By The Financial District
Mar 21 min
A fire that started in an e-bike parking lot in a residential building in Nanjing killed 15 people, prompting authorities to promise new safety regulations, James Palmer reported for China Brief.
E-bike batteries caused a startling 21,000 fires in China last year alone. I Photo: 大纪元新闻网 Wikimedia Commons
E-bike batteries caused a startling 21,000 fires in China last year alone. It is not a risk limited to China, but the number of e-bikes and the density of parking in the country make the fires more common and more dangerous.
There are around 300 million e-bikes in China. Bicycles were once the standard personal vehicle, but as cars grew more affordable, bicycles became seen as old-fashioned.
However, as car traffic increased to new extremes in the 2010s, bikes made a comeback. Between 2014 and 2017, bike-sharing apps proliferated and then collapsed, littering the country with bike graveyards.
That created the space for e-bikes, but the new charging stations were hastily erected and, until now, largely unregulated.