because it's not UL certified, is just nuts.

Do you eat home made food that people bring to work pot lucks? Even though it's not certified by the FDA or the local government? It could potentially kill you. And even that is not a valid comparison.

If a product has an average customer rating of 4.8 on 10,000 reviews, I'll take that with a lower price instead of a higher price with a UL certification.

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whattteva@reddit

Uh.. It's not false equivalency at all. It is basically the same thing and people do fly many of these things to great success. Otherwise, they wouldn't sell very much.

And yes, people buy them for the same reasons why people bike cheap ebikes.... Cheap price and yes, while it could be deemed fairly safe (again, many people buy and do fly in these things), the risk is still far greater.

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robotcoke@reddit

Uh.. It's not false equivalency at all. It is basically the same thing and people do fly many of these things to great success. Otherwise, they wouldn't sell very much and there wouldn't be a market for these things.

I'm not sure if you're being serious here or just trolling. Either way, it's 100% NOT the same thing to fly in a homemade plane piloted by assume hit who doesn't even have a license, as it is to buy an ebike from a company with a high customer satisfaction rate from thousands of satisfied customers, but they didn't pay some 3rd party company's ridiculously high rate to give their own opinion on the product.

And yes, people buy them for the same reasons why people buy cheap ebikes.... Cheap and affordable price for the average aviation hobbyists and yes, while it could be deemed fairly safe (again, many people buy and do fly in these things), the risk is still far greater.

That's not what you said. You asked if someone would fly in one of these planes while it was piloted by some unlicensed fit that you didn't know anything about. That's not the same thing at all as building your own plane from a kit and learning how to fly it. That is also a false equivalency, lol. Though neither of them is the same as buying an ebike when you can see the ratings and reviews of all the other customers who bought that model.

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Inciteful_Analysis@reddit

There are third parties that test to UL standards. Lectric uses one of them (SGS). You'll see phrasing like "certified to UL 2849" instead of "UL certified".

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robotcoke@reddit

There are third parties that test to UL standards. Lectric uses one of them (SGS). You'll see phrasing like "certified to UL 2849" instead of "UL certified".

SGS is also a for profit company. So it's the same thing with them.

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Inciteful_Analysis@reddit

You said UL charges an arm and a leg. Presumably SGS charges less. Generally, competition reduces prices. So it's not the same as the monopoly concerns you framed.

A nonprofit performing certifications would almost invariably have to be government funded.

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robotcoke@reddit

You said UL charges an arm and a leg. Presumably SGS charges less. Generally, competition reduces prices. So it's not the same as the monopoly concerns you framed.

Do you have numbers to show how much less SGS charges? I don't think very many companies are opting for SGS instead of UL, so it's presumably also an issue of cost with them. The example I gave, Ubiquiti, is large enough to get certified by all of them if they wanted, but they chose to skip all of them for cost reasons. If there is a high cost, it's not worth it to a lot of companies.

A nonprofit performing certifications would almost invariably have to be government funded.

Yep. It would have to be like PBS. Government starts it and gives money, users give donations, the org itself has fund raisers, and the products that get certified are all donated to the org, not purchased.

The expectation would be that every product was certified if that's how it worked.

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Inciteful_Analysis@reddit

Lectric is a cost cutting machine. If SGS were not cheaper, there would be no incentive to use them.

Go look it up. Tired of your shifting goalposts and refusal to acknowledge your premise was flawed.

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robotcoke@reddit

Lectric is a cost cutting machine. If SGS were not cheaper, there would be no incentive to use them.

Wait so you're saying cost IS a factor then? Because free is a whole lot better than slightly cheaper. And besides, you've posted nothing that says SGS is even 1 penny cheaper, let alone significantly cheaper.

Go look it up. Tired of your shifting goalposts and refusal to acknowledge your premise was flawed.

Is your reading comprehension struggling here? Or are you just a bot that's trying to make stuff up after your argument was destroyed by facts?

I didn't shift why goal post or use a flawed premise. I have a multi billion dollar company - a highly respected industry leader, as an example. A much larger company than Lectric, lol. Ubiquiti flat out says that don't get certified due to the cost. They prefer to sell a lower cost product.

The market has spoken. Ubiquiti has some of the best selling and highest rated products in the SMB networking sector. The company is worth in the tens of billions of dollars. American company, so not able to hide overseas, and not going anywhere anytime soon.

I don't know how you think that shows my premise is flawed, but it actually proves my point. They have enough money to get certified with whoever they want. They choose not to, and everyone still loves their products.

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Inciteful_Analysis@reddit

I've not once heard of Ubiquiti before your rant. Are Ubiquiti routers and cameras powered by 500Wh lithium batteries that can burn down a house and kill the consumers buying them?

This isn't apples & oranges. It's grapes and watermelon.

FFS you are dense.

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chrispark70@reddit (OP)

UL is very well trusted in the US. It took many decades to build that trust with consumers and the government (started in 1894). Now you just want to throw that away because they are for profit?

It is unlikely this would have passed even if UL did the testing for free. These companies don't really exist in any real sense. The bikes are slightly customized OEM models from some random bike maker in China. There is likely inconsistency across the bikes (within a single model) based on availability of cells and BMSs. IOW, there is likely different battery configurations across a single model of bikes because on the date of manufacture, they used whatever cells they had in stock that day/week. The batteries may also be hand made, which again would interfere with consistency.

