Hoverboards are not safe

Hoverboards are not safe for people’s use. This holiday many people are going to receive many gifts and hoverboards are currently sold out in other countries. Internet retailers like Amazon are pulling hoverboards from sale because they are a death trap.

Every teenager would like to have these toys for Christmas. However, many hoverboards have been pulled from sale after several accidents involving the vehicles exploding or bursting into flames. The cheap vehicle imitation are currently in almost all music videos and celebrities are moving around with them in the streets.

Mechanics found huge safety defects in most hoverboards and thousands have been seized at UK ports, with nine out of 10 failing basic safety tests. Amazon has sent notices to all hoverboard manufacturers requiring that they comply with safety standards on batteries and chargers, removing all of the vehicles from sale until they provide appropriate documentation.

Telegraph reports, one manufacturer, Swagway, said it was “happy that Amazon has decided to take steps to weed out the low quality boards.” The retailer follows Wal-Mart, the American retail giant, in pulling them from sale. Hoverboards are illegal to ride on both roads and pavements in the UK, and have been banned from New York as well as several events, including the Consumer Electronics Show, or CES, Las Vegas’s annual gadgets jamboree.

Several cases have been reported including one where a 15 year old boy died in London. The boy fell off the board into a moving bus.

Hoverboards are not safe

Leon Livermore, chief executive of the Chartered Trading Standards Institute, said: “Criminals and irresponsible manufacturers will often exploit high demand and attempt to flood the market with cheap and dangerous products. Some products that are made abroad, principally for the overseas market, are not fitted with the correct plug and fuse for use in the UK. As a minimum, consumers should check that the three-pin plug on the device states it is made to BS1363. If it doesn’t include this information, then don’t buy the product.”

Jay Whitacre, Professor of Materials Science & Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University gave a reason why hoverboards are not safe. “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. 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.”