Was Curtis Sathre's son's cell phone battery a counterfeit? Poorly made electrical products cause many injuries and deaths. Poorly made Li-Ion, without adequate venting could build up enough pressure to explode if there were an internal short in a faulty battery, causing accelerated thermal runaway and fire. Still, with exception of defective batteries, or counterfeits; it would seem a very, very rare occurrence. So are the non-counterfeit Li-Ion safe enough, chance of one exploding or catching fire greater than 1 in 2 million? Maybe we should all start buying lottery tickets, odds of winning the big prize are not that much higher, 1 in 60 million or so /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif
The claim that cell phone batteries are getting more and more powerful, is that true? Well, they are getting thinner and thinner (and perhaps more difficult to design safety into them), but capacity is far less than the old 'brick' extended runtime NiMH of the mid 1990's.
I was looking at the Insurance industry 40mph crash tests on brand new Hyundai Elentras, they gave the Elantra a poor rating, indicating the possibility of serious injury, even death. Yet you don't see newspaper articles all over the country about injuries sustained when someone gets into and accident with a brand new Hyundai Elantra. Seems only severe injuries and death, like with the poorly designed Firestone tires for SUV's, or exploding gas tanks, make the news. You step into a automobile, and think because it has side and front air bags, you are relatively safe...but is this a false sense of security? If you look at the poor ratings for many new cars made today, you might feel very unsafe. Those made before 2002, are even worse. How many millions of cars are on the road, where you are exposing yourself to serious injury?
If 3rd party cell phone batteries and counterfeit batteries are the majority of battery failures, then how do you avoid all risk with them; short of testing each and every batch of batteries coming into the country? Diminishing returns for amounts of money you have to spend to try to stop counterfeit batteries. It is easy to avoid buying a Hyundai Elantra, but not as easy to avoid counterfeit batteries. The longer term solution is for the industry to migrate to a safer cell chemistry like Li-phosphate, but if there are only a few dozen or so Li-Ion failures from legitimate quality manufactures out of hundreds of millions of cell phones in use, the fear factor and actual danger seems very highly exaggerated/sensationalized.
