New York is recharging its fight against e-bikes’ lithium-ion battery fires.
Gov. Kathy Hochul signed a package of bills Thursday that ban dangerous substandard batteries she said are linked to nearly 270 fires that killed 18 people across New York City in the last year alone.
“These batteries don’t catch on fire like kindling, they explode like a grenade,” she said during a news conference in her Manhattan office. “They spew toxic gas and chemicals everywhere.”
“We’re taking the first steps to extinguish the scourge of lithium-ion battery fires here in New York City.”
Fires linked to shoddy lithium-ion batteries have exploded in recent years, thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic popularity of e-bikes often used by delivery workers hired by apps such as DoorDash, officials have said.
Many of those batteries are faulty from improper maintenance or, worse, cobbled together “Frankenstein” fashion from older units and sold to e-bike riders at a cheaper price than safer new ones, FDNY officials warned.
Fire investigators as of June launched probes into 89 lithium-ion battery blazes so far this year, according to FDNY data.
Those fires included an East Harlem apartment building inferno that killed Indian journalist Fazil Khan and forced other residents to escape by dangling from a window.
The laws require e-bikes, mopeds and other micro-mobility devices to sport a bright red tag explicitly warning that they should be unplugged once fully charged, as well as imposes a fleet of safety measures for emergency responders and sellers.
They also, beyond prohibiting the sale of batteries that aren’t up to specific manufacturing standards, require mopeds to be registered by dealers once they’re sold — a move that could help crack down on scooter-riding bandits, often migrants, who police said are robbing unwitting pedestrians.
Hochul, when asked by The Post about the unregistered moped scourge, said roughly 12,000 such vehicles have been confiscated by local law enforcement.
“We have to go to the retailers, we have to go to the manufacturers, we have to go to the point of sale to the point of resale,” said Jackie Bray, commissioner for the state’s Division of Homeland Security. “It is a real challenge if you’re talking about going at each individual bike, but this legislation pulls us upstream from that.”
