When a Battery Recall Can Kill a Company
CPSC says certain Rad Power e-bike batteries are a serious fire risk and wants them off the street. Rad says a full recall would bankrupt it. The recall system assumes money that isn’t there, so riders and cities end up holding the risk.
Imagine a black metal battery pack next to an apartment door. Perhaps it's propped against a shoe rack, plugged into an outlet not designed for such energy demands. The label reads "Rad Power Bikes." The owner has been instructed by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission to stop using it at once and take it to a hazardous waste facility. The company that sold it claims replacing all those packs would bankrupt them.
Theoretically, this is a textbook case for regulation. A product presents a fire hazard, the safety agency intervenes, and the company either recalls or fixes it. This way, no one has to live with a potential disaster by their door. But in reality, when the solution costs more than the company can afford, the whole framework starts to falter. The danger doesn't simply vanish. It shifts downward, ultimately landing on those with the least power.
Here's the gist of it: The CPSC issued a warning about specific Rad Power Bikes lithium-ion batteries—models HL-RP-S1304 and RP-1304. Both the agency and reports from outlets like The New York Times and The Verge connect these battery packs to 31 fires and a dozen incidents of property damage, amounting to around three-quarters of a million dollars. While no injuries have been reported so far, the agency is quite blunt about the danger. They state these batteries "pose a risk of serious injury and death," urging people to stop using them and dispose of them at a hazardous waste facility.
These batteries came with many of Rad's popular bikes, such as the RadWagon 4, RadCity and RadRover versions, various RadRunner models, and the RadExpand 5. They were also available as replacements. So, we're not talking about some niche product here. This covers a significant portion of the company's bikes from the time electric bikes really took off, back when it seemed like everyone you knew had one of those orange cargo bikes.
Generally, the next move would be a negotiated recall. The company and agency would meet, determine who's impacted, and decide on a combination of refunds, repairs, or replacement parts. This happens constantly with cars and appliances. While the public message is "safety first," the actual discussion revolves around finances: how much it costs to compensate people, the timeline, and who bears which expenses.
Now, the CPSC claims Rad Power "refused to agree to an acceptable recall." And Rad doesn't really dispute that. In remarks quoted by places like TechCrunch, Seattle Bike Blog, and GeekWire, the company mentioned the agency insisted on replacing all those batteries, even if a particular one wasn't causing issues. Rad apparently told the commission such a move would "immediately put Rad out of business." They also say they proposed other options, such as markdowns on new "Safe Shield" batteries, which use more fire-resistant technology, but the agency wasn't interested.
So, what we have now is a classic American situation: a stern warning from the federal government, a company that vehemently denies its product has flaws, and countless riders who still rely on their bikes to get around.
If you're in a crowded apartment building, the CPSC's suggestion to stop using and toss the battery is correct in theory. But it leaves out so much. Practically speaking, that battery is probably how you get your kid to daycare or yourself to work a night shift when you don't have a car. The bike itself might have cost you a few months' rent. Plus, that battery pack might be past its warranty. Maybe Rad gives you a discount for an upgrade you still can't really afford.
Regulators won't admit this, but they're banking on a bunch of people just ignoring the warning. If every single Rad owner with one of those batteries actually took it to a hazardous waste site tomorrow, the chaos from all those suddenly unusable bikes would be massive. We'd see a full-blown consumer rebellion. What happens instead is much quieter: some folks follow the advice, others just risk it and keep charging, and everyone basically hopes their specific battery is one of the many that won't ever cause trouble.
In my line of work, in the shop, that kind of division is pretty common. You might tell a rider their front brake line is rubbing the tire and could give out completely when they're going fast. Half of them will say, "Fix it right away." The other half will ask, "Will it last until the end of the season?" They're not dumb; they're just weighing the costs against their real-world schedules. Things often degrade slowly until suddenly, they just don't work anymore.
Lithium batteries are particularly dangerous once they start to fail. When a pack goes into what's called 'thermal runaway,' you're not simply putting out a fire. Instead, you're dealing with a chemical reaction that feeds itself, capable of releasing superheated gas, reigniting unexpectedly, and quickly spreading to anything nearby. In places like New York City, we've already seen e-bike and scooter battery fires kill people and destroy apartments. So, it's pretty clear why CPSC staff, after seeing three dozen incidents just in the Rad case, are eager to get ahead of this issue now.
