Legal Uncertainty Surrounding Hoverboards Should Concern Consumers

by | Jan 25, 2016 | Health Featured

“Hoverboards” are being banned left and right. Whether it’s colleges and universities or professional sports teams like the Carolina Panthers, these devices have gone from being wildly popular to being something of a tech pariah in record time. What gives?

Essentially, two things: people keep having accidents on them and they keep blowing up. And of course, we’re talking about what Wikipedia calls, their more proper name, not the Trademarked “hoverboard”, but rather “self balancing two-wheeled board”.

Accidents are understandable to an extent. These are quick devices with nothing to hold on to. So if you lose your balance or have a collision, there’s nowhere to go but off.

In London, sadly, one young man actually fell off of his board and was run over by a bus and killed.

That’s an extreme example, but the boards, which are said to be self-balancing, are tricky to, well, balance on and many people have fallen off. Some have suffered injuries to wrists and feet. As people take them out onto sidewalks and roadways, injuries are rising. As injury lawyer Ed Smith states on a page about hoverboard injuries, many different people can be held liable for contributing to the injury.

As bad as all of this is though, it may pale next to the rash of fires we’ve seen from these devices. Just days ago there was a hoverboard fire in Folsom, CA.

The problem comes from the lithium-ion batteries. Electronic devices use them all the time, but hoverboards require a lot of juice to run and use more than the average gadget. Due to the nature of lithium batteries (electrochemistry), they can get very hot while charging. We’ve all seen the periodic stories of phones bursting into flames or laptops exploding.

What makes this even more dangerous is this: except for a few companies, you have absolutely no way of knowing whether your batteries are safe or not. When a cheap, mass produced battery short circuits it often produces heat, fire, and sometimes even explodes. The bumps and bangs these boards experience don’t seem to help matters much, either.

And there’s a certain level of fraud as well, with some unethical firms labeling certain batteries as being okay when in reality no one really knows.

These are interesting devices that may yet become a useful and reliable way to move people around. In the short term, however, they are dangerous to use and store and should probably be avoided.

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