Megastores and Small E-Bike Shops Blow Off City Ban on Unsafe Batteries

Since September, the City of New York has banned the sale and rental of e-bike and other micro-mobility batteries that haven’t been certified as safe by a recognized testing lab — a step the FDNY deems crucial in the fight to halt deadly fires triggered by exploding devices.

Since then, however, city enforcers have often found success elusive in their battle to get sellers of these potentially dangerous devices to cease and desist, a review of records obtained under the Freedom of Information Law by THE CITY has found.

Those retailers include giants Amazon and Target, as well as neighborhood e-bike stores.

Battery sellers blowing off the city ban on uncertified batteries has been especially common online, with the city issuing summonses to 10 major sellers of these batteries for continuing to sell devices that they could not show were certified as safe even after having previously been cited, THE CITY found. Among them was the biggest of them all: Amazon.

Eight months after the ban went into effect, the city Department of Consumer & Worker Protection (DCWP) has found itself playing a volatile game of Whack-A-Mole trying to halt the sale and rental of these potentially calamitous devices.

“It’s been a real issue and not just enforcement but a safety issue,” DCWP Commissioner Vilda Vera Mayuga told THE CITY. “We really want to make sure retailers get into compliance … so we don’t have to keep going back to these places.”

Since the law kicked in on Sept. 16, DCWP has performed more than 500 inspections and issued more than 150 summonses to brick-and-mortar retailers, along with 40 cease-and-desist letters to on-line retailers through March.

Mayuga noted the agency has had “some success,” but added, “There’s others like Amazon that’s been a bit more difficult to get them there. In between the summonses and the penalties they’re receiving with the recidivism we certainly hope that not just Amazon but any business realizes that we are taking this seriously.”

The Fire Department has meanwhile engaged in an equally frustrating battle against shops that store and charge e-bikes and e-scooters in dangerously unsafe conditions. In many cases shop owners appear undeterred by the law, openly selling uncertified devices and storing and charging them in illegal unsafe conditions — even after being repeatedly cited for breaking the law, THE CITY found.

This is happening at a time when the number of fires caused by these lithium-ion batteries has risen steadily year by year from 30 in 2019 to 268 last year, as  THE CITY reported in January . These fires erupt quickly, are difficult to put out and more often than not occur inside apartments or in e-bike stores above which are residential units.

And they are potentially deadly. In all, through April 2024, there have been 735 e-bike battery fires across the five boroughs resulting in 447 injuries and 29 deaths.

The most recent fatality occurred Feb. 23 with the death of Fazil Khan , 27, a reporter for the nonprofit education journalism site the Hechinger Report. Khan lived in a Harlem building above an apartment where several food delivery drivers lived and charged their batteries. One of those batteries exploded, causing a fast-moving fire that spread thick black deadly smoke throughout the building, fire officials say. The city medical examiner attributed Khan’s death to smoke inhalation and thermal injuries.

Fire officials say a key to reversing this dangerous trend is to eliminate the use of unsafe, untested batteries that delivery drivers often rely on. They are sometimes altered to juice up their power and are extremely vulnerable to explosion, particularly when owners swap out the chemical cells that are the fuel for the batteries’ power.

Dejan Gakovic, micro-mobility business development manager at UL Solutions, the organization that promotes the safety standard, notes that uncertified batteries are “significantly” less expensive and that “demand for batteries is extremely high and there’s a lot of batteries on the market.”

“There’s a whole black market. Go on YouTube on how to build your own battery,” he said. “We have to educate the public. That is the message that we have to get to consumers — buy only certified products. Don’t buy replacements from who knows who.”

Unlicensed Businesses

The City Council has tried multiple approaches to get e-bike battery dangers under control, with mixed results. They have included laws requiring e-bike shops to post instructions advising customers to only use certified batteries and on how to properly store and charge them. The Council also hiked penalties for sale and rental of uncertified batteries and banned the sale of batteries that have been altered.

But other measures have met a dead-end. A proposal to require food delivery apps to provide drivers with certified batteries went nowhere. And a bill that would require e-bike stores to be licensed by Mayuga’s agency — giving the city authority to suspend and revoke licenses — failed to gain support.

Instead, in March the Council passed a law giving DCWP the authority to temporarily seal businesses that are repeatedly cited for violations. That law, however, won’t take effect until September, and so to date none of the dozens of repeat offenders have been subject to this sanction.

Mayuga opposed the licensing requirement, stating that sealing orders are “really more effective.”

“We license a lot of businesses. Some of them, it helps in the enforcement. In other areas like this, we don’t believe it would help identify and take action against illegal sales,” she said. Among the 40 industries and 46,000 businesses her agency licenses are car washes, used car dealers and locksmiths.

