On 28 August, BBC Verify found 18 deaths and nearly 700 injuries from UK e-bike and e-scooter battery fires since 2019: both fatal cases examined by coroners so far trace to a replacement battery bought on a marketplace, not the bike as sold

Two coroners, two eBay-bought batteries, two dead families

BBC Verify's dataset is the broadest count of e-bike and e-scooter fires the UK has produced to date, built from fire-service records rather than manufacturer or retailer disclosures. It confirms a trend London Fire Brigade has flagged for two years: incidents rising every year since 2019, most involving lithium-ion batteries that failed, were overcharged, or were damaged, releasing stored energy as flame jets and burning projectiles within seconds. But the dataset counts incidents; it does not, on its own, say what caused each one. For that, the clearest evidence comes from two inquests. On 30 June 2023, Gemma Germeney, 31, and her children Lilly Peden, 8, and Oliver Peden, 4, died in a fire at a flat in Sackville Close, Cambridge. An inquest reported by ITV News Anglia in March 2026 found the fire most likely started in a replacement lithium e-bike battery left on charge, bought on eBay two days earlier, fitted to a modified e-bike. In Bradford, Mohsin Janjua, 28, died in December 2023 when his converted e-bike caught fire while charging overnight. He had fitted an electric motor to his bicycle in 2022 and swapped in a 52-volt battery a week before the fire. The senior coroner for West Yorkshire Western, Martin Fleming, concluded it was 'more likely than not' that a catastrophic failure of that battery, bought from a seller on eBay, caused the blaze. Test purchases of the same battery and charger after Janjua's death found they did not conform to UK safety standards and regulations, and were believed to originate from China. Fleming issued a report asking the government to reassess the law on selling lithium-ion batteries used to convert ordinary bikes into e-bikes.

The numbers behind 28 August

One number is the human cost recorded so far. One is how fast annual incidents have grown. The third is how many of the country’s fire services had comparable enough records to be counted at all.

The real subject: certification covers the bike as sold, not the battery bought afterward

Most coverage of the 18-death figure reads it as a story about e-bikes being dangerous. Read against the two inquests on record, it is a narrower story about where UK product safety law stops. A new electrically assisted bicycle placed on the market has to meet the Electrical Equipment (Safety) Regulations 2016, typically demonstrated against the industry standard BS EN 15194, and carry a UKCA or CE mark: that assessment covers the finished product exactly as first sold. Neither the Cambridge nor the Bradford death involved a bike failing that assessment. Both involved a lithium-ion battery bought afterward, on eBay, as a standalone replacement or conversion part, and fitted by the owner. No equivalent mandatory UK safety standard currently exists for that standalone battery, its charger, or the conversion kit it goes into: OPSS has published non-mandatory statutory guidelines, and commissioned BSI to fast-track PAS 7250 to cover exactly this category, but a Publicly Available Specification is voluntary by default unless a future government designates it as a legal requirement under the Product Regulation and Metrology Act 2025. Until that happens, a certified bike and an uncertified battery can sit in the same product, sold by different parties, months apart, with only one of the two ever assessed against a mandatory standard.

Why it matters for brands

For e-bike and e-scooter manufacturers and retailers, the exposure does not end at the point of sale. Press and coroner coverage of a fatal fire routinely names the bike brand even when the failure traces to an aftermarket battery fitted later, which makes documented, retrievable proof of a product's as-sold configuration, battery model, certification and sale date part of the brand's own liability defence, not an afterthought. For online marketplaces, the direction of travel is now explicit: the Product Regulation and Metrology Act 2025 gives government the power to impose new obligations on platforms selling unsafe products, following the same logic already applied to marketplaces under the EU's General Product Safety Regulation, and government and London Councils have both pointed specifically at uncertified batteries and conversion kits sold online as the target. For battery, charger and conversion-kit brands and importers, PAS 7250 is worth treating as the specification to conform to now rather than waiting for it to become mandatory: two coroners have already issued findings calling on government to close this gap, and a Prevention of Future Deaths report is precisely the kind of pressure that turns a voluntary PAS into a designated legal standard. Retailers and landlords are not waiting either; several have already restricted e-bike charging and storage independent of what the law currently requires, which means the commercial cost of an uncertified aftermarket part can arrive before the regulatory one does.

Two ways to read 28 August