Lime scooters recalled over fire risk

Lime has pulled about 2,000 of its electric rental scooters from the streets of Los Angeles, San Diego and Lake Tahoe, saying a battery defect in one model could cause the vehicles to burst into flames.

Lime said in a statement that it found a manufacturing defect in an early version of the green-and-black scooters, produced by Segway, that could cause one of the onboard batteries to smolder or catch fire.

Lime wrote a software program to detect the scooters with flaws, and then deactivated them and removed all “vulnerable scooters” from the streets, the company said. A spokesman did not respond to questions about when the scooters were recalled or what the defect entailed.

Lime said that the defect put no riders or members of the public at risk, and that more recent scooter models have sturdier frames and redesigned batteries.

In late August, a night employee at a Lime facility in Lake Tahoe heard a loud bang, walked into a scooter repair room and saw flames shooting out of a scooter “as well as an adjacent chair,” according to the fire department’s report quoted in The Washington Post.

Lime’s recall prompted questions about whether the independent contractors who collect, charge and redistribute the scooters were aware of the fire risks.

Like its main competitor, Bird, Lime typically pays people about $5 per scooter to charge the vehicles at their homes overnight.