Mayuga also noted that under Mayor Eric Adams, the idea of requiring the food delivery apps to contribute more to ending the scourge of e-bike battery fires is not entirely off the table: “The administration as a whole, it’s not just me, we all believe that the apps should be dispatching workers with certified equipment.”

She added: “I know that there will be ongoing conversations and hopefully it will increase the safety levels.”

Amazon Delays

Enforcing the existing law banning uncertified battery sales, in fact, has proven to be more difficult than originally anticipated — particularly with online retailers.

Days after Local Law 39 went into effect on Sept. 16, inspectors in the consumer protection department began randomly searching online retailer websites. They quickly found potential illegal sales just about everywhere.

That includes one of the world’s biggest companies, Amazon, where corporate executives repeatedly put off responding to the city of New York’s efforts to get them to come into compliance with the law, records show.

On Sept. 25, after DCWP’s random search turned up three potentially illegal batteries for sale on Amazon’s site ready for shipment to New York City, the department issued a cease and desist order requiring that Amazon provide proof that the devices they were selling had been certified as safe by a recognized testing lab.

According to records obtained by THE CITY, DCWP gave Amazon until Oct. 12 to provide proof of compliance. Amazon then requested an extension until Nov. 3.

The day the deadline arrived, Amazon requested a meeting.

Another month passed. On Dec. 7, DCWP met with Amazon’s representatives “to ensure Amazon understood its obligations to comply” with the law. Five days later DCWP was now informing Amazon that their inspectors had now compiled a “non-exhaustive list of 30 products” on its site that “appeared to be out of compliance.”

They set a new deadline of Dec. 22.

On that day Amazon requested yet another extension, this time to Jan. 12. On that day, Amazon sent an email to the city claiming it was now in compliance. DCWP, however, discovered they were not, tagging another 10 items deemed to be out of compliance still for sale to New York City buyers on the mega-platform’s heavily trafficked site.

Finally the agency issued a summons to Amazon on Feb. 6, demanding compliance and threatening to seek “relief.” There was one final problem: the “relief” consisted of zero dollars in imposed fines. The law didn’t allow for any financial penalties until the second summons.

In March the mega-platform finally began posting a notice on some items red-flagged by DCWP: “This item cannot be shipped to your selected delivery location. Please choose a different delivery location.”

But as of Wednesday, DCWP said Amazon is once again non-compliant.

In response to questions from THE CITY, Amazon spokesperson Heather Layman emailed a statement, asserting, “We continuously monitor our store, and if we discover a product was undetected by our automated checks, we address the issue immediately and refine our controls. We take action to maintain a safe selection for our customers, including removing non-compliant products, and outreach to sellers, manufacturers, and government agencies, such as DCWP, for additional information, when appropriate.

“We ensure our selection meets industry-accepted standards, and we develop innovative tools to prevent the sale of unsafe products,” Layman added.

‘You Need Federal Legislation’

The struggle to get Amazon to obey the law was anything but unusual, THE CITY has found.

Data obtained by THE CITY reveals local authorities have issued multiple summonses to nine other national online retailers that specialize in selling e-bikes, e-scooters and the batteries that power them. All nine are based outside of New York and were cited last fall and then again over the last two months for selling devices for which they could not document safety certification, the data show.

Last fall, for instance, the city issued summons to Fiido of Hong Kong, Retrospec of California, Surface 604 of Canada, GOTRAX of Carrollton, Texas, and Swagtron of South Bend, Ind., demanding proof that the items they were selling to New York City buyers had, in fact, been certified as safe by a recognized testing lab.

Five months later city inspectors checked each of these retailers again and, without exception, found more items for sale without proof that they were certified as safe. They issued another summons, records show. As of Wednesday, all five remained non-compliant, according to DCWP.

Fiido, Retrospec, Surface 604, GOTRAX and Swagtron have not responded to emailed questions submitted Monday by THE CITY regarding the pending and past summons.

Because enforcement of the ban with online retailers has proven difficult, FDNY Commissioner Laura Kavanagh, the Council members who’ve sponsored the battery bills and Mayuga are all urging a federal ban on the sale of uncertified batteries.

“It’s just that everything we try seems to go south,” said Councilmember Gale Brewer (D-Manhattan), who has sponsored several laws to combat e-bike battery fires. “It’s like throwing spaghetti on the wall. You need federal legislation.”

Mayuga noted this is particularly necessary with on-line sales: “With online, we really need a federal ban on the sale of these devices. It’s cutting across state lines. Right now somebody could ship it across the river and it’s coming here.”

On Wednesday the House overwhelmingly passed a bill co-sponsored by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and U.S. Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-The Bronx) that would require the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission to set standards for lithium-ion batteries, including requiring that they be certified as safe by a recognized testing lab. It’s not clear when the Senate will take it up, but its sponsors emphasize it has bipartisan support in both chambers.

