The trouble with these news reports is no information about the ebike itself. I am always curious about the full details of this ebike conversion. None of us are any wiser to what actual product caused this fire. As a journalist I would want to ask neighbours etc what they knew and perhaps see if they had by chance any photos of the ebike. There has been quite a lot of recalls for products that might cause fires, I think there was a Specialized battery recall and the Canyon recall has just been announced, then there are products like tumble dryers, microwaves and other products that have caused fires. You'd think with the danger of lithium-ion fires they would make the effort to inform people more about the product. As I said before many gig economy riders use battery packs well beyond their normal 500 charges, they are larger battery packs anyway typically so still have some decent capacity over 1000 charges but the cells are in a worn state more likely to fail. Someone who works 10 hours a day (maybe 2 shifts of 5 hours) 6 days a week for 50 weeks a year and does 10miles every hour on average is building up a huge amount of miles, well beyond its expected normal lifespan. That could be 25,000 miles a year. That's about a tenth of the distance of the Earth from the moon. I know from past threads of ebike fires at least 2 of the ebikes were used by gig economy riders. I just feel more information is needed otherwise people jump to the wrong conclusions.
Halfords have sold tons of ebikes under many different brands and I don't recall any ebikes from them having a recall and they have sold some fairly basic ebikes under the Assist brand with pretty low end components. The only recall I can find currently on their site related to bikes is a small child's bike which came with a gun with foam darts and the darts could break apart causing a choking hazard. I seem to remember in the past a Carrera Banshee I think it was called a basic dual suspension bike had a recall for a frame issue. Same situation with Argos. I think
Decathlon have had recalls for some ebikes but it was failing frames not the electrical components.
Looking on the government recall site I can see there are various recalls for bicycles most are related to premium brands but there are two ebike kits on there. One is a direct drive ebike kit that allows for too high a speed and the other is a ebike kit based on a tongsheng motor which is the cause of fires and explosions. This is likely due to an under-spec'd battery as such motors require a very high capacity battery.
https://www.gov.uk/product-safety-alerts-reports-recalls?keywords=bicycle
https://assets.publishing.service.g...404-0123-product-recall-e-bike-conversion.pdf
I personally don't think the Tongsheng motors are unsafe but many people don't seem to understand these motors are really something like 750-1000W in performance and so need a battery that will happily give out 25-30A of current without heating up and damaging the battery cells. Looking at the picture of the example bike, the rear carrier battery looks like one of those battery packs only about 9Ah but really you would be looking at a 12-15Ah battery I would of thought to power a high current mid-drive motor, some might say more than that.
