I don't know Indonesian import law but I would guess that this guy making batteries for his local business might have better quality than what I assume is the alternative, imported Chinese batteries. I wonder why so much concern over safety. I would be much more concerned about Chinese imported batteries since you don't always have a brand name and QC.
Some guy DIY-ing batteries in his shop is pretty much the epitome of "no brand name and QC" though. Seriously, look at some of the pictures in the article. Those botched together mains wires alone look like a fire risk.
Quite apart from the circumstances of their creation, the homemade battery packs themselves can also be quite unsafe as some/most shops use any secondhand cells they can get their hands without regards for discharge ratings etc. That sort of imbalance can easily lead to fires during use, which is obviously not great when the driver is in busy traffic at the time.
He works under his own brand though, I would argue that batteries made by the guy down the street have a higher brand awareness than "COCO" batteries which might also sell under name "BOBO", "AOAO", "AKKO", "LMYW", etc.
I am only pointing out that I would be concerned regardless of the source, chinese or local but suspect the local guy has a greater incentive to maintain his brand than the imported brand from china.
> Seriously, look at some of the pictures in the article. Those botched together mains wires alone look like a fire risk.
I'm guessing you haven't been to Indonesia. This style of wiring is common in businesses and homes in Indonesia, Thailand and lot of poorer asian countries. The regulations are weak or unenforced. Often unlicensed people build houses, run power, water etc.
It's (probably unintentionally) dishonest to judge this by a first world standard.
> Those botched together mains wires alone look like a fire risk.
There is nothing inherently unsafe with bolting power strip onto the wall.
> Quite apart from the circumstances of their creation, the homemade battery packs themselves can also be quite unsafe as some/most shops use any secondhand cells they can get their hands without regards for discharge ratings etc. That sort of imbalance can easily lead to fires during use, which is obviously not great when the driver is in busy traffic at the time.
Not reading the article before yapping your mouth eh ?
> Ady Siswanto, owner of e-bike workshop Dyvolt in Jakarta, told Rest of World he takes care to match the internal resistance and capacity of the cells.
Most of the "serial DIYes" know that just fine, as it is blindingly obvious in performance of batteries and if you're making it a business you'd not have many returning customers... except ones returning for a return.
And let's not pretend name-brand packs don't have "accidents"
> better quality than what I assume is the alternative, imported Chinese batteries.
You do realise that China makes some of the worlds best batteries right?
There is a reason why BYD, EVE and CATL are in the news all the time and it's not because they suck.
Quality wise Chinese/Korean/Japanese batteries are all pretty much the same on NCA/NCM chemistries. China has a big advantage in LFP but LFP is shitty for an e-bike because the reduced density penalty is much more meaningful than in a car.
Those companies make cells of course but there is also plenty of high quality BMS available and fully assembled batteries out of China too obviously.
They are doing exactly what the advocates of free market dream of. You want to pay as little as possible, you get the crappiest stuff, you are willing to pay more to get top quality, you get good stuff.
That would be fine if there was a way to differentiate crap from not crap. Price is a signal, but an increasingly shitty one in that I can pay a high price and still receive crap.
The free market is happy to sell me crap at high prices with no ability to know that until the deal is irreversible.
The theoretical free market also has perfect information, and the current markets actively work to obscure that.
In many product categories there is no top stuff, just keep buying the crap stuff until you find the specimen that works. Maybe "keep repeating" is a proxy for free market goodness, I can honestly not tell anymore. :-D
They are having huge issues with e-bike fires in China. Here you have an article with two Chinese researchers weighing in on the issue.[0] According to them low quality batteries are the reason for the number of deadly fires.
So yes, Chinese ebike batteries are on a whole of low quality.
Given the numbers cited there it looks like Chinese e-bikes have a fire rate of 0.002391% per year. From a quick search it seems like there were about 130 e-bike fires in NYC in 2022 out of a population of about 65000 e-bikes, so NYC based e-bikes have a failure rate of 0.2% per year which seems significantly worse than the cheap ones used throughout China.
I don't think there has been any sort of reliable survey on the quantity of ebikes in NYC, and 65,000 is likely to be extremely low. There is no registration or point-of-sale reporting requirement.
There are also large quantities of unregistered electric and gasoline mopeds and motorcycles, many of which are also labeled as ebikes by either their manufacturers/importers or public authorities when involved in an incident.
One can purchase custom-made ebike batteries in NYC from shops similar to the one in this article, often with substantially worse finishing/packaging quality and unknown BMS quality. And said batteries are often run hard in delivery service in 4-season conditions, including exposure to temperatures well below freezing and salty slush spray, then charged via chargers and cords of unknown quality plugged into what are often pre-WWII electrical systems.
The FDNY is appropriately raiding custom battery shops in NYC, since there doesn't seem to be an appropriate regulatory system yet for custom-manufacturing this sort of energy storage device in a dense urban environment yet:
https://ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/news/2024/02/09/queens-biz-...
Did you read what the experts said? It doesn't matter if the incident rate is higher in NYC, anything about NYC has no bearing on this. The fires in china are due to low quality batteries.
Do you really think these bicycle batteries are being powered by BYD? Like I said I don't know the their market well but if its similar to other markets in the region, they are importing low quality generic branded stuff that may be worse off than those local manufacturer who have a real incentive to try to product higher quality products.
Do you really think there are tons of dodgy Chinese companies producing battery cells? A notoriously technically difficult, capital intensive and above all massively competitive business with tiny margins unless you are running the absolute best process at enormous scale?
No. There is just a handful of companies producing cells at reasonable scale and cost. Pretty much every cell you can buy from Alibaba (which is almost certainly where these e-bike pack makers are buying from) come from just 7 companies: CATL, BYD, EVE, CALB, Gotion, Sunwoda and Farasis.
All of these companies make high quality cells and these are definitely the only ones with a good enough price/performance to shove in a hand-made e-bike pack and make a profit.
This notion that Chinese batteries are somehow bad is ludicrous and the lengths people go to state as fact something they clearly have no experience with is intellectual dishonesty at best.
Is this just a case of people buying reputable batteries and selling them under their own brand name with higher specs? If so, why do these 7 manufacturers make bad batteries?
Clearly there are plenty of badly made cells out there, so I think I'm misunderstanding something.
> Do you really think there are tons of dodgy Chinese companies producing battery cells?
Are you serious? Yes, obviously. Spend 5 minutes on Alibaba looking at the panoply of companies selling cheap cells, and reading forum posts from people who build their own batteries unfortunate enough to buy those cells.
I can see you are very passionate on this topic. I did not realize in the article that these shops were actually making individual cells but the rather the complete pack. My notion was that the complete pack may be safer than complete packs coming from china under generic fake names. Thanks for clearing it up. You clearly have a lot of experience in this area with incredible honesty but low capability at following thoughts.
