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.
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…
we love a good child labor battery pack
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.
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.
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?
Allowed in carry on but not checked bags, for the same reason.
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.
One is allowed, one is straight out banned.
One is high up in the sky, one is on the land.
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
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).
Electric busses not always have batteries, they’re also busses that connect directly to the power source like trolies
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.
rEAsOn bEinG Is 🥴
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.
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
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.
Cheap eBike batteries have and do set on fire though. Sounds pretty terrifying.
More likely that’s the insurance company’s call
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.
i dont think that an electric fleet is feasable by 2030. for one simple reason: wintertime. the way to go for commercial vehicles is for the time being dieselelectric. that means diesel generator, battery, and electric drive.
We already have a fully electric bus fleet in my city (Oslo, Norway).
Granted, when we had a period of extreme cold and snow last winter there was a bit of chaos. The electric buses did struggle a bit with range (though we’re talking -20 C), but the main problem was the combination of rear wheel drive and lots of snow.
do they have heating? maybe i am out of the loop, but last thing i read about electric busses was that they end up scrapped quite fast. i will read up on oslo, thanks.
Yes, they’re modern city buses with heating and air conditioning. Most of the buses are from the Solaris Urbino Electric line, but we also have quite a few from Mercedes, BYD and MAN.
chances are that i was talking out of my behind, i will look into it, thanks for giving me doubts. what i last read was people freezing in busses, and busses being in depots for charging all the time.
you sure those bussus are fully elctric? my impression was hybrid.
Yep, fully battery electric. The silence is glorious!
i will crawl in this rabbithole, thanks!
No? San Francisco has had electric busses for decades. They go up and down hills all the time. Their only problem is they have no batteries, so once they are disconnected they stop. It happens every day.
I think something combination of a small battery and a direct connection will work great. The battery only needs to work for an hour and the bus will be able to get around just fine.
well, obviously i didnt mean those kind of busses.
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.
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.
If it’s a cheap one, only charge it while home or somehow isolate it from flammables. Keep a fire extinguisher nearby always.
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
Who is bringing gas inside? I’m struggling to come up with even one legitimate reason to bring gasoline inside.
Eh, I keep it in my garage. If it catches on fire, the fire will spread to the rest of the house pretty quickly.