It's also pretty clear why a company that really thrived during the e-bike boom of the pandemic, only to face the inevitable slowdown afterward, wouldn't be too keen on signing a blank check for this. News reports over the past couple of years have pretty consistently shown Rad Power struggling: there have been layoffs, stores closing down, and all sorts of logistics headaches. The Verge pointed out that Rad actually tried to make their battery packs better with new "Safe Shield" designs to handle heat. And GeekWire even called this whole CPSC dispute "another roadblock" for a business that's already got its back against the wall. So, when Rad claims that replacing all those batteries would bankrupt them, it doesn't exactly sound like they're trying to bluff.
So, what really happens when safety policies are made assuming a company has plenty of money, but it actually doesn't? Well, you end up with exactly this kind of stalemate. The government agency can make all the noise it wants, and the company can dispute all the figures. Meanwhile, the actual dangers just get passed along to firefighters, property owners, garbage dumps, and regular riders.
Just look at what the warning says: stop using these batteries, take them to a hazardous waste center. Sounds like good advice, right? But it's not without cost. Someone has to actually drive them there. Someone else has to be ready to take in and store these powerful lithium packs. And local governments, usually working with limited funds, are the ones who have to manage these facilities. If a rider just ignores it, leaving an old battery in the back of a closet, or even worse, throws it in the regular trash, that danger just shifts further down the line to sanitation workers and landfills.
When things get complicated with incentives, people inevitably look for easier ways out. Think cheap, off-brand chargers, or DIY storage boxes that might keep sparks away from anything that could catch fire – maybe. People end up charging their bikes in hallways or near doorways because there’s no outdoor plug available. I've taken apart plenty of tool batteries and seen cells packed way too tightly for safety, with hardly any thought given to heat management, all just to hit a certain price. E-bike batteries are no different, just on a larger scale. If there’s no proper, funded recall system in place, people will just cobble together their own "good enough" solutions.
It’s simple to just say, "Well, Rad should have put money aside for this kind of thing." And yeah, in a perfect world, any company selling tons of high-energy gadgets would have insurance or a special fund specifically for safety problems. But investors are after growth, customers want cheap products, and regulators haven't made those kinds of upfront payments mandatory. So, what happens instead is we only start talking about morality after something has already gone wrong and caught fire.
I really don't think the CPSC is the bad guy in all this. They're just doing exactly what we expect them to: spot a problem and warn everyone before things get truly awful. Rad isn't some evil corporation either. It's a mid-sized business squeezed between tight profits and a serious risk. If you absolutely need a villain, then it's the flawed way we built our recall system.
We typically treat safety solutions like something you just add on after a product’s been sold, once most of the money is gone. We allow companies to operate with minimal resources, push their hardware to the limit, and then somehow expect them to have a huge reserve of cash to buy back every faulty unit. With cars, the industry is vast enough and the companies are old enough that they can usually absorb these costs. But for e-bikes and other newer tech, you have businesses that can saturate a market in just three years and then vanish by year six. Their risks disappear with them, but unfortunately, their batteries don't.
If you want what we say we're doing to actually line up with what happens, you’ve got to get the money and accountability sorted out much sooner. That might mean requiring recall insurance for anything with a certain amount of power stored, for example. Or maybe demanding that big battery sellers chip into a combined fund that covers safe disposal and replacements if something goes wrong. It could also just mean having tougher battery standards in place before anything even hits the market, so we get fewer questionable designs leaving the factory to begin with.
None of this stuff is particularly exciting. It's all about financial systems and dull meetings discussing standards. But honestly, that’s a lot better than expecting some nurse who bought a cargo bike with financing to deal with a hazardous waste issue in her own home.
Right this moment, somewhere, there's a Rad Power Bike battery still charging by the front door. The owner has probably seen the news, maybe even read "death" in a government alert and felt a knot in their stomach. Then they probably glanced at their bike, considered the commute to work, and looked at their bank balance before making a decision. Until we create a system where companies can't offload this much risk without essentially paying for its future cleanup, these tough choices will continue to fall to the people least equipped to handle them.
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