It's been two years now, and so far I've been lucky because the scooter has not broken down and it passed it's first Ministry-of-Transport test back in May.
In addition to that I reached 75yrs a month ago and although expecting a massive jump in insurance premiums, that didn't happen and I still pay under £80 a year.
That's the end of the good news...... here comes all the rest.
The batteries.......! Mine are working fine, but because of truly shocking news reports of how dreadful lithium fires are I put both of mine in a converted store in the back garden including charging facilities. But many bus, rail, tube services have now banned any bikes/scooters that have lithiums because of the super heated fires that they can cause, and now they are being banned from certain buildings. Each artisan battery is five times larger than an e-bike battery, and after watching an e-bike turn 'incendiary' I can guess what an artisan fire would look like.
Here is a post from an e-motorbike group by a Las Vegas artisan owner who has just discovered that he isn't allowed to take his batteries in to the security of his flat. I don't think he can continue with a battery powered bike and stay in the same place!
This:-
Sorry, I posted this earlier, but inside someone else's post by accident... I'm guessing not since I'm not seeing any posts about it here, but anyone ever had their batteries catch fire? I'm in Los Angeles, about to move into a rental apartment downtown and the building has banned all ebikes and electric scooters, for fear of fires. I'm reading about the new laws passed in NYC regarding batteries needing to be UL certified and the stories of batteries catching fire in people's living rooms. It's making me wonder if I've made a mistake purchasing my scooter (Aventura-X but the same scooter as Artisan)... but I'm seeing people here talk about having their scooters now for several years and no issues. I noticed my batteries aren't UL-certified (or any other certification). Anyone have any safety advice?
So here we are, with all e-scooters, mopeds, bikes being banned from travel services and many buildings, with (certainly) more to be included soon.
The Insurers haven't all caught up with this yet because my insurance didn't go up this month and my machine is covered for all fire damage, but you can bet that the insurers will wake up fairly soon!
Why am I telling you this ? Well, this month our government decided to put back it's plans to halt production of IC vehicles from 2030 to 2035, and with the value dropping out of e-vehicles and no further development of safer and efficient batteries on the horizon it's fairly obvious that the battery risks are one of the main reasons.
We do believe that the climate is changing, most of us believe that human dirt is accelerating that, we do want to clean up our acts........ but we don't know how we can do that just yet. I've enjoyed riding my artisan , and ownership has kept me in touch with so many of the problems around the IC/E transition. And I couldn't sell the artisan to buy an E-bike now because I wouldn't even put it in our entrance porch after watching videos of these exploding in to furnaces. At least the artisan is out on the drive.
So in the UK it looks as if our vehicle transitioning has just taken a kick in the guts.
Leave a comment: