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15,000 Hoverboards Seized As Unsafe In United Kingdom (nationaltradingstandards.uk)
puddingebola writes: National Trading Standards and trading standards services in Scotland have released figures that 15,000 of 17,000 hoverboards have been seized at ports of entry in the UK because of safety concerns. The boards were seized "due to a range of concerns, such as safety issues with the plug, cabling, charger, battery or the cut-off switch within the board, which often fails." Are we pushing hoverboard technology too far too quickly, or are there just a group of criminal sociopaths manufacturing unsafe devices at Christmastime and pumping them into the market? Mashable has a story summary with links to video of a man in Alabama with his hoverboard on fire. The government of New York City isn't so hot on hoverboards, either.
Hoverboards? What year is this?
they clearly DONT hover.
It's legal to buy plenty of things which can be dangerous if used improperly, from cars to parachutes to kitchen knives.
What we do have, however, are laws on issues such as electrical safety standards. These exist to provide the public with a degree of reassurance that devices which are not being used in a manner which is inherently unsafe - which are, for instance, just charging their batteries from the mains, will not do things like catching fire and burning down their homes.
I regard that as a good thing. If you want to buy a hoverboard, then go out and buy one which has passed those basic electrical safety checks. Nobody's preventing you from doing that.
This is about giving people a basic level of confidence that every last electrical device they buy isn't going to put them at significant risk of their house burning down. I'm in favour of that.
However, the blurb about NYC, trying to ban them because they "weren't licensable" just chaps my ass....
More and more, govt seems to be there for NOTHING more than regulating everything, and charging you money for the "privilege".
With this type of regulation and down neck breathing of govt to the public back in decades past...we'd certainly not have the nice things we do today, and buggy whips would still be the fashion everywhere!!
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Not that silly; some people will find them useful and they are a lot easier to ride than the Solowheel, without adding the bulk of a full Segway. With that said, it makes sense to ban them if they explode and cause fire when charging. Over here (NL) they have just been banned, not because of fire hazards, but because they constitute a "motorized transport" and thus do not fit in our century old definition of traffic. Never mind the fact that these things are safer than roller skates. Of course at some point they will be made legal, as soon as the state makes a law to extract their 30 pieces of silver from riders: mandatory lights, license plates, taxes, and insurance.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Yeah, except these are knockoff devices, with unsafe electrics.
Some idiot falling off his stupid not-a-Segway isn't what the concern here is. The concern is same idiot plugging it in to charge, and burning down his apartment complex because it's a cheap knockoff that was wired by an incompetent, and has batteries with known failed cells that rupture when bumped around too much... you know, kind of like when an idiot falls off his stupid not-a-Segway.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
NYC, yes. Most the rest of the US, there's a strong desire to return to the Gilded Age. Except not really. Because people oddly don't like drinking shit and river fires.
You should really really read history. The fact is, the public generally demands of government that such things exist. There's a reason the first cars were little more than horseless carriages in design, no matter how stupid that was. It's also why there was such a push for speed limits for the longest time ("to not scare the horses").
Meanwhile, it took over half a century before things like actual safety took center stage. Or fuel economy. Or really any consideration about anything more than the general aesthetics of the damned thing. Which boils down to the market (and regulation) being more in line with public opinion than anything to do with doing things "right", efficiently, or whatever.
tl;dr - You really should read some more history, take some context on the actual who is regulating (NYC isn't most of America), and actually have some respect for the degree which things aren't regulated but the regulation we do have frequently came about precisely because of how much of a clusterfuck "the free market" runs if left to its own devices. Still, free to complain about NYC specifically in this example. It's just a bad basis for generalization.
While I am not surprised that clearly- unbiased source, "reason.com" calls this an example of runaway nanny-state regulation, the fact remains that millions use the sidewalks of NYC every single day, and those people have the right to safety.
Digging a bit deeper into the question of their legality, we find this article from the NY Daile News
It appears that these motorized electric scooters - which I've personally only recently become aware of, and until reading this article had no idea they were becoming so popular, essentially fall under a broad "motorized transport" classification.
I guess that it is easy to paint a picture of "big government wants its pound of flesh" surrounding their registration. However, the interpretation I take is that any tom, dick, or harry can't just go driving a motor-propelled vehicle on the streets and sidewalks of NYC. In fact, the whole topic of this thread is that 15,000 of these things are siezed in the UK for being unsafe. Are the scooters being sold on the streets of NYC coming from a different chinese factory? Is there any less of a problem of bootleg, unsafe goods?
I'm sorry, but I'f I'm walking down the streets of brooklyn or wherever, I don't want someone slamming into me on their unsafe, unregulated, apparently-on-flames motorized fad-scooter.
But you're right, government only exists to regulate, regulate, regulate. It's all just rules and red tape, isn't it?