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robotcoke@reddit

UL is very well trusted in the US. It took many decades to build that trust with consumers and the government (started in 1894). Now you just want to throw that away because they are for profit?

Let me just stop you right there. It's not ME who wants to throw them away. It's the millions of consumers who consistently opt to buy the lower priced goods that don't have UL certification.

I gave Ubiquiti as a great example. It's a trusted American company who makes high quality products. They bring in billions in revenue. They have the money to get UL certified. They're not UL certified because they'd have to raise their prices to cover the cost of getting UL certified. People don't care about it. They still buy enough of their products to make them top 3 in the SMB networking sector, and #1 in most areas of that sector.

YOU may value UL certification above all else, but most others don't give a crap about UL certification. Their business model was valid back in the 1800s, but it's largely obsolete these days. Everyone has an entire history of every product, with user reviews, from nearly everyone that's ever bought the product. We don't need UL to tell us how we should feel about a product anymore. We can see what everyone who owns one thinks about it and take the average of their opinions.

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chrispark70@reddit (OP)

They could have done it for free and it likely would not have passed.

The very first thing I would assume you need to pass a UL test is consistency with your cells, that the battery on every single X model bike is exactly the same. This likely cannot be shown on these cheap DTC bikes. Keeping inventory of battery cells and BMSs is more expensive than just using whatever cells and BMS you can get in a particular week. They could easily end up in a situation where they manufacture 5k model "w751"(just a made up number for illustrative purposes) with 3 different cell brands across those 5k batteries. Even worse, the bike company probably doesn't even know because they are the not the ones making the bike.

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robotcoke@reddit

They could have done it for free and it likely would not have passed.

In this case, sure. But many big name companies who make high quality products don't bother with UL certification due to the added costs.

Look at the Ubiquiti example I gave. That post is from yesterday, so it's not like this isn't a thing anymore. It's very much a thing that currently happens. Even with industry leaders like Ubiquiti (American company, top 3 in all SMB networking categories and #1 in many of them, multi billion dollar organization that has been around for a long time and isn't going anywhere anytime soon, not UL certified and when an installer refused to install their equipment the post about it yesterday had 167 (and counting) direct replies telling the OP to get a new installer and not to just use UL certified equipment).

UL isn't anywhere near as valuable or as important as the people in this sub make it out to be. It's a for profit company that provides their opinion on products, for a huge fee. That's it.

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Relative-Display-676@reddit

Arm and a leg for spec is specifically to weed out shit shops like dtc ebikes.

Working as intended.

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robotcoke@reddit

Arm and a leg for spec is specifically to weed out shit shops like dtc ebikes.

Working as intended.

No it isn't. I just saw a post in the Ubiquiti sub about how their alarm company refused to install their new Ubiquiti cameras because they weren't UL certified.

Ubiquiti is an American company and extremely popular. They aren't UL certified because of the added cost.

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Relative-Display-676@reddit

now imagine it was a cheap service and get flooded with bunch of garbage from all over the world. the quality of testing and speed of certification would go down the shitter. if they can't afford it, they need to grow the company. rome wasn't built in a day.

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robotcoke@reddit

now imagine it was a cheap service and get flooded with bunch of garbage from all over the world. the quality of testing and speed of certification would go down the shitter. if they can't afford it, they need to grow the company. rome wasn't built in a day.

You're very clearly talking about things you don't understand. Ubiquiti is one of the largest providers of network equipment in the world. They don't need to grow the company. They're just keeping their stuff lower cost by not paying UL for their opinion. They're been around for a long time, everyone knows their stuff is safe and the company (which is an American company) isn't going anywhere in the near future.

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Relative-Display-676@reddit

Ubiquiti (UI) has a market capitalization of approximately $50.89 billion, reflecting significant growth in recent years. The company, which specializes in networking technology, reported a revenue of $2.57B with a net income of $711.92M for the fiscal year 2025,

and they can't afford UL certification? that's their problem.

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robotcoke@reddit

Ubiquiti (UI) has a market capitalization of approximately $50.89 billion, reflecting significant growth in recent years. The company, which specializes in networking technology, reported a revenue of $2.57B with a net income of $711.92M for the fiscal year 2025,

and they can't afford UL certification? that's their problem.

The numbers you just posted showed they very much CAN afford UL certification. They're top 3 in every SMB networking category and #1 in most of them.

The fact that you think they need UL certification is YOUR problem, not theirs.

As I stated, UL is a private, for profit organization. They charge a lot of money for their products. The fact that a company doesn't choose to pay them is not an indication that their products are shoddy or that the company isn't reputable. Ubiquiti is a great example of this.

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ZestycloseMonk1988@reddit

If you can’t afford to test your batteries and electronics, you shouldn’t be manufacturing them

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yangbanger@reddit

Tomorrow’s post: I’m looking for a cheap ebike, maybe an Oraimo. Has anyone tried one yet?

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TheSharpestHammer@reddit

I'm looking at the ZSDXCHINGYTZ HIGH POWER EBIKE 180V 5000W ELECTRIC BIKE MOTORCYCLE OFFROAD 80 MILES BATTERY CERTIFIED CHARGE FUN BIKE on Amazon for $300. Anyone have advice on how cool it is and how good of a decision it is to buy it? Don't tell me to save up and buy something better I'm not a MILLIONAIRE**.

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