REAL LIFE NEWS: AMAZON DROPS UNSAFE SELF-BALANCING SCOOTERS
by Hazed
Speaking of Amazon, the company has started pulling a load of those self-balancing scooters from its listings because they are proving to be so unsafe.
(I refuse to call the gadgets hoverboards. They have wheels. They don’t hover. They are just Segways without handles. Stop calling them hoverboards, journalists!)
There have been a number of news stories recently about problems with the scooters. They seem to catch fire a lot, and last week one exploded in a shopping mall. Most of them have been manufactured in China and shipped in bulk to the west, where they are rebranded by resellers. Tests carried out by trading standards authorities in Britain are warning that 88% of the gadgets imported from outside the EU had failed basic safety checks.
The issues are with the battery and chargers which definitely don’t seem to be safe.
So Amazon is demanding that sellers provide documents to prove the vehicles are “compliant with applicable safety standards”.
What’s more, US airlines are banning the scooters from their flights, so if you already own one you may not be able to take it home for Christmas, and the USPS won’t let you send them by airmail either.
In the UK, it’s illegal to use them on the roads or the pavements (sidewalks to my American readers) so even if you manage to buy one, and get it home safely without it blowing up, the places you can ride on it are very limited.
So all in all, it’s probably not the greatest of Christmas presents.
Source: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/dec/14/amazon-pulls-hoverboards-over-safety-fears
http://www.forbes.com/sites/katiesola/2015/12/14/airlines-ban-hoverboards-for-their-tendency-to-spontaneously-ignite/
http://gizmodo.com/stop-buying-hoverboards-1748510694