“For years, it has been clear that unregulated lithium-ion batteries pose an escalating threat to the public’s safety, and now is the time to do something about it,” Rep. Torres said following the 378-34 vote.

THE CITY also found two megastores, Target and Best Buy, got cease and desist letters from the city and came into compliance online, but were then hit with multiple summons at some of their brick-and-mortar stores that DCWP chose to randomly inspect, records show.

From December through March, DCWP issued summonses to six different Target stores in every borough but Staten Island. Between January and April, inspectors issued four summonses at Best Buy stores in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens. The Best Buy on Queens Boulevard in Rego Park was hit with a violation in February, then another one in April.

Target did not respond to requests for comment from THE CITY. On Tuesday, Best Buy spokesperson initially promised to provide a response to THE CITY’s questions, but by late Wednesday had not done so.

By far the vast majority of summonses for illegal sales went to small brick-and-mortar shops all over the city, where DCWP and the FDNY have made repeat inspections and issued multiple summonses — and still the sales of uncertified batteries, along with the unsafe storage and charging violations, continued.

“We find it incredibly frustrating,” Kavanagh said last month after fire marshals for the first time arrested an e-bike shop owner for repeatedly flouting the law. “We have shown people again and again how dangerous this is, that this is real life, that this is not some arbitrary regulation. New Yorkers have died because of e-bikes and because of this reckless activity.”

Kavanagh said some small businesses have come into compliance by following fire code restrictions on how to safely store and charge batteries to minimize the risk of fire. But not everybody appears to have gotten the message.

A review of FDNY data shows at least 39 small e-bike shops across the city have received at least one violation after an initial inspection, then more summonses after subsequent inspections going forward — an indication that they didn’t take that first summons too seriously.

“I would say we are seeing them more frequently flouting these laws,” Kavanagh said following that first arrest. “That is why they are still operating…so when we go back to places that were once conducting illegal activity, we are seeing that that’s continuing at many of those sites.”

Last year, for example, both fire and DCWP inspectors spent a lot of time at a Fly E-Bike shop at 220 Ingraham St. in Bushwick, Brooklyn — eight visits in all, including five by the FDNY and three by DCWP, records show. In all but one of these visits over a 10-month period, authorities issued new citations for unsafe conditions or selling or leasing uncertified batteries, according to THE CITY’s review of FDNY and DCWP data.

Sometimes not even a fire stops e-bike shop owners from continuing to create unsafe conditions.

At the 11th Avenue Bike Shop, 6304-6308 11th Ave. in Dyker Heights, Brooklyn, the FDNY responded to a Feb. 18, 2023 fire that destroyed dozens of e-bikes. A post-fire assessment resulted in four FDNY summonses. By July 14, the shop was back in business when fire inspectors returned in response to a complaint and issued two more summonses.

In March 2023, fire inspectors issued two violations during a scheduled inspection of a Fly E-Bike shop at 4130 Broadway in Washington Heights. Three months later, on June 5, 2023, a battery-triggered fire erupted there.

None of that stopped the owner from continuing to charge and store uncertified batteries in dangerous conditions. FDNY returned that August and issued a summons; DCWP showed up in September to cite the owner for selling/renting uncertified batteries; then FDNY returned Dec. 7 to issue two more citations.

A week later DCWP issued two more summonses for illegal battery sales/rentals.

For the last four years, fire officials have relied on civil summonses against anyone they find storing and charging batteries in an unsafe manner. Last month’s criminal charges against two e-bike shop owners they’d repeatedly cited who’d continued their unsafe ways undeterred show officials’ determination to go further.

One of those charged, Wei Chen, owner of Wilson’s E-Bike Shop at 101-19 Queens Boulevard in Rego Park, had been hit with FDNY civil summonses twice before during two separate inspections in February, including for storing altered and repaired batteries. That same month DCWP also hit Wilson’s with a summons for illegal sales/rentals of unsafe batteries.

When fire marshals revisited Chen’s shop on April 29, they found 80 e-bikes and two toolboxes containing 282 batteries. One of the batteries exploded during the inspection.

Another owner, Tian Liang Liu, was arrested on reckless endangerment charges April 12 after FDNY paid a fourth visit to his e-bike shop at 1239 Flatbush Ave., in Brooklyn. FDNY had repeatedly issued multiple violations for unsafe charging, while DCWP had twice issued summons for illegal sales of uncertified batteries.

Asked by reporters if she expects to see more arrests for this type of activity, Kavanagh made it clear that’s an option that remains in play.

“Our inspectors wrote numerous violations on their previous visits and they had little or no compliance,” she said during the April arrest press conference. “If we find someone with a similar pattern where we’ve been there multiple times and they’ve recklessly ignored us, then certainly.”

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