Jay Whitacre, Professor of Materials Science & Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, says that the problem doesn’t have to do with these self-balancing scooters themselves, but with the quality of the batteries being used (in some)…
“There are a lot of factories in China that now make Li-ion batteries, and the reality is that the quality and consistency of these batteries is typically not as good as what is found in top tier producers such as LG or Samsung,” Whitacre says. “These are known as ‘low cost li-ion batteries’ by most in the industry—they are not knockoffs or copies, but are instead just mass-manufactured cells.”
With these cheap batteries, a lot of things can cause fires.
The solution is to buy a better quality hoverboard, right? but according to Prof. Whitacre, there isn’t any way yet, to know which are the better boards. Ooops. Maybe buy your loved one something else for the 2015 holidays.