Increasing incidents of electric two-wheelers exploding or catching fire across the country have not only forced companies to postpone new product launches, but also made them retest their safety standards and manufacturing processes.

Electric scooters of market leader Hero Electric and Hero MotoCorp-funded start-up company, Ather Energy, were the latest to go up in smoke last week. Earlier, fire incidents were reported of electric scooters belonging to Ola Electric, Benling, Okinawa and Pure EV.

The Bharat Forge-promoted Tork Motors has frozen its orderbook of its maiden electric bike to just 1,000 units in the light of fires and explosions. The company has appointed an external agency to do a full retest of the product before starting its deliveries. 

Amit Kalyani, Deputy Managing Director, Bharat Forge, said: “We have closed the order book at 1,000 orders because after reading all the issues with safety and fire and explosions and vehicle going in reverse of certain products, we’ve initiated a full testing regimen, including outside agency to make sure that our product is completely robust and will not have any of these issues. So, I believe that it is better to take a little time but do it right.”

Priced at ₹1.92 lakh (ex-showroom), Tork Kratos (which has the styling of a motorcycle) generates peak power of 7.5kW, has a claimed range of 180km and a top-speed of 100kmph. Tork has been developing an e-bike since 2016. 

Test rides

The Bengaluru-based start-up Simple Energy said it will start test rides of its maiden product only in July — a staggering 11 months after the company showcased its product on August 15 last year.

“In the light of recent events in the EV industry, we expect updated guidelines for EVs concerning battery health and overall vehicle safety. In accordance with this, we are postponing the deliveries of Simple ONE. Test rides for ONE will begin in July 2022,” a note from the company stated.

From altering product technology to focussing more on product safety, electric two-wheeler makers are going the whole hog to avoid hurting consumer confidence, especially since EVs are at a nascent stage in India, with a penetration level of just 2 percent.

Rahil Gupta, co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, HOP Electric Mobility, said: “The fire incidents have come as a dampener to the momentum that EV two-wheelers had gained. We have undertaken backward-integration and further re-engineered quality standards for testing and validation of battery packs. We are now testing our packs in high ambient temperatures moving north to 50 degree Celsius at high discharge rates.”

NMC batteries

Industry watchers blame the NMC (Nickle, Manganese and Cobalt) batteries used in most EVs for the fires. These batteries are inherently volatile in nature, claim experts.

“NMC has proved to be dangerous. Even in China, the government is not promoting NMC. Last year, China had 300,000 cases of fire, and all of them had NMC batteries,” said Amit Kumar, Executive Director and CEO, Benling India.

Benling had lined up a new product launch in the first week of April, but the company decided to postpone because it wanted to launch the product with LFP (lithium ferrophosohate) batteries, instead of NMC batteries. In fact, it wants to move all its products to LFP batteries progressively from May. LFP batteries have a much safer track record compared to NMC.

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