Ridstar causing 11 fires selling over a million bikes seems like a fair risk

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Comfortable-Fly5797@reddit

How many fires do you think is acceptable?

Let's rephrase that. How many homes lost, serious injuries, and deaths do you think are acceptable? If one of those fires happened in an apartment building or dorm where dozens of innocent people are impacted by one person's crappy bike?

Is saving a few hundred dollars really worth the risk?

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DalinsiaValkyrPrime@reddit

There are millions of flights per year, the 4 hijackings in September of 2001 seems like a fair risk.

How about we invest in batteries that don’t light on fire and have people who want to push a battery further than it can go or try to modify a battery with no electrical experience?

I’m not even the most against cheaper bikes, but battery fires aren’t something to play with.

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aero_sock@reddit

can you recommend some batteries that dont light on fire?)

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Comfortable-Fly5797@reddit

UL listed batteries. Look for bikes from good, established brands. Not drop shipped bikes.

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Elk801@reddit

The free market has proved time and time and time and time and time again that if they save even the smallest whiff of a fart of corner cut and a penny saved, they will double and triple down. Companies and corporations do not and have never cared about your safety. They care about liability, which is communicated as “safety”, but not because they care about your health, but because you or your family can sue them.

This is why we don’t tolerate “just” 11 fires. Because entirely arbitrary threshold is too far, and what arguments could be made to push that further and further and further and further.

No battery fires are acceptable.

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aero_sock@reddit

but no battery fires is impossible - electronics can just do that sometimes. so are you suggesting we stop using batteries completely? or what did you want to say by that

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Elk801@reddit

This is disingenuous and you’re seeking an argument I’m not making to make a point to justify that response.

When patterns are recognized that should be addressed.

This is why recalls exist. It assigns a price to cutting corners. Everything is possible, but setting a threshold for understanding what leads to failures so that fixes can be applied in, or so that failure modes can be constrained and well understood to gauge risk, is the goal.

It could be truly random or preventable, but that’s why forensic engineering labs exist, to see if the conditions that lead to failures exist at scale, and to then weigh the cost of removing them from market against the potential damage or loss of life.

The cost of a human life and a fire in a house is a weirdly well defined thing in legal spaces.

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Educational-Log-5463@reddit (OP)

Keeping the battery over charged or plugged in to long

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