NYC Bill to Ban Reuse of Lithium Ion Batteries, Right-to-Repair Advocates Warn | Hacker News Reader

NYC Bill to Ban Reuse of Lithium Ion Batteries, Right-to-Repair Advocates Warn

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40 pointsIronWolve9 comments

An attempt to stop the hundreds of fires from cheap electronics with cheap batteries, sounds like it doesn't really address the problem. People are buying thousands of ebikes/scooters/skateboards like crazy from china, brand new.

> problem is nobody knows exactly what is causing these fires

This sounds like a better place to start than legislating in the dark.

Depends if it's temporary or not. I dislike some regulations my country do, but one thing they're good at are temporary and local trials.

Ban it in densely populated areas, make testing mandatory in regular US suburban area, check in 6 month for results of testing. If the test change nothing, keep the ban and change the tests.

Kind of the new SE mentality of testing in prod.

nah a blanket ban is better. see how well its worked for the last two years in public health

As someone who is really into micro mobility devices, this sounds like it could be a reasonable step.

The lithium ion battery fire problem is extreme. Batteries can be permanently damaged without visible damage. Manufacturing defects in an imperfect world mean they're not even totally safe brand new from the factory.

To accurately judge this we'd need a statistical analysis that I don't think exists. So yeah, in general a government shouldn't make laws without proof they'll be successful, but this is fire safety in city of mid & high-rises. The risk calculation is tough to criticize.

You are able to access the safety of such a device from one or two cycles against standardized loads, freshly manufactured or reused.

If safety or fires would be truly a concern, costly test would be mandatory every year for each battery powered device.

Battery connection and test modes would be standardized, to check the rest of the device for shorts and isolation etc. Usually those things are glued together with epoxy and sufficient testing is impossible without destruction of the toy.

Could LiFePO4 batteries be used in these devices?

They have lower energy densities and lower discharge rates than the equivalent NMC batteries, but I suppose they should be able to work around the limitations.

Singapore already went through this. Their regulatory response after a massive increase in residential fires seems to be working

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