Given the numbers cited there it looks like Chinese e-bikes have a fire rate of 0.002391% per year. From a quick search it seems like there were about 130 e-bike fires in NYC in 2022 out of a population of about 65000 e-bikes, so NYC based e-bikes have a failure rate of 0.2% per year which seems significantly worse than the cheap ones used throughout China.
I don't think there has been any sort of reliable survey on the quantity of ebikes in NYC, and 65,000 is likely to be extremely low. There is no registration or point-of-sale reporting requirement.
There are also large quantities of unregistered electric and gasoline mopeds and motorcycles, many of which are also labeled as ebikes by either their manufacturers/importers or public authorities when involved in an incident.
One can purchase custom-made ebike batteries in NYC from shops similar to the one in this article, often with substantially worse finishing/packaging quality and unknown BMS quality. And said batteries are often run hard in delivery service in 4-season conditions, including exposure to temperatures well below freezing and salty slush spray, then charged via chargers and cords of unknown quality plugged into what are often pre-WWII electrical systems.
The FDNY is appropriately raiding custom battery shops in NYC, since there doesn't seem to be an appropriate regulatory system yet for custom-manufacturing this sort of energy storage device in a dense urban environment yet:
https://ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/news/2024/02/09/queens-biz-...
Did you read what the experts said? It doesn't matter if the incident rate is higher in NYC, anything about NYC has no bearing on this. The fires in china are due to low quality batteries.
