Sanyo Blamed in Lenovo Battery Recall

ukhackster writes "Those overheating laptop batteries are back. Lenovo is recalling 205,000 'extended' batteries which shipped with its ThinkPad machines, or were bought as replacements. Slashdot readers will doubtless remember the flak which Sony attracted last year, after it was blamed for exploding Dell notebooks and several massive recalls. This time, the batteries were made by Sanyo. Their engineers determined that the failure was repeatable by dropping machines using the batteries from a certain height and at a certain angle. As soon as the repeatable nature of the flaw was determined, a recall was issued."

Comments

Correction

[p0tat03]

As soon as the repeatable nature of the flaw was determined, a recall was issued.

Correction: As soon as finance and legal determined that the:

1 - The cost of settling out of court with the projected number of people harmed by this defect.
2 - Lost business due to bad publicity caused by this defect.

would exceed the cost of recall, a recall was issued.

Re:Correction

[ednopantz]

The first rule of cynicism masquerading as wisdom is...

oh never mind.

Good Response by Lenovo

[liliafan]

It is pretty good and Lenovo is being proactive about recalling their batteries, rather than waiting.

Since the two types of exploding batteries we have seen so far are from two different producers (sony and sanyo) I am wondering if this is an inherent flaw in the battery type itself, or if it is just that both manufacturers use similar production methods?

Regardless I think I will wait until we have hydrogen cell batteries before I go buy a laptop, at least that way if one happens to explode you don't need to worry to much about a recall, since a large percentage of your market (read the world) will be destroyed along with the batteries.

Re:Ooops, I just dropped *BOOOOOM!*

[mandelbr0t]

Nope, it was folks complaining of a hot lap from their laptops. I had to bring a computer in for repair with this symptom. The machine became increasingly unstable and the battery became hotter. In addition to being a fire hazard, the motherboard, processor and RAM are put under a lot of heat stress. "Complaining" is a loaded term here as the complaints speak to a real problem.