Ben Rosen of Pop Wheels testifies on battery fire crisis
Ben Rosen says battery fires are up 70% this year, many from non-structural causes and end-of-life batteries, and calls for mandated battery lifecycle management.
Good afternoon.
My name is Ben Rosen, and I serve as the Director of Deployments at Pop Wheels, a Brooklyn-based company building battery-swapping infrastructure across New York City.
Since completing our successful 2024 pilot with DOT, Popwheel's 50-plus outdoor battery swapping cabinets have provided over half a million safe battery swaps to e-bike riders and workers while reducing the lithium-ion fire risk citywide.
We support nearly all of the bills before you today, particularly those favoring low-speed Class 1 and Class 2 devices over heavier, higher-speed ones.
and those removing illegal unregistered devices from our streets.
But as the Council conducts this holistic review, we urge you, do not lose sight of the lithium-ion battery fire crisis.
FDNY data released this July showed battery fires up more than 70% this year, on track for over 500 fires in 2026, including some several recent tragic fatalities.
Now, the data highlights two things worth paying attention to.
One, an increasing share of these fires are non-structural, which means that they are occurring outside of charging contexts, igniting on the street after overuse in a trash can or through improper disposal.
And two, a growing number of these fires are caused by batteries reaching the end of their useful life cycle, even when a battery was UL certified at the point of sale.
A UL 2271 certification says that a battery was safe on the day it was sold, but not that it was still safe after months of damage or charging cycles on city streets.
The fix is simple.
Regular inspection, maintenance, and safe retirement across a battery's full life, available to every rider and not left to the rider alone.
And this can be done in-house by fleet operators, trained retailers, through a city-run assessment program, or through a third-party provider, of which battery-swapping networks like ours are just one existing option.
So we have three specific asks.
The first is to amend Local Law 95 of 2025 to mandate that ongoing battery lifecycle management, the regular inspection, maintenance, and timely retirement.
Thank you very much.
No problem.