The problem here is that Lenny has an obsession and is constantly hyping this cr ap and leaving a permanent trail on the internet that will make more and more people like my relative get refused a room when he arrived at a hotel with his £3000 ebike of impeccable breeding,because the hotelier thought it was a potential bomb from stuff he's seen.
All the hype will also lead to home insurance exclusions and premium surcharges. None of us will elude these impacts.
The sorriest state of affairs is that far too many people don't understand statistics and miss the point that whereas there have been a very small number of fires in the whole data set of fires - 199 e-bile fires in 2023 out of a total of 594,384 UK fires reported.
This means that ONE fire in every 2986 fires was an ebike in 2023.
You are almost three thousand times as likely to be involved in a fire caused by something else than you are to be involved in an e-bike fire.
Ho hum - just carry on hyping the matter though. Who cares about the reality of risks?
And of course really stupid people do really stupid things with e-bikes, like they do with other things like chip pans, smoking equipment and even a simple box of matches. All of these fires could be eliminated if people acted sensibly. Nobody is as far as I know seeking to legislate controls on the sale of matches and cigarette lighters, but smoking is just about the largest cause of fire deaths in this country and of course, a cigarette without a match or a lighter isn't much use, so why are there no attempts to legislate them out of existence?
Anecdotally - the majority of burned e-bikes that I have seen were delivery bikes, way illegal in the main, drawing loads of power from their batteries and likely being fast charged after a hard run. They generally but not always, ignite while being charged and since most of them are obviously grotesque contraptions, who knows what the chargers are delivering.
