In the interests of accuracy this reply is addressed to all in the forum, not just you.
The OP has obviously assumed that we in the EAPC community are a part of the fires problem when we clearly are not. That is the inaccuracy I speak of that only adds to all the media hysteria, which is very real. We are also media, so if we get involved in this current discussion about battery fires, we wrongly admit to being part of the problem when we absolutely are not.
So let's start by getting a long list of facts right:
When Russell Scott first created the pedelecs forum in October 2006, knowing of my pedelecs advice sites he got in touch inviting me to join, so I became member number one and added links to the pedelecs forum to my sites. So when I tell you that there have been no fires in their bikes reported by our members, that is true. Had there been we would have known, since we discussed the subject in depth in the first decade when the defective cobalt cathode cells that caused all the laptop fires were in some of our batteries, albeit much better protected in our products, hence our not suffering the laptop style fires.
Much of the source of the current fires problem is, as so often, our bungling incompetent politicians. When Boris Johnson successfully persuaded the public to vote for Brexit and later became PM, he was desperate to get a US trade deal to help make it a success. The large US e-scooter hire companies had long tried to get them into Britain, but unsuccessfully since they are automatically illegal here. However Johnson had the idea that he might curry favour with Biden by permitting a trial here, but of course that didn't work, since Biden has followed Trump's "America First" policy.
However in admitting the e-scooters into Britain for the trial the problem of how to deal with them was created, so our civil servants and politicians very wrongly lumped them in with pedelecs, referring to all of them as e-bikes. That is why we are being wrongly treated as a part of the problem.
At this point lets get one thing straight, our legal EAPCs (pedelecs) ARE NOT E-BIKES, so please stop calling them that !!
An e-bike, short for Electric Bike, describes a bicycle driven by an electric motor. Our legal EAPCs are NEVER only driven by an electric motor. They only have an AUXILLIARY motor which only ASSISTS when rider is pedalling, however lightly. If you don't believe me, you don't know this law. I do, better than anyone, even better that the DfT who make the law but are on record as not knowing it a number of times and being corrected by me.
An e-bike if not registered and plated etc., is an illegal machine, because the law has no provision or exemption for an unregistered electrically powered bicycle. E-bikes are in law L class motor vehicles, chiefly L1e-A or B. That is why our EAPCs cannot have fully acting throttles, since the addition of one makes them a motor vehicle.
The 20,000 members mentioned is not inaccurate. Former site hosts kept a tally of total membership on the forums page, that lost with the last change of host company.
The Search facility in this forum is indeed very poor, but it often wouldn't help even if it were excellent. The Pedelecs forum has been hosted by three different companies during its lifetime and in the transfers, particularly the last one, very large numbers of earlier posts have been lost, a source of considerable frustration to many of us. So even a random Google search often won't help.
Fleece kindly given to me by the Pedelecs administrators:
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